Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

William Carlos Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” reflects on Brueghel’s interpretation of the myth of Icarus to explore the tension between grand mythical narratives and everyday reality. “According to Brueghel” (Line 1), the death of an individual such as Icarus does not have the same tragic importance that it does in more conventional treatments of the myth. Williams’s poem uses vivid, straightforward language to place the fall of Icarus in the context of the mundane world: “when Icarus fell / it was spring” (Lines 2-3). Williams thus creates a dichotomy or juxtaposition between the timelessness of myth—the fall of Icarus—and the cyclicality of nature and reality (highlighted in the renewal represented by the season of spring).

The mythical figure of Icarus, for all his monumentality, also becomes less real than the symbols of the commonplace and the everyday evoked in the poem, such as the farmer plowing his field. The farmer, like the world at large, is preoccupied with his activity. This is reality. Meanwhile, the mythical Icarus goes “quite unnoticed” (Line 19) as he drowns. Myth is eclipsed by day-to-day reality, its pageantry taken over by the “pageantry / of the year” (Lines 6-7). This is a very idiosyncratic interpretation of the myth of Icarus, which is usually seen as a cautionary tale, a warning of the dangers of reaching too high and flying too close to the sun.