W.H. Auden, 'Musee Des Beaux Arts'
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| The Fall of Icarus, as depicted by artist Frank Wright. Icarus. 1971. 15/16x5. Engraving. http://www.gwu.edu/~fwright/graphics/icarus.html |
Read Ovid's retelling of the myth of Icarus and Daedalus from Metamorphoses. Notice the juxtaposition between the everyday and extraordinary - this is Ovid's twist on the tale and the element Breughel focused on in his painting.
Both painting and poem are beautiful meditations on tragedy and the cyclical nature of human life.
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| Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Held at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium. Fun Fact: the painting we know is in fact most probably a very good copy of Brueghel's original, completed sometime in the 1560s. |
Musee 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.
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.
Source: Another Time, 1940.
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