The first time I saw the painting Landscape with the Fall of Icarus I thought "Where is Icarus?"
The painting in oil on canvas is currently displayed in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. It was long thought to be by the leading painter of Dutch and Flemish Renaissance painting, Pieter Bruegel the Elder but that is controversial and it may be a copy of his original which is lost.
I came to the painting via W. H. Auden's poem "Musée des Beaux-Arts", named after the museum in Brussels where he saw the painting. I later found a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams, and just recently read "Lines on Bruegel's 'Icarus'" by Michael Hamburger. They are all examples of ekphrastic poetry.
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
insignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
His poem focuses on what is so interesting about the painting's title; that Icarus is insignificant on the canvas. He also tells you where to look for Icarus. His legs are sticking out of the water below the ship near shore.
W. H. Auden’s "Musée des Beaux Arts" goes in another direction. He opens by saying, "About suffering they were never wrong / The old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position.
Auden wrote the poem in 1938, while he was staying in Brussels with his friend Christopher Isherwood. He was probably thinking of several paintings that are in that museum. In his first stanza, he is concerned with how the Masters displayed suffering.
The second shorter stanza uses the Icarus painting as an example of:
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;
In this poem, the nature of suffering is that no matter how intense it is for the person undergoing it, most of the people around are ignorant or indifferent to what is happening. Accurate though that might be, it's pretty depressing.
Icarus comes to us in Greek mythology. He is the son of the master craftsman Daedalus, who created the labyrinth of Crete. Daedalus and his son are imprisoned in the labyrinth of his own creation with a dangerous minotaur. They attempt to escape using wings Daedalus had constructed from feathers and wax.
The father warns the boy not to fly too low or too high. The sea's dampness will clog his wings and the sun's heat will melt them. But Icarus, probably thrilled with flight, ignores the warnings and does fly too close to the sun. The wax melts, the wings fall apart and he falls out of the sky and into the sea, and drowns.
Ovid's treatment of the Icarus myth inspired many English writers (including Chaucer, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, and Joyce. Other English-language poems referencing the Icarus myth are "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph" by Anne Sexton; "Icarus Again" by Alan Devenish; "Mrs. Icarus" by Carol Ann Duffy; "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert; "It Should Have Been Winter" by Nancy Chen Long; "Icarus Burning" and "Icarus Redux" by Hiromi Yoshida; and "Up like Icarus" by syllabic poet Mark Antony Owen.
It is generally seen as a cautionary lesson about "high-flying ambition," and hubris.
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