Auden on tragedy

Somehow I can't experience tragedy without thinking of this poem by Auden. It is welded to my first experience with "national" tragedy, the assassination of JFK. I was a student, and this is the poem we were studying in my English class the morning I heard the news. In fact, later wandering the halls in shock, I ran into my English professor and simultaneously we recited, "About suffering they were never wrong, the Old Masters." Yes, poetry can reach the marrow and has much to do with one's life.

Musee des Beaux Arts
W.H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
1940