A long time ago, I fell in love with the poetry of William Carlos Williams. I distinctly remember being mesmerized by Red Wheelbarrow: its simplicity, its shape, like inky little bird prints on the page. I had no idea that a poem could be that easy and yet so packed with powerful imagery.
Williams quickly became a member of my personal rat pack, rubbing shoulders with Pablo Neruda and Dylan Thomas. Then came Williams' Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, based on a painting of the same name by Brueghel:
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
this was
Icarus drowning
- William Carlos Williams
What i loved about the poem and the painting were their antithesis with the Icarus Myth. Rather than presenting a highly tragic and hubristic fall, both are works in which Icarus plays a small part, certainly, at least, secondary to the plowing farmer and the noble sailing ship. In the painting all you can see of Icarus are his poor little legs while he drowns. He is just a detail within a greater tapestry. I liked that Williams pointed the eye to a small section of the painting that might go unnoticed. Because without those legs, it would only be a landscape, similar to any other.
I wanted to do that too: show people the small but vital things they hadn't noticed before.
