Since posting several poems about Icarus the other day, told from various perspectives, I've encountered two more versions. First, a poem by Sonia Greenfield telling the story from Icarus's mother's point of view, "Naxocrate Considers Brugel's Famous Work":
Then one, by Muriel Rukeyser, from his girlfriend's perspective, in which it turns out Icarus is something of a jerk:
Waiting for Icarus
 |
| Icarus, plate VIII from the illustrated book Jazz |
He said that everything would be better than before
He said we were on the edge of a new relation
He said he would never again cringe before his father
He said that he was going to invent full-time
He said he loved me that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky
He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax
He said Wait for me here on the beach
He said Just don’t cry
I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea
I remember the girls laughing
I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me
I remember mother saying, Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot
I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse
I remember she added, Women who love such are the
Worst of all
I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer.
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this.
And while I'm at it, here's William Carlos Williams, with a sparer counterpart to Auden's musing on that same Bruegel painting (presented in that earlier post):
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
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
And finally, a prose poem not about Icarus alone, but invoking the Gilbert poem "Failing and Flying"—and a whole bunch of other poets as well. (I've provided links to what appear to be the referent poems, or in the case of Sharon Olds, a related one.)
Alexandria
by Lucas Jorgensen
Brigit Pegeen Kelly said it burned. Hera Lindsay Bird said it burned in alphabetical order. There’s nothing left about it to say. To say, “there’s nothing left about it to say” is awfully similar to what Alberto Ríos said about the Sonoran Desert and its fires—mainly, actually, that there was only one thing left to say. Then, he said it. The way it took a thousand years and one Jack Gilbert to say we’ve forgotten the beauty in Icarian flight. And he’s right. But I’d also say, even more beautiful is the moment before Icarus flies. When he sees both outcomes reflected on the ocean in front of him and still decides there’s nothing left to lose. And sure, were Elizabeth Bishop there, with her keen clairvoyant eye, she would say the trail of wax he lost behind his wings looked exactly like disaster bobbing on the waves. Perhaps we should reframe. Mary Ruefle says The Odyssey was probably sung by sirens because none of us can turn away from the tragedy of our own lives. And the logical conclusion of this history arrives when Ocean Vuong borrows Telemachus’s clothing, finds his father with a bullet in his back, washed in by a foaming red tide. His teacher, Sharon Olds, does a similar trick—when she makes her father say “I love you” from the afterlife. We get to do this—dilute the River Styxes of the real world under the peat bogs of the mind. Like, I could tell you it didn’t matter that the Library burned—that it’s all bubblegum and cherry pie to say it stopped us from developing steam engines or penicillin in a pre-American century. But after I said that, I could take it back, like Ada Limón when American Pharaoh unstrung the gray from her sky. I have to remind myself at times of Terrance Hayes’s advice, that what it is isn’t always what it looks like. The Library burned, yes. But no one ever talks about the scribe who put it out.
Maybe now I'm done with Icarus. Or, maybe not. We'll just have to see.
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