Landscape With the Fall of Icarus

- by Peter Bruegel

Landscape With the Fall of Icarus

- by 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

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                                                                      Musée des Beaux Arts

- by 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.

Magpie on the Gallows

- by Peter Brughel