The second stanza of this excellent poem is where you will
find the answer to your question. In this stanza, the speaker, who we imagine strolling
through a museum leisurely looking at a variety of masterpieces, contemplates suffering
and the indifference with which it is often met. He uses one painting in particular to
demonstrate his point: Bruegel's Icarus, which depicts Icarus
falling out of the sky having soared too close to the sun. He plummets to his death
whilst those around him remain either unaware or choose to ignore his death. The poem
says that "everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster." Although the
"plowman may / Have heard the splash" it was not "an important failure" for him.
However, both the plowman and the ship had more pressing business to
complete:
...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.
Thus the profound
indifference to human suffering is characterised by this painting and the way that the
death of Icarus is variously ignored or not noticed.
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