Landscape with the fall of lcarus - Essay Example

In this regard, Michel Anderson comments that the poem “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” (2). Whereas the mythical adventure of Icarus’s ambition to reach the sun provides a good deal of philosophical insights into human life, the poem as well as the painting, composed on Icarus’ downfall, rather conveys a slightly different interpretation of life and ambition.

It ultimately propounds that human life which is absorbed busily in its daily affairs is rather oblivious disinterested to others’ highflying desires. Williams’ economy of language in the poem does not leave any instructions on how to read and to interpret the poem. Because of being one of the imagist poets, he might not allow his readers to go into such complex interpretation; but the reality is that his poem includes a camouflaged simplicity of meaning. The poem’s simplicity is camouflaged because it rather invites a reader to delve deep more into its philosophical matrix.

Indeed imagism is a response to “the flabby abstract language and "careless thinking" of Georgian Romanticism” (A Brief Guide to Imagism, 2). In an attempt to reject this flabbiness of abstraction and vague allusion, Williams kept the poem as substantial as possible. Such imagist style of Williams allows his poem to read on two different levels: first, the imagism of the poem claims that it should be read as it is. Indeed Williams’ “masterful creation of the poetic image” (Anderson 1) invites his readers to interpret art and literature as they are.

It necessarily tends to propound that art is for art’s sake. Even though the proclamation that “art is for art’s sake” seems to withdraw poetry from general people, Williams’ imagist simplicity keeps the poem totally perceivable by common people. Second, the paradoxical quality of the poem allures the readers to explore into its philosophical dimension. While readings the poem, one feels a type uncertainty. Even though Icarus is taken apart from his well-known mythical essence, and if he is taken simply to represent one of the mass commoners, the drowning of Icarus and the disinterestedness of the people in him essentially refers to people’s self-centeredness and oblivious behavior to others’ suffering.

But the problem with Bruegel’s painting is that the original version does not show any flying figure in the sky. So if only the name ‘Icarus’ is taken apart from the title of the painting, it simply denotes man’s indifference to others’ suffering. After all, a boy is drowning, but the people, in the painting, remain busy in their works. In his poem, Williams’ acknowledgement of the drowning figure as Icarus seems to be his self-invested fallacy. The drowning or downfall of Icarus is described, by Bruegel, in a mode which is quite different from Ovid’s original description of highflying Icarus.

In Ovid’s description of the myth, the people were “astonished and think to see gods approaching them through the aether” (Hagen 60). Indeed there is a contrast between the emotions of the painting and the poem. The painting’s emotional appeal is a bit ambivalent, because, though it