The Fall of Icarus

In Philosophy today, Prof. JC Uy asked us if we've ever come across Pieter Breughel The Elder's The Fall of Icarus. In high school, after reading William Carlos William's Landscape with The Fall of Icarus, I looked up Breughel's piece and something about it made me feel sad. I couldn't quite articulate why the painting triggered such a feeling of desolation in me (Prior to that, the only other paintings that moved me were Vincent Van Gogh's Wheatfield with Crows and Edgar Degas' Absinthe Drinker--and neither painting made me quite as sad.) . It wasn't because the subject of the painting was inherently sad--there was no depiction of how he had fallen; the painting only showed Icarus' lower legs. I guess it was the fact that such a tragic event seemed to not have been noticed by the others characters in the painting.

Today, Prof. Uy read W.H. Auden's Musee des Beaux Arts, another poem on Breughel's piece, in class. The poem perfectly summed up how I felt the first time I came across the painting:

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, c. 1558

Pieter Breughel the Elder,

Musee Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels

Musée des Beaux Arts (W.H. Auden)

About suffering they were never wrong, The Old Masters; how well, they understood Its human position; how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.