Painting and Two Related Poems

"Fall of Icarus" Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1558)

Musee des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden (1938)

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 Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman 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.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
William Carlos Williams (1962)

According to Brueghel 
when Icarus fell 
it was spring 

a farmer was ploughing 
his field 
the whole pageantry 

of the year was 
awake tingling 
near 

the edge of the sea 
concerned 
with itself 

sweating in the sun 
that melted 
the wings' wax 

unsignificantly
off the coast 
there was 

a splash quite unnoticed 
this was 
Icarus drowning

http://valerie6.myweb.uga.edu/intertextuality.html#three