Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1960

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Form and Meter

William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” employs a loose form. It is made up of 21 short lines divided into seven stanzas of three lines each (tercets). The poem is in free verse, a hallmark of Williams’s style. This absence of a strict meter produces a flexible and fluid rhythm, enabling Williams to capture the natural cadence of language and the flow of thought, and it contributes a modern tone that is juxtaposed with Icarus’s ancient mythical status. The lack of punctuation and the use of enjambment (breaking up of the lines) also contributes to the flexibility and fluidity of the poem, going against classical traditions.

Though the poem has no strict meter, it is not without metrical properties. Most of the lines of the poem employ two stressed syllables (though a few have only one). The first line of several stanzas (Lines 1, 4, and 19) begins with an iamb (da-DUM) followed by an anapest (da-da-DUM). Similarly, while the poem lacks a sustained rhyme scheme, it does open with a subtle rhyme (“Brueghel” at the end of Line 1 rhymes with “fell” at the end of Line 2). Such metrical elements give the poem some rhythmic consistency and create a sense of momentum leading toward Icarus’s ultimate fall.

Alliteration

Alliteration is a stylistic device in which a sound is repeated at the beginning of multiple words or stressed syllables. Williams and other Imagist poets often used alliteration to intensify the imagery for which their movement was known. Williams uses alliteration in “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” when he refers to the year “sweating in the sun” (Line 13) and the “wings’ wax” (Line 15). The alliteration in Lines 10-13 is particularly evocative as it culminates with an example of sibilance, the repetition of the “s” sound, so often associated with water:

the edge of the sea

concerned

with itself

sweating in the sun (Lines 10-13).

Here, the sibilance evokes the watery sound of perspiration, and this alliteration repeats throughout the poem.

The second stanza also contains alliteration, where the “f” and “p” sounds complement each other, filling the stanza with stressed labial sounds: “A farmer was plowing / his field / the whole pageantry” (Lines 4-6). The boldness of these alliterative sounds anticipates and overshadows the “splash” (Line 19) of Icarus’s fall. The interlaced alliteration of “farmer” (Line 4), “field” (Line 5), “ploughing” (Line 4), and “pageantry” (Line 6) also creates a pattern that unifies the stanza while mimicking the sound of a farmer’s plowing. The stanza’s alliteration thus underscores the tone of self-involvement and indifference: The farmer’s engrossment in his work is heralded by the alliteration of “farmer” (Line 4) and “field” (Line 5), while the alliterative stanza is itself a self-contained unit.

Enjambment

Enjambment refers to the continuation of a sentence or phrase beyond the end of a line without a pause. Enjambment was often important in modernist poetry, and Williams strategically uses this device in his “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” to create a sense of natural rhythm and momentum and to emphasize his thematic points.

Williams employs enjambment to reflect the interconnectedness of the poem’s themes, particularly the juxtaposition of mythic events and everyday life. In the first stanza, the enjambment produces a subtle rhyme between “Brueghel” (Line 1)—the artist whose painting inspired the poem—and “fell” (Line 2), the subject of the painting (the fall of Icarus). The enjambment between Lines 2 and 3 also separates the insignificant mythical subject, “when Icarus fell” (Line 2), from the more central landscape, “it was spring” (Line 3).

The lack of punctuation in the poem blurs the boundaries between individual thoughts and ideas, much as the boundaries between the myth of Icarus and the daily activities of the world blend together within the painting. With this lack of punctuation, enjambment serves the role of distinguishing between disparate elements while also evoking a sense of unity between them. Thus, the farmer who is plowing “his field” in Line 5 is separated from “the whole pageantry / of the year” in Lines 6 and 7, with no punctuation intruding on the larger unity that connects them. Elsewhere, enjambment emphasizes key ideas, putting the “unsignificantly” (Line 16) of Icarus’s fall, for instance, in its own line.