Book 8
Daedalus, the father of Icarus, is a master craftsman. A celebrated figure for over 1400 years before Ovid, in Metamorphoses he is the archvillain whose technological genius leads to one disaster after another. In the face of these, Daedalus’ response is always to apply more technology. Or to kill his own nephew, Perdix, and steal his ideas. Daedalus’ final invention is human flight, using wings of feather and wax to escape the island on which he and his son had been imprisoned. Icarus’ wings have a design fault, however. The wax melts in the sun’s heat, and he falls headlong from the sky and drowns in the green waters of the Aegean.
This event is portrayed by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, a painting that is the subject of W H Auden’s poem, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’.
The Fall of Icarus
In the foreground someone ploughs a field,
focussed on the furrow line,
the ploughshare and the wheel.
A shepherd looks as if he might have heard
something coming from above,
perhaps his dog heard something too,
but doesn’t turn to look. A partridge
settles in a tree, an angler casts a hook.
Hard not to think of Auden’s ‘des Beaux Arts’
where Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
is not a painting of some foolish boy,
but is the paradigm of how Old Masters saw
that tragedy occurs amongst the commonplace,
in a world where everyone has things to do,
where farmers have to work on with the plough,
where ships have sails that need to be unfurled,
and no one’s paying any mind to things
that aren’t to their advantage or to their loss,
like this young man drowning in the sea,
or that one dying on a cross.