I returned to Michael Hamburger’s poem this morning after years of knowing it only as a footnote to Auden’s more famous treatment of Brueghel’s Icarus. What struck me now was not the fall itself but how Hamburger constructs a peripheral world around it.
The ploughman ploughs, the fisherman dreams of fish;
Aloft, the sailor, through a world of ropes
Guides tangled meditations, feverish
With memories of girls forsaken, hopes
Of brief reunions, new discoveries,
Past rum consumed, rum promised, rum potential.
Each figure occupies a closed universe. The sheep perceive only “the essential, illimitable juiciness of things.” The shepherd notices wings overhead but cannot interpret what he sees. Against this indifference, Icarus becomes “the angel… forever failed.” His drowning happens at a distance: “Too far from his half-brothers on the shore, / Hardly conceivable, is left to drown.”
The poem refuses the easy moral lesson. There is no satisfaction in watching hubris punished, no comfort in witnessing the “ordering planet” prevail. Instead, Hamburger gives us absence and incomprehension.
Reading it today, I found myself thinking of other failures that go unwitnessed, other drownings that happen beyond our perception. This, perhaps, is what continues to unsettle me about Hamburger’s vision: not the fall itself but how easily it slips past ordinary attention, becoming “hardly conceivable” to those who might have seen.
Ah, I love Brueghel. Try to get a high res image of the painting and see why almost every poem about it misses the point. It warrants patient and detailed examination as, like in every B, the meaning is always hidden. Something Augustine said, apparently: “Some of the expressions are so obscure as to shroud the meaning in the thickest darkness. And I do not doubt that all this was divinely arranged for the purpose of subduing pride by toil, and of preventing a feeling of satiety in the intellect, which generally holds in small esteem what is discovered without difficulty.”
So do I, Claudia, and particularly the Icarus painting, which I think about often. My own assumption has always been that the poem is about the mundanity of death. Although death is entirely natural, common, we humans invest our subjective experience of death(s) with an overwhelming degree of significance.
Thanks. Lovely sinewy poem. Auden had his own take. Regards thom
My pleasure, Thom. I enjoy Auden’s completely different take.
A good poem. Are you Familiar with Auden’s poem aboiut the same subject? >KB
Very familiar. It is an old favourite. Its focus on aspects of death and myth takes a completely different viewpoint to Hamburger’s poem.
It seems the view point is not much different if you look closely. The disregard for the tragedy taking place
is similar. One thing I like is the reference to Icarus as an angel. Both Auen’s poem and Icarus are favorite things of mine and I have written several poems dealing with both. But I would like to see your take on the angelic quality more expounded upon. I have always seen Icarus as a promethian character, heroic in his disregard of the threat of being too bold, an archetype of man’s searching nature for answers to the unknown. Putting him in the guise of an angel creates a new perspective of sacrifice for example sake. Anyway, go poem, just my ramblings. >KB
The fallen angel references seem to me an almost religious reading. Auden and Hamburger choose the fall as a consequence of human folly interpretation, rather than a quest for progress reading.
I’ve always been more intrigued by Daedalus, and why Brueghel chose not to depict him. Or the sun. And of course the ploughman who is the true subject of the painting.
I come very late to this thread, having chanced upon it because my search brought me to your posting of Hamburger’s poem. Like you, I’m intrigued, puzzled even, that the inciting figure of the myth is not portrayed. It’s a rich painting, rich enough to bear different interpretations, and different ekphrastic responses. Both Auden and Hamburger use rhymed stanzas, Hamburger’s sonnet-like in form. And both contrast the quotidian with the extraordinary. But neither (and certainly not William Carlos Williams’s dry treatment) address the overwhelming absence of the father, the one whose inventiveness both freed them (from Minos’s Crete) and led to the son’s death. Daedalus out of frame seems to me as significant as Icarus splashing into the sea.
Thank you. I’m very glad you stumbled in. You’re right: the absence of Daedalus feels like the painting’s most deliberate omission, and one that each poet handles (or avoids) in their own way. Your point about the father’s inventiveness being both liberating and fatal is haunting, it sharpens the poignancy of Icarus’s fall.
Are you aware that there is yet another poem about this subject? If you are not, it is Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams. It is not as great as the others, but it still exists.
oops meant to ask K. A. Brace
I didn’t so thank you.
would you read it?
(also that respond was fast)
The WCW Icarus poem? I read it after you mentioned it. You are right, it is fine but a different register than Auden. What is the reference to K. A. Brace?
Which one did you enjoy the most? Also, the reference to K.A Brace was an accident.
The Auden I think. It’s an old favourite. They are all wonderful.
Discover a contemporary version of “The Fall of Icarus” by a french artist.
This myth symbolizes the tendency of man to always want to push the limits, but also embodies the symbol of human presumption in the face of nature. To discover on : https://1011-art.blogspot.com/p/icare.html
Fascinated by the painting and all the poems associated with it. In fact, I’ve even attempted one of my own on the topic (although ignoring the ploughman in the process). Apologies, it doesn’t compare at all to the other far better poems on this topic.
Do you think Icarus knew from the outset
that his wings would melt before the end of flight?
Do you think he just flew anyway, because he could not resist
the pull of the sun
those brief moments of flying free
before the crash?
It’s such a rich painting, sustaining so many thoughts.
Again, thank you for posting the Hamburger poem, far less known than Auden’s; perhaps not quite as trenchant, but a worthy companion to the painting. For anyone interested (who might these many years later still be looking at this thread), there is a fascinating book by John Hollander, “The Gazer’s Spirit: Poems Speaking To Silent Works Of Art.” It’s a capacious collection of ekphrastic poems (including Auden’s), with commentary by Hollander (an accomplished – and learnèd – poet in his own right), with images of the paintings or sculptures in question (unfortunately all in B&W), but of course you can find better renditions on the net. Out of print but still available from dealers.
https://search.worldcat.org/fr/title/The-gazer%27s-spirit-:-poems-speaking-to-silent-works-of-art/oclc/30667275