.png)
23 Aug 2025
Noah
Berlatsky
New
Moon
Not Icarus
After W H Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts,
after Breughel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Breughel was right
about suffering but
not like Auden says.
Icarus isn’t the man
whose suffering is forgotten.
There he is in the painting.
There he is in the poem.
The plowman doesn’t know,
but the plowman isn’t Auden.
The whole land under that plow
is one enormous grave.
But those who die without names
aren’t even significant enough
to illustrate the insignificance
of suffering,
the illustration of which
makes some artists significant,
while others, outside the painting
and outside the poem
turn away, and fall, if they bother,
nowhere that matters.
Behind the poem...
W H Auden’s 1940 poem Musée des Beaux Arts is his ekphrastic response to Breughel’s famous Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. While life goes on as usual in the painting’s foreground, Icarus is seen drowning in the distance. Auden argues everyone’s suffering happens to one side, unnoticed by others. To some extent, this is true. Yet still we think of Icarus’ life and death – Auden’s, too. My poem then is for those of us without wings. For all who are unlikely to be eulogised by great painters or poets.