Landscape Of Icarus

The perception that one person’s sorrow and tragedy goes unseen to the world is the central idea in the poetry of William Carlos Williams. His poem “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” is written as an interpretation of Pieter Brueghel’s painting. The painting is based on the Greek mythological tale of Icarus and his father, Daedalus. Williams paints the words in the poem not only to describe Brueghel’s painting, but to make the readers feel as if they are apart of the tragedy. The structure of the poem is almost like a waterslide, there are lots of twists and turns, but the flow of water keeps you sliding all the way into the drowning of Icarus. Irony is used to make up the central perception of the poem. Williams’s “Landscape with the Fall
“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” lacks both punctuation and capitalization. The absence of these key parts of sentence structure leads the readers to the impression that Williams narrative is meant to be read as one long, uninterrupted story. The flow of the poem is comparable to “The Copacabana Shot” from the movie Good Fellas, which was directed by Martin Scorsese. “The Copacabana Shot” shares the same trait as the poem in the sense that they both lack punctuation. Although Scorsese was in the movie business, and Williams was in the poetry business thirty years ahead of Good Fellas, the tempo in both the scene and the poem is one in the same. The lack of punctuation in Williams’s poem lets the reader float down a lazy river of imagery, all the way down to the fatal drop of Icarus. Meanwhile, Scorsese invites the audience to join Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) and the soon to be Karen Hill (Lorraine Bracco) on a shot through the popular restaurant. The flow of the camera doesn’t just let the audience in on the secret entrance that the couple takes but continues on with the couple through some back hallways, the kitchen, and through the whole restaurant to the front; a shot that feels like a whole night when in reality, it is an impressive one minute and eleven seconds long. Similar to “The Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” the shot has no punctuation or commas in it where the audience can take a breath and think a bit. The other thing that is similar between the two is the witnesses. In both, people were going about their business while the main attraction was making its way to center stage. The only difference is Icarus dies at the end as opposed to getting a front row table set up for him, with a pretty date, at a stand up comedy show, at the nicest restaurant