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.

-W.H. Auden

I don’t know why, but I woke up thinking about Pieter Bruegel.  Particularly Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (pace art history snobs, I know it is likely a copy of a Bruegel and not the real thing). I think what I love about the painting is simply that Icarus falls in the margin. No one notices, life moves on. Everyday life wins. Icarus may fall, but fields still need plowed. Icarus is a lightning rod. His fall is conjured in poems, songs, and paintings- I mean, this painting alone inspired not one, but two significant poems. One by W.H. Auden given above and the other by William Carlos Williams given below. The myth is flexible, durable, and- I think in Bruegel’s eyes- pointless. Perhaps the painter would have sympathized with Dan Haseltine when he sang: 

I am the only one to blame for this

Somehow it all ends up the same

Soaring on the wings of selfish pride
I flew too high and like Icarus I collide
With a world I try so hard to leave behind
To rid myself of all but love
to give and die

Bruegul gently mocks Icarus for trying to leave a world manifestly good and overflowing with abundence. At least in my reading of the painting. Brugel, to me, is a painter in love with life his fat farmers are healthy and hale, a strong wind lifts his ship across the sea, why, Bruegel asks, would Icarus try to leave this?

William Carlos Williams

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
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

-William Carlos Williams