fall of icarus - the significant of the unsignificant

We know that Icarus’ fall was insignificant to anyone on that land except for his father, Daedalus…this issue of insignificantness not only evolves around the drawing but also these two poems by William Carlos Williams “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” and W.H Auden “Musee des Beaux Arts” which used the drawing as an inspiration. If in the drawing, Icarus’ fall was only located on a small fraction of the canvas, in these poems they also mentioned about him in the last few lines only…

The realisation of this made me think, why is Icarus being neglected by everyone becomes so significant. Is he the symbol of the insignificants? To me, I’ve learned from this poem that there more in this world for us to be worried about instead of fiddling with unimportant item. Just like Auden said in his poem, “Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone” . Besides that, we still need to go on with life as usual even though we might have lost something in the past. Maybe there are more expected for us in the mere future, who knows? At the same time, this poem made me reflect our society nowadays. We NEVER care about others…and that is not very nice too…sometimes, people tend to ignore the problems happening in front of them because they think it has nothing to do with them…I experienced once when a very very old aunty was standing in the Monorail and nobody care about giving her a seat…how cruel!!it reminded me of the advertisement on TV about budi bahasa…and another case when my father helped a motorcyclist and his wife who was involved in a minor accident (the guy did break his legs though) in the middle of the rain. My father offered them a ride to the hospital and my father asked the couple how long have they been there and they said they were there, in the rain, full of pain for nearly half an hour WITHOUT anyone offering them help. I was surprised, is our society that cruel? Is it when there is blood pools all over then there will be help? Sometimes the idea of ignoring others’ business is not a very good idea in certain issue…