![]() ![]() Or a group illusion (and thus a conspiracy, perhaps of dunces, us among them), If the appearance of matter was merely a random accident, Roast him on the spit as yet another blasphemous hereticĪnd has justly crucified the One True Monster, the Creator. If man should confront his terrible Creator,Ĭapture him, hogtie him, hold his horny feet to the fire, When the hammer’s anthems at last are stilled? Hammered out on the anvil of Fate, by Will? In the seething crucible of life and death, What becomes of man’s vision, apart from terrestrial shadows? If there were only sunny mid-afternoons but no mysterious midnights, If there was only light, with no occluding matter, If the mind’s and the heart’s quests were ever satisfied, Notes toward an Icarian philosophy of life. Oh, some will call the sun my doom, but Love Here the Vulture cruelly chidesĪnd plunges at my eyes, and coos and sings. Seem small and pale, a girdle’s handsbreadth girth. That had vexed us to such Distance now all things Ten thousand miles above the breasted earth Of Love itself we floated on plumed wings Whatever we became climbed on the thought Lose all in the sudden realization of gravity,įollowing Icarus’s, sun-unwinged, singed trajectory. They must first assimilate the latest technology, or ![]() They have yet to learn that,īefore they can soar starward, like fanciful archaic machines, Their weaker siblings in the high-leafed fernedįrom which men must fly like improbable dreams The first harsh lesson of survival: to devour Still pinkly exposed, who have not yet learned Who bicker for worms with dramatic throats With her small eyes, pale and unforgiving, To recall existence, to make the coming darkness everlasting. Toward the earth, and soon thereafter there will be sufficient pain Heavier than ballast, sinks on its thick-looped chain Despair like an anchor, like an iron ball, Toward the sun’s unendurable brightness.īut since I touched you, fire consumes each wing!Ĭontemplating disaster. Our being borne up, because of our lightness, No more man and woman than exhaled breath―unable to fallīack to solid existence, despite the air’s sparseness: all Swirling together through Himalayan serene altitudes― We were never of earth, but merely white clouds adrift, I have no earthly remembrance of you, as if The poem can be taken as a metaphor for the death and rebirth of Poetry, and perhaps as a prophecy that Poetry will rise, radiate and reattain its former glory. In the final stanza Icarus agrees with Tom that it is “no journey” to wherever they’re going together and also agrees with Tom that they will injure no one along the way, no matter how intensely they glow and radiate. In the fourth and fifth stanzas Icarus joins Tom Rynosseross of the Bedlam poem in embracing madness by deserting “knowledge” and its cages (ivory towers, etc.). In the third stanza the grounded Icarus can still fly, but only in flights of imagination through dreams of love. In the second stanza, Apollo predictably wakes up and Icarus plummets to earth, or back to mundane reality, as in Breughel’s painting and Auden’s poem. ![]() Auden’s modernist poem “Musee des Beaux Arts,” which in turn refers to Pieter Breughel’s painting “The Fall of Icarus.” In the first stanza Icarus levitates with the help of Athena, the goddess or wisdom, through “strange dreamlands” while Apollo, the sun god, lies sleeping. This odd poem invokes and merges with the anonymous medieval poem “Tom O’Bedlam’s Song” and W. ![]() Laugh lines and tan lines and thick-callused kneesįrom begging and praying and girls sighing "Please!" Pale glowworm agleam with a tale of panache. Such comfort, in that moment, loving you. Till nothing was so beautiful, so blue.Īn image of your face, and dreamed I flew Vibrations of huge engines thrummed my armsĪs, glistening with sweat, I nudged the switch Like a minnow wriggling feebly in my grasp. Why existence felt so small, so purposeless, I held the switch in trembling fingers, asked Only a little longer the wind invests its sighs Unspooled from the truck’s wildly lurching embrace, These are poems about Icarus, flying and flights of fancy. ![]()
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