The first time I saw the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus I thought "Where is Icarus?"
The painting in oil on canvas is currently displayed in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. It was long thought to be by the leading painter of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder but that is controversial and it may be a copy of his original which is lost.
I came to the painting via W. H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux-Arts", named after the museum in Brussels where he saw the painting. I later found a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams, and just recently read "Lines on Bruegel's 'Icarus'" by Michael Hamburger. They are all examples of ekphrastic poetry.
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
insignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
His poem focuses on what is so interesting about the painting's title; that Icarus is insignificant on the canvas. He also tells you where to look for Icarus. His legs are sticking out of the water below the ship near shore.
W. H. Auden’s "Musée des Beaux Arts" goes in another direction. He opens by saying, "About suffering they were never wrong / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position.
Auden wrote the poem in 1938, while he was staying in Brussels with his friend Christopher Isherwood. He was probably thinking of several paintings that are in that museum. In his first stanza, he is concerned with how the Masters displayed suffering.
The second shorter stanza uses the Icarus painting as an example of:
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;
In this poem, the nature of suffering is that no matter how intense it is for the person undergoing it, most of the people around are ignorant or indifferent to what is happening. Accurate though that might be, it's pretty depressing.
Icarus comes to us in Greek mythology. He is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, who created the labyrinth of Crete. Daedalus and his son are imprisoned in the labyrinth of his own creation with a dangerous minotaur. They attempt to escape using wings Daedalus had constructed from feathers and wax.
The father warns the boy not to fly too low or too high. The sea's dampness will clog his wings and the sun's heat will melt them. But Icarus, probably thrilled with flight, ignores the warnings and does fly too close to the sun. The wax melts, the wings fall apart and he falls out of the sky and into the sea, and drowns.
Ovid's treatment of the Icarus myth inspired many English writers (including Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Joyce. Other English-language poems referencing the Icarus myth are "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" by Anne Sexton; "Icarus Again" by Alan Devenish; "Mrs. Icarus" by Carol Ann Duffy; "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert; "It Should Have Been Winter" by Nancy Chen Long; "Icarus Burning" and "Icarus Redux" by Hiromi Yoshida; and "Up like Icarus" by syllabic poet Mark Antony Owen.
It is generally seen as a cautionary lesson about "high-flying ambition," and hubris.
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ReplyDeleteHamburger overly romanticizes the scene and Icarus or the figure in the ocean. The fall, in the painting, appears to be more a madman than a hero who leapt off a cliff thinking he could fly. In the Hamburger poem, I get the impression that Icarus is human but somehow greater than his “half-brothers,” which gives the impression he is greater than his brothers for merely attempting to reach the sun. Hamburger’s poem suggests that Icarus deserves more recognition for flying too close to the sun. I don’t get that impression in the painting. The characters in the painting seem to accept their lot. You might even say they are content, accepting. I love the last stanza, but I don’t get the impression of a “jeering” sun from the painting. The sun appears hopeful, casting its light across the water onto the figures in the foreground, away from the figure drowning in the water.
Auden expresses an idea about the painting in his poem that makes more sense to me, but it's the first four lines of the poem that capture the meaning, not just the first two:
"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...." So, there is nothing heroic about Icarus or the figure here. It’s about the individual suffering that goes on while the rest of humanity just goes about its daily business or busyness. Auden's perspective on the painting is colored by his experience of WWII and the Nazi and Japanese atrocities. I don't think that indifference to human evil and suffering is a central idea in the painting, but there is something to the idea of the world spinning on while indifferent to the individual. Auden, as you stated, is also referencing paintings other than the "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus."
Williams’ poem captures the essence of the painting, which conveys something that is ahead of its time: the modern need to be noticed and significant, the cult of personality that modern Western culture has perpetuated, which I think is a deadly myth. Icarus in Willam's poem is drowning not from the water but drowning from the insignificance of his life: "a splash quite unnoticed/ this was/ Icarus drowning." The key word in the quote is ”this,” which stressed the adjectives, “unnoticed.” It is in being unnoticed, not in any grand or heroic way, but just as a plain ordinary human being, who goes about life like everyone else that I feel the deep sadness, loneliness of the figure in the poem.
All the poems seem to miss something about the details of the painting that don’t jive with the myth of Icarus. When I look at a close up of the painting, there seem to be some feathers floating in the air.. The splashes of white could just be the crests of the waves. Assuming this is not just a panel with verifiable parts remaining to be found, the shepherd gives the impression of looking up the side of a mountain. Our perspective in the poem is one of looking down the side of a mountain into the expanse of the landscape and then up again into the glowing mountain landscapes in the distance. I get the impression that the figure jumped from a point on the mountain that we don’t see, a cliff perhaps. The shepherd may have heard something then looked up, but too late to see the figure falling into the sea.
All this speculation aside, it is likely Icarus, but the artist has reinterpreted the myth in ways that don’t entirely connect with the poems.