Similarities Between Williams And The Fall Of Icarus

The fall of Icarus often comes as a cautionary tale about pride and ambition. However, W. H. Auden and William Carlos Williams took inspiration from Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus in their respective poems Musee des Beaux Arts and Landscape with the Fall of Icarus to tell a new tale. The poems use imagery, form, repetition, and alliteration to convey the apathy of the world in the face of personal tragedy.

The most notable technique that Auden and Williams both use is contrast. Auden takes care to describe the beauty of the world as an ironic backdrop for Icarus’s death. He describes how “the sun shone...on the white legs disappearing into the green/ Water”. This use of imagery emphasizes beauty to show how the world will not change its appearance for the loss of one boy. Williams uses a similar technique when he characterizes the world as “tingling with itself” due to the “pageantry of the world”. These words bring to mind a happy and celebratory mood

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus has no rhyme scheme or punctuation. The longest line has four words. This use of form causes the reader to focus on the shape of the poem, which is long and thin and almost makes it seems as though the words themselves are falling. This isn’t to say that Williams does not make use of the language within the poem, however. He creates a powerful image in the fourth stanza by using alliteration to describe how the world is “sweating in the sun” and how it melted “the wings’ wax”. The sun and the wax are cornerstones of the image of Icarus and his fall. More importantly, this is immediately followed, in its own line, by the word “unsignificantly”. This direct correlation shows how the sun and the wax, though iconic, matter very little to the ploughman and whoever else happened to be by the sea when Icarus drowned. Though his focus is more on form, Williams’s use of language adds layers of depth to his