On Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

On Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”

William Carlos Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” is a subtle and concise poem which philosophizes about a constellation of very complex allusions, such as: the art of reading poetry, human consciousness, morality, and peoples’ distractions and indifference in a beautiful, chaotic world. Many books could be written on ideas drawn from this little piece of text. Although these analyses are probably not the way in which Williams’ would like us to enjoy his poetry, one might interject for the reason that this issue itself is, in fact, the theme of this particular poem, “over-examination” and the poetry-reader’s urge to do so. Multiple readings might also be permissible due to the poem’s confrontations with uncertain thoughts and paradox. Williams’ masterful creation of the poetic image is meant to show us that images are to be celebrated and held above everything else in everyday life as a reassurance of beauty in a world where people are often too quick to call their very existence meaningless.
Modernist William Carlos Williams, the first of his kind as an imagist, was at odds with authors before him in style, form, theme, voice, purpose, and virtually all areas where he could have allowed himself to be a victim of conventionality. He wrote short lines with simplified language in defiance against symbols, emblems and propaganda as devices in literature and thought it wrong to incorporate politics, spirituality, and deliberately placed riddles. Before this time, poetry was defined rather differently. Romantics learned lessons from nature; Victorians spoke politically and preached spiritually; all wrote about their own life experiences, using rhythm and rhyme, abundant metaphors, and impossible language to educate and be discussed within a rather limited, exclusive audience of an educated, high society. This, Williams would say, deters people from true beauty that belongs to and within the objects themselves, without our interference and with only our casual observation. Williams wrote so as to make poetry accessible to ordinary citizens and enjoyed by the masses. His innovations to poetry made old writers obsolete, trivial and impractical.
Since Williams’ poetry was so “modern” and far from the norm at this time in history, one might wonder why his writing is considered poetry at all. This kind of poetry is the reason poetry is not taken seriously; it is the reason why everyone thinks that they can be a poet—scribble down a few random words that read funny (or comfortably) and create a peculiar picture, and you have written a poem. Williams, however, has discovered a game in his deeply artistic vision of poetry in creating a communion in peoples’ shared experiences, those everyday simple experiences with our senses.
Just as how some people might call this kind of poetry “insignificant,” Williams’ modernist imagism metaphorically snaps a photograph of a seemingly ordinary moment in time, captures it, and gives what would generally be considered “insignificant objects” significance. This significance is attributed to the fact that we all share this common experience—the natural tendency to take mental pictures at any given moment which stay in our memory almost permanently, whether we are conscious of it or not, and build structures of associated thoughts and feelings into random accidental designs of shapes, lines, shades and colors. Symbols are similar to images in that they can be found everywhere; both exist in our imaginations; both require participation from the reader. When we interact with an image in poetry, we are sort of indulging in an individual psychological experiment of cause and effect, or image and reaction. One might consider associating this with Freudian concepts of image-association in the unconscious mind, where images in childhood memories have long-lasting effects throughout the rest of our lives. Experiences we recall in our childhood and the images we attach to them, in theory, could perhaps shape our reactions to like images we may come across in adulthood, hence triggering the familiar mindset which belongs to that former past image.
The importance of the poet is diminished in Williams’ modernist imagism, while the reader’s importance is made clearer. Work-shopping imagist poetry is like an open forum which relays thoughts and feelings from the authors’ source experiences to the minds of the readers, resulting in unique reactions from each. It is like looking over a family photo album, each photo being a poem, as a collection of precious moments that Williams frames in time with the use of his senses and delivers in words— accessible experiences in ordinary life that everyone can relate to but no one takes the time to notice in their own lives, as their perspectives might just be limited or their minds unenthusiastic.
This is a common theme in most of Williams’ poetry: delighting in the beauty, the complexity, the importance of life’s simplest actions and objects that otherwise go unnoticed by all. Images are simply invitations to stop and smell the roses, to cease from being involuntary and experience one’s own senses. Allow the senses to teach you something you’ve never acknowledged before, a psychological indulgence to feel what Williams is feeling at a given moment in time.
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” is a unique commentary on the painting “The Fall of Icarus” by Pieter Brueghel, the artist he mentions in the first line. The painting is of Icarus drowning off the shore while the rest of the world on shore continues, and no one attempts to save him nor do they even notice his plight. The message is double-sided: that you should not be preoccupied with the tragedies in your life, because they are unavoidable as part of the world’s disordered flow. Instead, take refuge in the beauty of nature’s complex design in simple, ordinary things. Williams’ is saying that some things are out of our control, and we do not need to interfere. We must learn to accept life and death or else the world will continue to turn without us, regardless of our emotional health. The edge of the sea is “concerned with itself,” just as the farmers on the shore are only concerned with themselves, likewise with Icarus. The title of the poem is an echo of this theme, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.” Williams’ addition to the title of Brueghel’s painting positions the catastrophe of “The Fall of icarus” secondary as a side note to the “Landscape,” which is, or ought to be, the greater focus.
Conversely, Williams’ says that we should not be absolutely helpless and compliant in the face of doom while staring at the clouds and admiring rocks and dirt, if one were to consider the significance of the story of Daedalus and Icarus. In this Cretian myth, Daedalus, the father of Icarus, is a famous architect who is appointed to build a labyrinth for King Minos. The king imprisons the father and son inside the labyrinth, and when they are unable to find their way out, Daedalus fashions two sets of wings made out of wax and bird feathers. When the two of them take flight for their escape, Daedalus warns Icarus to not not fly too high where the sun’s rays can melt the wax or too low where the mist can dissolve it. This story is an example lesson of Aristotle’s philosophy of the “Golden Mean,” which promotes moderation for good living. The doctrine says that it is bad to behave on either extreme—that of excess or of deficiency—and everyone should act in accordance of measuring every action to find a comfortable in-between. In Icarus’ case, he took the road of excess by flying too close to the sun, which melted his wings and sent him plummeting to his death.
In considering the story of Icarus and the Aristotelian “Golden Mean,” Williams is not saying that we should be picking daisies and always have our heads in the clouds, but at the same time, we should not hide our heads in the sand either. We should not over-indulge ourselves with the good aspects of life while ignoring and running away from the bad parts; but rather, we simply ought to not let inevitable sorrows and the misfortunes of our past weigh us down. The world is unpredictable, full of both good and bad, and if we allow ourselves to be preoccupied with the past, the rest of the world remains unchanged and will move on without us.
Williams might also be referring to himself in the poem as the victim. He is Icarus drowning in the bay, while no one pays attention or is bothered. This may be an anxiety about his career and if anyone will remember him and his writing after he is gone, also in the integrity of his writing itself, if it is really a triumph or a failure. Icarus was given flight only temporarily before coming down crashing. The achievements of Daedalus and Williams remain suspended in uncertainty, and the rest of the world is apathetic.
Another interpretation of Daedalus and Icarus can be applied to Williams’ poem in the act of Daedalus granting wings to human beings, and the resulting fall of Icarus. The lesson could perhaps be a religious parable. Daedalus commits the sin of playing God by tampering with His designs, improving them. Humanity’s cunning in technology and progress toward advancing ourselves beyond normal human beings will often fail, as it disrupts the flow of nature. Humans are not made to fly as they are, and so Icarus suffered the consequences of our limited potential. This will always happen because of our own fault—in our dangerous pursuit of power and thirst for knowledge beyond our means. Likewise, in reading Williams’ poetry, the reader’s overanalyzing of this simple text might just as well be removing him or her further and further away from the actual poem itself. Scholars’ arrogant inclination to dissect literature and apply their knowledge overcomplicates the intention of Williams’ poetry, that of simple delight. Our enthusiastic endeavors have boomeranged and been wasted.