The poem is about the death of hope. Auden is distraught over the deaths in WWII. The soldiers of WWII were teenagers. To have 55 million children dead is an act of pure genocide. To Auden the fact that people let this happen means that the world is an ugly place. Art is a thing of beauty and humans don't deserve it because of the ugly things we do. Auden uses The Fall of Icarus to describe the way people behave. Everyone sees that Icarus has fallen but they turn their heads instead of helping Icarus. That is how WWII was everyone knew that massive amounts of people would die but they just turned their heads. This poem contains an approach to its subject different from many other poems. The