Ekphrasis: The Fall of Icarus as springboard

Here is the painting 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus', attributed to Pieter Brueghel, which inspired both W. H. Auden to write his 'Musée des Beaux Arts' and William Carlos Williams to pen 'Landscape and the Fall of Icarus'. It is enjoyable to contemplate how the imaginations of two poets took flight in different directions (pardon the pun) in response to this art work. Both are free verse poems, but that is where the similarity ends; the mood and tone of each is quite distinct with Williams's short lines and stanzas creating a vital sense of immediacy as Icarus drops, while Auden's longer lines scaffold a broader meditation on the arbitrariness of human suffering and how the Old Masters captured this so skilfully. The fact that both writers refer to Brueghel in the body of their poems serves as a reminder that ekphrasis is concerned with the act of representation itself.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium

Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus

William Carlos Williams

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



unsignificantly


off the coast


there was



a splash quite unnoticed


this was


Icarus drowning 

Musée des Beaux Arts

W. H. Auden

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.