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 must always 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 Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the foresaken 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.
W. H. Auden
Collected Poems (1940)
ICARUS
In his father's face flying
He soared until the cities of the Aegean
Opened like bloodvessels lying
Under a microscope. End on
He saw below the trunks of trees
While space-time flowered in his sunward eyes.
His feathered arms, extension
Of nimble thoughts, pride of invention,
Were lifting him high above man.
"And if I fly,"
He said, "to the source of mortal energy
I shall capture the receipt
To administer light and heat."
But sunlight to all eyes is not bearable
Or sunheat to all blood.
His motion turned to earth, unable
To sustain its presumptuous mood.
Falling he saw the cantilevered birds,
Their great humerous muscles bearing
Them in their spacious veering
Over shores and sherds
Over swords and words.
Like a detached leaf, feeble
In the wind, he fell,
A multitude of molecules
Organized in equal and parallel
Velocities (according to the rules
Of motion) to seek the ground.
And on the slope above the sea
The hard handed-peasants go their round
Turning the soil, blind to the body
Ambitious and viable, whose pride
Will leave no trace in the quenching tide.
Ronald Bottrall
Selected Poems by Ronald Bottrall (1946)
LANDSCAPE WITH THE FALL OF ICARUS
According to Breughel
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
William Carlos Williams
LINES ON BRUEGHEL'S "ICARUS"
The ploughman ploughs, the fisherman dreams of fish;
Aloft, the sailor, through a world of ropes
Guides tangled meditations, feverish
With memories of girls forsaken, hopes
Of brief reunions, new discoveries,
Past rum consumed, rum promised, rum potential.
Sheep crop the grass, lift up their heads and gaze
Into a sheepish present: the essential,
Illimitable juiciness of things,
Greens, yellows, browns are what they see.
Churlish and slow, the shepherd, hearing wings --
Perhaps an eagle's--gapes uncertainly;
Too late. The worst has happened: lost to man,
The angel, Icarus, for ever failed,
Fallen with melted wings when, near the sun
He scorned the ordering planet, which prevailed
And, jeering, now slinks off, to rise once more.
But he--his damaged purpose drags him down --
Too far from his half-brothers on the shore,
Hardly conceivable, is left to drown.
Michael Hamburger
