Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” is an ekphrastic poem that describes a painting attributed to Pieter Brueghel the Elder to reflect on the themes of The Tension Between Myth and Reality, The Transience of Human Experience, and The Power of Nature. The very first words of the poem, “According to Brueghel” (Line 1) call attention the poem’s intimate relationship with the visual artwork and establish the authority behind the poem. Though the myth of Icarus originated in ancient Greece and featured in many ancient and modern works of literature and art, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8 CE), the poem remains primarily interested in Brueghel’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the famous myth. At the same time, it is telling that the poem is an incomplete description of Brueghel’s painting. For example, Williams does not speak at all of the activity along the coastline, the shepherd with his sheep in the pasture, the fisherman casting his net, or the several ships unfurling their sails as they head out to sea. Williams’s description is sparing—focusing on the farmer and the fallen man—seeking to convey meaning rather than recreate exactly everything in the visual image.

Williams’s poem asserts the relativity of perspective by juxtaposing the mythical with the mundane. The second line, “when Icarus fell,” introduces the mythical subject; but this famous subject is immediately decentered in the lines that follow, which instead vividly render the spring season in which Icarus’s fall takes place. Thus, “it was spring” (Line 3) is placed on its own line, indicating that the poem is swiftly shifting to a new subject. The mention of spring invokes ideas of renewal and vitality, clashing with the conventionally tragic tone of the Icarus myth. Hence the “whole pageantry / of the year” (Lines 6-7) is “awake tingling” (Line 8) in the foreground of the poem, just as it is in the foreground of Brueghel’s painting. The mention of spring also reflects the interplay between larger seasonal cycles and individual human events. Natural cycles constantly renew; amid all this, a single human life hardly seems meaningful.

The natural world increasingly becomes the primary agent of the poem. The “pageantry / of the year” (Lines 6-7)—that is, the lively landscape as rendered in Williams’s poem—is personified and described as “concerned / with itself” (Lines 11-12) as it basks in the springtime sun. The farmer, likewise, is entirely occupied with his own activity, “ploughing / his field” (Lines 4-5) and not paying any attention to the drowning Icarus. This vivid description of nature and daily life (such as the farmer’s plowing of the field) underscores the world’s indifference to the monumental and mythical fall of Icarus. This supposedly tragic event simply does not matter in Williams’s world (as filtered through Brueghel’s painting). The farmer receives just as much attention in the poem as Icarus, suggesting that in the final analysis, Icarus is no more significant.

The sun is what brings the poem back to Icarus. The spring landscape stretches out “sweating in the sun” (Line 13), and it is this same sun “that melted / the wings’ wax” (Lines 14-15) and caused Icarus to fall into the sea. These allusive lines refer to the ancient Greek myth of Icarus, who was imprisoned in the Labyrinth on the island of Crete with his father Daedalus. In the myth, Daedalus—who was a great inventor—designed wings by gluing birds’ feathers with wax. He fashioned one pair of wings for himself and another for his son Icarus. But as they flew to freedom, Icarus foolishly flew too close to the sun. The heat from the sun melted the wax holding his wings, and he fell to his death. In Williams’s poem, this story is present only as an allusion. The reader must rely on their own knowledge to supply the details; the myth is not recounted in the poem, where the event is dwarfed by the larger significance of nature and everyday life. This landscape, the true focus of the poem, is beautiful and indifferent, but it is also sinister. The sun in particular becomes a symbol of life’s harsh realities. The pageantry of the moment is described as “sweating in the sun” (Line 13), evoking the toil that characterizes all aspects of existence, and of course it is the same sun that melts Icarus’s wings. The sun lords itself over the mundane as well as the mythical, hardly discriminating between the two.

A key to the poem’s meaning lies in the word “unsignificantly” (Line 16), emphatically placed as the first word of the fourth stanza and the only word in its line. “Unsignificantly” is not a word in English, but rather a deliberate play on the word “insignificant.” The painting’s reframing of the fall, by placing it within a bucolic landscape, negates its significance, making it un-signified. The farmer continues to plow, the spring continues to arrive, even with Icarus drowning, and the sun continues to shine, careless of the damage it has done. The fall of Icarus certainly makes a “splash” (Line 19), but this splash goes “quite unnoticed” (Line 19). The ending of the poem is thus as poignant as it is abrupt: The splash of “Icarus drowning” (Line 21) hardly makes a mark on the world. A human life such as Icarus’s is too transient to matter in the grand scheme of things.

In stressing the transience of human life and the insignificance of the mythical subject, Williams’s slyly reinforces the myth’s underlying message. Icarus’s tale is a warning to the overly ambitious, to those who believe themselves indestructible and godlike. The boy’s ambition and pride ultimately lead to his downfall, as he ignored his father’s warning and thought he could fly ever higher. When framed by Brueghel, and then Williams, the boy’s self-importance does seem quite unsignificant, as the landscape, the sea, the sun, and the archetypal farmer are completely indifferent to the drowning boy who thought so much of himself.

However, for the reader (and viewer), Icarus does maintain some significance. For while Icarus is de-centered in the painting, without him, Brueghel’s landscape is just another landscape. What gives this landscape its essential character—that is, its indifference to human pride—is the figure of Icarus, the object of the landscape’s indifference. Even the poem’s silence on the myth of Icarus reveals how important he really is, for the only reason Williams can afford to refer to Icarus so minimally and so allusively is because Icarus is so well known. Brueghel’s landscape may be indifferent to Icarus, but Icarus, paradoxically, has not been forgotten. For even if the reader ignores Icarus and focuses on the world’s indifference, there is still a “splash” (Line 19). The figure who drowns unnoticed is not a nameless, forgotten nobody, but Icarus, a mythical exemplar whose demise teaches an important lesson about hubris and human mortality. Brueghel’s framing of the moment reminds the viewer of just how fragile and transient human life really is, just as Williams draws attention to the way nature—from an aggressive sun to a dangerous sea—can quickly render human life unsignificant in a matter of moments.