Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus Essay

A father built himself wings and flew across the sky with them. Meanwhile, his son stood in amazement of his brilliance. Taking notice of this, the father gave his son a pair of wings and told him to be careful, for if he flew too high the wax holding it together would melt. The young boy started to fly and with every second that passed his confidence grew, and he inched closer and closer to the sun. Then, the wax on his wings melted and he fell into the ocean and took his last breath. This was the story of Ovid’s original myth of Daedalus and Icarus that establishes the central idea of man’s failure which is that people’s failures affect their lives as well as the lives of others. Similarly, Peter Brueghel’s interpretation of the myth is in a painting called Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. The painting depicts some land with people doing their everyday work, a ship sailing in the ocean, and the sun shining bright in the sky while the ocean is much lower and dark. In the corner of the painting, almost completely unnoticeable, there is a small child drowning underneath the waves of the ocean. The people working on land are all within eyesight of Icarus, the child, but they choose to look away and allow their work to consume them. How Icarus is placed in the

Williams’ poem does not discuss Icarus’ death until the last few lines. In his poem, the death of Icarus is sudden and nonchalant. This conveys to the reader that suffering and failure are just accepted as part of life and don’t deserve to be treated as anything more than such. This is seen in the few lines that talk about Icarus’ death. According to the author, “... off the coast, there was a splash quite unnoticed. This was Icarus drowning.” The reader is left with the central idea of man’s failure that something big can seem insignificant if nobody cares to pay attention to