The Fall of Icarus - Ekphrasis

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This is an ekphrastic collage of "Musee des Beaux Arts" by W. H. Auden, which is again an ekphrastic poem about "The Fall of Icarus" by Brueghel.

I had to scan it in two parts because it's in A3 v_v
Material used: GQ magazine June 2009


Here is Brueghel's "The Fall of Icarus"
[link]



"Musee des Beaux Arts" W. H. Auden

"About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."