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| Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, now seen as a good early copy of Bruegel's original Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium |
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
William Carlos Williams
I have four favourite poets (am excluding Shakespeare as
he was also a playwright). In English there are Emily Dickinson and William
Carlos Williams. I must admit that my entry into poems in English came via
Ogden Nash. In Spanish there is the Argentine Jorge Luís Borges and Mexican
Homero Aridjis.
Twice in the last couple of years the NY Times has
published in its arts section paintings by Peter Brueghel the Elder. In both of
those occasions a sentence from a Williams Carlos Williams poem was cited. I
found this not only interesting but strange. Why would the poet have written
two poems about Landscape With the Fall of Icarus and The Corn Harvest?
My curiousity led me to the usual Google search and I hit
paydirt. The book in question is Pictures from Brueghel and other Poems – A New
Directions Paperbook – Collected Poems 1950-1962. The book won Williams a Pulitzer Prize.
In the book I learned that William Carlos Williams had
written ten poems about Brueghel paintings. I also found a poem that fit ever
so nicely with some roses in my early fall garden here.
I cannot leave out from this blog my thanks and appreciation
for our excellent Vancouver Public Library which as far as I know, its main
branch has the only known copy (UBC and Simon Fraser University perhaps, too?)
of the lovely book
