Bruegel’s 'Icarus' has been the subject of 63 poems. Make that 64.

According to Robert Denham, Bruegel’s 'Landscape with the Fall of Icarus' has been the subject of at least sixty-three poems. Make that 64.

[For another of my ekphratic poems - on an image by the photographer Olive Cotton, see -[ Ссылка ]]

Pieter Bruegel the Elder was astonishingly independent of the dominant artistic interests of his day. He painted no commissioned portraits nor any of powerful contemporaries. He deliberately revived the Gothic style of Hieronymus Bosch and then went on to original themes. He died quite young in Brussels in 1569, but had already developed such a range – the everyday work and play, landscape, politics and religion.

The scene is from Ovid: ‘some angler catching fish with a quivering rod, or a shepherd leaning on his crook, or a ploughman resting on the handles of his plough, saw them, perhaps, and stood there amazed, believing them to be gods able to travel the sky.’ (Metamorphosis, Book 8, 183-235).

Bruegel had such a range and such originality in themes, work and play, politics, and religion as well as execution. The composition is stranger the more one looks at it,

Many poems have been written about this work from 1558. In December 1938, having witnessed violent conflicts in Spain and China and with prospects of immanent war in Europe, W H Auden visited this museum. His poem ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’, inspired by ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’, is one of his best-known poems. (First published as ‘Palais des beaux arts’, New Writing, Spring, 1939.)

The most famous line is about the Old Masters, ‘About suffering they were never wrong’, memorable but nebulous. The first stanza refers to ‘The Census at Bethlehem’, 1566. He then looks at Icarus:
‘In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster.’
Auden was mistaken. The locals have not deliberately ignored and turned away from the drowning. They are all intent on what they have to do. They have not avoided being witness.

John Sutherland suggests, ‘Underlying the poem is an essay by Freud which Auden returns to time and again in his poetry: ‘Civilisation and its Discontents’ . . . Our aspirations, achievements, human ‘progress’ and our increasing ability to communicate, is a one-way trip to loneliness and despair.’
~
William Carlos Williams offered his poem: ‘Landscape with The Fall Of Icarus’:
‘According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring . . . ‘

'according to Williams /but no-one ploughs/ in spring.' I add! I find Williams’ poem not nearly as rich or interesting as Auden’s.
~
‘Too late. The worst has happened: lost to man,
The angel, Icarus, for ever failed.’ Michael Hamburger ‘Lines on Brueghel's 'Icarus'.

Hamburger’s Icarus isn’t a foolish youth driving too fast or flying too high, but an angel. I don’t believe in angels, but Bruegel certainly did, he painted plenty, but there’s no sense of one here, a pair of legs, wingless, unable I swim, no supernatural powers. Whereas Williams poem told me nothing and was sparse (which he often made work), I find Hamburger’s poem a tangle. Bruegel took the ‘common’ people seriously, possibly for the first time in art, but Hamburger describes the shepherd as ‘Churlish and slow’.

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