How to not look away FacebookTwitterEmail 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 The speaker in the poem is looking at Pieter Brueghel’s painting “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” which hangs in the Musee des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. The painting — which researchers in the 1990s determined was actually a copy of Brueghel’s original — shows humanity going about its work (the farmer plowing, the angler fishing, the shepherd tending his flock) as, in a remote corner of the canvas, Icarus is drowning in the sea after his waxwork wings have melted.