Icarus just keeps falling toward us
After I posted William Carlos Williams’ Landscape With the Fall of Icarus, several people emailed me another beautiful poem about Icarus, one I didn’t know – thank you, Sally and Sebastian. It reminded me of other poems about that same Breughel painting – I have a file of 50 or so of them.
A very favorite is this by Auden, one I’ve often used in speeches, those last five lines speaking volumes about us, tilling our soil and sailing past as extraordinary things happen around us, unnoticed or dismissed or unrecognized:
Musee des Beaux Arts
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;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, 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.
-W.H. Auden
Little Icarus will no doubt reappear at our party before poetry month is finished, I’m thinking.
