Williams and Auden both address the issue of "turning away" from other people's failures and suffering in their poems that focus on Peter Brueghel's Icarus painting.
Williams’ “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”
William Carlos Williams’ poem, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” offers a simple brief sketch describing the subject of Peter Brueghel’s painting with the same title, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus.
Williams’ poem consists of seven three-line free-verse word groupings; the three lines cannot qualify as either stanzas or verse paragraphs.
A paraphrase of the poem might be: In Brueghel’s painting the season is spring when Icarus fell into sea. There is a farmer working in his field. Everything was coming alive because it was spring. The sea shore is teeming with activity. The sun is hot, that is why the wax wings melted. No one notices that Icarus fell into the sea, even though there was a splash, which meant that Icarus was drowning.
The poem focuses on the fact that such a significant event is portrayed as insignificant to the people in the poem who were not drowning. The event was “unsignificant” and “unnoticed.” This human tendency to fail to focus on other people’s tragedies and suffering prompts much literary activity, so it is hardly a surprise that two poets would address this issue, but they do take slightly different approaches in their respective portrayals of this drama.
Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts”
In W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the speaker offers more elaboration than Williams’ brief sketch. Auden’s poem also focuses on the insignificance of the event to those not directly involved, but Auden has a lot more to say about this phenomenon.
Auden’s poem consists of two verse paragraphs. The first one offers many details about how “the Old Masters” understood the nature of human suffering: “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.”
Auden had visited the art museum in Brussels that houses Peter Brueghel’s painting, and his observations found a place in this poem. As the first verse paragraph continues, the speaker points out other situations that human beings consider major events such as older people who eagerly anticipate the birth of a child while children nonchalantly go about “skating / On a pond at the edge of the wood,” not caring particularly about the event.
And also the Old Masters never forgot about “martyrdom” and torturers whose horses scratched their “innocent” rumps on a tree, while “dogs go on with their doggy life.” While the ordinary individual has the luxury of dismissing these events, the Old Masters actually focused on them in their art; therefore, they never forgot, and through their art, they make sure others will be reminded.
In the second verse paragraph of “Musée des Beaux Arts,” the speaker points out Brueghel’s Icarus as the example of his claims made in the first verse paragraph: “In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away / Quite leisurely from the disaster.” The farmer plowing his field might have heard the splash, but it was not important enough for him to stop plowing. For the plowman “it was not an important failure.”
And the people in “the expensive delicate ship” must have seen and heard the boy falling out of the sky and splashing into the water, but they apparently did nothing about it, because they “had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.” But the Old Masters remind the poets, and the poets remind others, who have the presence of mind to pay attention.
For another article on William Carlos Williams: Williams' ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’: Ideas in Things
