I keep encountering references to Icarus lately: in particular, two friends have invoked the myth in in-progress essays, and one of them also mentioned a poem by Jack Gilbert that similarly references it. Which sent me searching for other poems on Icarus, a couple of which are ekphrastic, inspired by paintings of the boy-bird. So I thought I'd share some of that shebang. I appreciate the variety of perspectives they offer on the myth.
Failing and Flying
Jack Gilbert
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
Chagall’s Fall of Icarus
David Moolten
He doesn’t fall into the sea, but back
Towards Russia, a shtetl’s chicken coop houses,
Crowds clutching children who point and wave.
They’ve cleared a space for him among their donkeys,
A boy in shades of gray, of wood fire ash
Coughed from chimneys, with a weak spiked sun
Like a circle around a star of David,
Which a dove easily passes over.
He might be an angel except for his dark wings
Flicking off feathers as he floats a moment,
As he flies in the forever of falling
And of the painting. He might be an angel.
Except he’s not, just a boy who’s gone
Too far, maybe crossed oceans, forty days
And forty nights of typhus in steerage,
High fever and delusions, sodden resilience
Maybe to live in Hoboken, sweat out
A shoe factory then a Dutchman’s farm,
Never come home. Only in his mind,
Does he revisit those antique relatives,
Colorful extensions of what he is
That let him rise through the world. And when
Their abandoned faces begin to shrivel
In memory like a picture thrown on a fire,
He still has his tall tales infectious as rumors
Of the old country, Yiddish he can’t leave
Well enough alone, squawking at his kids.
But unable to hover above the rooftops, play
On a breeze like the Klezmer fiddlers,
Maybe he flies too close, burns up in the warmth
Of this childish levity and weeps. Wracked
At the end, usurped by the ground reaching up
As a hospital room’s soft bed clothes, he’s just
A man with an unfamiliar name. Now nothing
Remains of the old days except pictures
In books and paintings. In them, no one hears
The shrieks of a violin nor of a boy
As he plunges back towards his sketchy village,
A native son humbly doing as he was told,
Thrashing about the midair of exile, dying
Only in his dreams, only in the myth of leaving.
Here is the painting in question:
Musée des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden
December 1938
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 Brueghel’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.
And that painting:
Here is a very nice piece by Elisa Gabbert in the New York Times that parses the poem (multiple times, variously), gives some pictorial background on Auden, and explores Pieter Bruegel to boot.
And finally, here's a view of Icarus from his father's point of view, after the fall:
Daedalus, After Icarus
Saeed Jones
Boys begin to gather around the man like seagulls.
He ignores them entirely, but they follow him
from one end of the beach to the other.
Their footprints burn holes in the sand.
It’s quite a sight, a strange parade:
a man with a pair of wings strapped to his arms
followed by a flock of rowdy boys.
Some squawk and flap their bony limbs.
Others try to leap now and then, stumbling
as the sand tugs at their feet. One boy pretends to fly
in a circle around the man, cawing in his face.
We don’t know his name or why he walks
along our beach, talking to the wind.
To say nothing of those wings. A woman yells
to her son, Ask him if he’ll make me a pair.
Maybe I’ll finally leave your father.
He answers our cackles with a sudden stop,
turns, and runs toward the water.
The children jump into the waves after him.
Over the sound of their thrashes and giggles,
we hear a boy say, We don’t want wings.
We want to be fish now.
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