Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus

The perception that one person’s sorrow and tragedy goes unseen to the world is the central idea in the poetry of William Carlos Williams. His poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” is written as an interpretation of Pieter Brueghel’s painting. The painting is based on the Greek mythological tale of Icarus and his father, Daedalus. Williams’s uses a purposeful tone, irony, and symbolism to put emphasis on the imagery of Brueghel’s painting. The poem is written in the form of a narrative, and each stanza includes three lines with the lack of punctuation and capitalization leading to the assumption that the poem represents one extensive, run-on sentence. Pieter Brueghel’s painting is an image based off the Greek mythological tale of The

Lines 1-3 in the first stanza is the first introduction of irony. Williams introduces the painting and the scene it is displaying, the fall of Icarus. Although the fall of Icarus is supposed to be a dark, tragic story, Williams informs the reader that it is Spring which is connected with happiness, new life, and the idea that nature that is forever continuing. In the third stanza, lines 7-9, Williams is describing the landscape as “awake tingling near”. This makes the readers feel like this day is fresh and full of life, when ironically this is a poem of a tragic death. In the fifth stanza, Williams is passively describing how Icarus fell to his death, “sweating in the sun that melted the wings wax.” The sun is what caused the wings’ wax to melt, ironically the thing that gives life caused Icarus’s death. In the last two stanzas, lines 16-21, Williams is referencing Icarus’s death as an insignificant thing, but in entirety it is a turn from the rest of the poem. The irony is in the actuality that at the beginning of the poem Williams paints an image of spring, the birth of a new life, but that image is unexpectedly interrupted by death; a depressed and gloomy