While Williams writes of the "tingling" of the new year, the "tingling" is not merely natural, not simply the world sprouting into rebirth. It is a very human, manufactured kind of celebration of the world's bounty.
Thus to read the painting as a kind of a mockery of Icarus and the artist's desire for transcendence may not be entirely fair. Brueghel, after all could have just shown Icarus falling into the hungry sea, unnoticed by nature. The key to a more nuanced interpretation of the painting is evident in Brueghel's deliberate choice of a perspective. According to David Cole, this is a "crucial aspect" of understanding the poem (Cole 2000). "The landscape and the action are seen from above -- from the viewpoint, in other words, of Daedalus. The force of the picture is thus, I think, to move the viewer not only to recognize the unconcern for catastrophe inherent in the preoccupation of ongoing life, but also to register a horrified protest that it should be so" (Cole 2000). It is Daedalus, after all, who is the real artist, the creator of the wings, not his son. The father sees what his creation has done to his boy. The artist protests the uncaring attitude of the world by showing the world from the father's perspective. The painting is an act of exposure: by making Icarus not central to the poem, the poem is even more horrific and more damning of ordinary people's attitudes towards a suffering artist who is trying to transcend the restrictions of common humanity.
"Perspective allows the painter to make this protest. How is the poet to do it?.... matter-of-fact language, the absence of any punctuation (which I take to indicate an absence of expressive inflection), and of course the explicit assertion of the event's insignificance, all work to understate, if not undercut, the pathos of Icarus's headlong plunge to death [just like the painting]....
And yet the last words of the poem are 'Icarus drowning.' The words resonate, and the splash is not quite unnoticed. The reader is forced to take notice, forced paradoxically not only to see but to feel the painful irony of death in the midst of life" (Cole 2000). The painting forces the reader to be shocked at the lack of concern shown for Icarus' death -- even to be ashamed his or her own initial lack of notice of Icarus' death in the painting. "Williams' remarkable, forceful understatement brilliantly captures the protest expressed through the perspective of Brueghel's painting" (Cole 2000).
From a conceptual art perspective, the poem and the painting are complementary in the way they present Icarus: both painting and poem are unsentimental, yet both are also damning of the discounting of Icarus' Quixotic efforts to fly. "The irony of the death of Icarus, who has always been an emblem for the poet's upward flight that ends in tragedy, is that his death goes unnoticed in the spring -- a mere splash in the sea. The fear of all poets -- that their passing will go 'quite unnoticed' -- is an old and pervasive theme. That Williams reiterates the theme is significant in the life of a poet who always felt the world had never fully recognized his accomplishments' (Roberts 1996).
Works Cited
Cole, David. "William Carlos Williams." The Explicator, 58.3 (Spring 2000).
Excerpted April 2, 2010 at http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/williams/icarus.htm
Delahunt, Michael. "Conceptual art." Art Lex. 1996-2010. April 2, 2010.
http://www.artlex.com/ArtLex/c/conceptualart.html
Rodgers, Audrey T. Virgin and Whore: The Image of Women in the Poetry of William Carlos
Williams. 1982. Excerpted April 2, 2010 at http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/williams/icarus.htm
