"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is a poem by American writer William Carlos Williams about the Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting of the same name. It was published in 1960 in the Hudson Review and subsequently collected in Williams's final book of poems, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems. Williams was a 20th-century poet known for his formal experimentation and affiliation with the Modernism and Imagism movements. His work often explored ideas about the meaning and status of art and language through the use of unusual formatting and layout. This poem fits into this category as it is depicting a famous Bruegel painting and using it as a means to discuss questions of perspective and the relative significance of other people's lives. The poem is an ekphrastic description of the painting, which depicts the climactic scene of the myth of Icarus (his falling to earth after flying too close to the sun and burning his wings) from the removed vantage point of a farmer.
The poem begins with an acknowledgment of its source material (the Bruegel painting) and starts to describe Icarus's fall in the season of spring. Williams quickly pivots away to the figure in the foreground of the painting: a farmer. He spends the second and third stanzas imagining the farmer plowing his field as it comes to life in springtime. He points out the relative isolation of this patch of land, stating that it is mostly "concerned" with itself, much like the farmer. The speaker then makes an oblique reference to the melting of Icarus's wings while describing the farmer sweating in the sun. Finally, the speaker describes Icarus's tumbling into the water, but frames this climactic event so as to highlight its going mostly entirely unnoticed by the farmer.
The poem is written in tercets, with no punctuation. The lines are extremely short, rarely running longer than five syllables. Williams makes very economical use of language, clearly focusing on creating and organizing specific images in each stanza. This style serves the poem particularly well in that it is attempting to render a painting in text. By parceling out each detail of the scene slowly, he is better able to slowly build the portrait and draw the reader's attention to the painting's important themes.
