Category: Music

I was grading a bunch of quizzes on Ovid’s telling of the Icarus and Daedalus myth. One line that came up often in the discussion portion was puer Icarus… ignarus sua se tractare pericla “The boy Icarus, naively handling his own doom…”  Just as I finished, “Superman” by Five for Fighting came on:

The opening lyrics just resonated with Icarus:

I can’t stand to fly
I’m not that naive

I could see the spirit of Icarus singing this lament. As the song went on, the singer declares

I wish that I could cry
Fall upon my knees
Find a way to lie
‘Bout a home I’ll never see

Poor Icarus (and his father) were in exile, trying to escape back home when they tried their luck to the fatal (to Icarus) wings. Icarus had, like Superman, been too young to remember his homeland and would never get to return to it. The lament fits Icarus well. 

I, of course, can’t leave Icarus without pointing out Bruegel’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus based on Ovid’s account. See if you have spot Icarus.

You can just see his legs poking out of the water below the ship in the bottom right corner. In Ovid, all the figures in this painting were entranced by Icarus’ flight and fall, wondering if he were a god (but of course, he’s “only a man in a silly” pair of wax-adhered wings).  In Bruegel, they couldn’t care less.  As W.H. Auden captured it in Musee des Beaux Arts:

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.

(William Carlos Williams also responds to this painting beautifully)