Considering the title, the intelligent reader wants to understand why the title is written in French

A poem of 21 lines in total, split into two stanzas with varying line length and rhythm. Note the use of end rhymes throughout the poem, for example:

Line 1/Line 4 - wrong/along

Line 2/Line 8 - understood/wood

Line 5/Line 7 - waiting/skating

Line 6/Line 13 - be/tree

Line 9/Line 11- forgot/spot

Line 10/Line 12- course/horse

Lines 14-21 also are end rhymed.

This rhyming is varied and has no established pattern so the rhyme becomes almost incidental, an echo of what it should be in a tighter rhyme scheme. All of this suggests tradition with a twist, a loosening and stretching of reality.

Line length plays an important role in this poem. Long clauses, with cleverly placed punctuation, help measure the steady conversational tone of the speaker.

Note that there is only one period (full stop) in the whole body of the poem, at the end of the first stanza. Commas, colons and semi-colons play a crucial role in the syntax by allowing the sense to build up, as in an argument or debate. Enjambment also lets the flow continue from one line into the next.

In the first stanza the speaker makes observations from other paintings by the same artist, Brueghel, namely Numbering at Bethlehem, Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird Trap and Massacre of the Innocents.

These references highlight the strange, contrasting human experiences that are part of the fabric of life - one person suffers terribly, another carries on regardless with some mundane activity.

The philosophical question that surfaces from such an issue - Why is it that some can knowingly ignore the cries for help from those experiencing torture and pain? - is partly answered in the poem.

For example, in the first stanza there are children who did not want a miraculous birth to happen, despite an older generation passionately waiting for a miracle birth. They continue skating on ice, oblivious to the one-off happening.

The speaker states with a cool detachment how there always must be such a gap between the young and the old.

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We shouldn't forget that the paintings the speaker is studying are equivalent to today's T.V. reportage. How many times have we watched horrific and disturbing images from some remote place in the world, knowing that, not too far away, normal lives are being lived.

The second stanza reinforces the idea of separateness, of people at work, at play, whilst the disaster, the suffering, goes on elsewhere. Is it apathy that takes over? Are people consciously looking the other way to avoid involvement?

There is an irony in this and the speaker captures it in a subtle, matter of fact fashion. As Icarus dramatically falls into the sea the event for one man was not an important failure; it made no impression on a passing ship with somewhere to get to; there is no reaction.

Auden's poem, through the eyes of an observer of old paintings, explores the idea that, as humans, we knowingly carry on with our familiar and mundane duties as long as we can, even if we know someone may be suffering.

We need routine, we fear distraction. We don't like being shocked out of our little lives too often. Suffering will always happen and there's not much the average person can do about it.