Musée des Beaux Arts Character

The Old Masters are not characters in the traditional sense but rather Renaissance painters such as Bruegel, personified by Auden as voices of human wisdom. Auden credits them with a deep understanding of suffering and its coexistence with ordinary life. They represent the idea that great art captures the full complexity of human experience.

Icarus is a mythological figure from Greek legend who flew too close to the sun and plummeted into the sea. In Auden's poem, he appears as depicted in Bruegel's painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, where his catastrophic fall goes almost unnoticed by those around him. He symbolizes human suffering, hubris, and the tragedy that the world tends to ignore.

The Ordinary People encompass the ploughman, the sailor, the horse, and the ship, all figures visible in Bruegel's painting. They continue their daily tasks without pause even as Icarus falls tragically nearby. They collectively represent the indifference of everyday humanity to the suffering of others, embodying the poem's central theme of the world's unconcern with individual tragedy.