Summary
The poem opens with an explicit reference to Bruegel's painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" before quickly pivoting away to another story. The next stanza depicts a farmer ploughing his field in the springtime. The sections that follow show, alternately, the growth in the fields during this time and the relative seclusion the farmer experiences while doing this work.
Analysis
"Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is a poem primarily concerned with questions surrounding perspective and perception. Even the poem's title (which it shares with the title of the painting it depicts) alludes to this idea. It is more about the "landscape" and less about the actual "fall of Icarus." The poem is a meaningful examination of how different points of view render individual stories more or less important.
The first stanza explicitly references the Bruegel painting it is attempting to depict: "According to Brueghel / when Icarus fell." However, the final line of the stanza is a clear turning away from Icarus's story: "it was spring." It is apparent in the way that Williams constructs this line that Icarus will not remain the focus of the poem, as it states "when Icarus fell / it was spring" and not "Icarus fell in spring," deemphasizing Icarus by making the season, not Icarus himself, the grammatical subject of the sentence. However, what this initial section does is situate and contextualize the poem in setting and time. It then moves quickly to the actual center of the poem: the story of the farmer in the foreground of the painting. The next stanza begins with an image of "a farmer was ploughing / his field." The final line of this section also functions as something of a turn, as it imbues this relatively mundane action with importance, describing it as "the whole pageantry." The use of the word "pageantry" implies there is a hidden beauty (and drama) to both this everyday action and the turning of the season. This usage also sets up the description of springtime that will come in the lines that follow. In these opening stanzas, Williams pulls a kind of sleight of hand, making the reader initially assume this will be a poem about Icarus, only to rapidly shuffle things around and zoom in on the farmer's scene. This technique mirrors the content of the painting he is describing in that it places the farmer in the visual foreground and makes Icarus a minor detail in the backdrop.
The third stanza describes the burst of springtime life in the land: "of the year was / awake tingling." The lines are connected to the ending of the previous stanza and read, when put together, "the whole pageantry / of the year was / awake tingling," which describes both the effects of the season and the way in which the farmer's field is experiencing a period of flourishing growth. This image of the rich field suggests a certain sort of pastoral radiance, effectively highlighting the wondrous elements of the farmer's work. The final line in this section is a single word: "near." It joins with the opening of the fourth stanza to read: "near / the edge of the sea." This shows the poem moving out again, but not before noting the way in which the farmer's domain is "concerned / with itself." What the speaker means here is that this patch of land, and its caretaker, are largely unconcerned with what goes on outside of it. This comment meaningfully sets up the main revelation of the poem, namely, that Icarus's drowning will be unseen by the farmer. These moments circle back to the poem's main thesis. The farmer's perspective on the famous myth of Icarus makes it so that he doesn't even notice this seemingly monumental moment occurring. This suggests that there is an equivalent (if not greater) importance to the farmer's narrative as there is to Icarus's.
The poem is written in tercets and contains no punctuation. Williams makes extensive use of enjambment throughout the poem, which keeps the lines flowing in a continuous fashion. The lines link together neatly, the ending of each stanza vaulting into the beginning of the next one, unimpeded by end stops. The short stanzas allow the reader to focus on individual images and not get bogged down in too many details. Similarly, Williams uses a relatively unadorned style to effectively communicate his images, one of his major stylistic trademarks. This approach is also emphasized in the extreme concision of each line. Williams removes extraneous information to keep the poem's visuals sharply defined.
