ICARUS REMEMBERED

ICARUS REMEMBERED
By Barbara Smith Stoff

And we are here again to honor and to remember. I see Paul Sonin’s photo of the Pentagon memorial benches, those benches, each one cantilevered over water. To me, those benches look like the wings of Icarus downed—ever so many wings reminding us of earthly flights suddenly cut short in the splintered morning of what started out as just another ordinary day.

I am reminded of Bruegel’s painting, “Landscape with the fall of Icarus” where only the white clad legs of Icarus can be seen sticking up from the water, if one looks closely. Those wings, crafted from imagination, inspiration and courage, have not served.

Auden’s poem “Musee Des Beaux Arts,” describes that painting…pointing out how the world turns away from disaster and private suffering and moves on. In another poem about that same painting, this one by Charles F. Madden, “The Fall of Icarus,” we read “none has seen the silent fall of Icarus/ through the riotous wind and the shadows of the coming evening light/nor do they hear his sigh, both of pity and delight/of his remembered waxed and winged flight.”

As I gaze now across the landscape of benches, it is comforting to see those ethereal feathers of hope made concrete, anchored in earth, yet hovering as if in flight over the waters…the soul flies on, but leaves a reminder for us.

And we have not turned away. We remember in public the private sufferings. With these wings we remember and we may pray, as individuals, for our collective humanity to continue. We may pray as with James Joyce, as he stands on the shore contemplating his own flight over the waters toward maturity:

“Amen. So be it. Welcome, O Life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race…..Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.”

Each of us privately forges some contribution to all life. Perhaps in those concrete wings, something of the essence of each departed soul has been distilled and offers back, for all to see, a symbol of hope for humankind–a more benevolent evolution.

THE SUNDAY TIMES MUSEUM OF FINE ART
By Barbara Smith Stoff
I see too,
remembering Auden’s Icarus,
that when it comes to suffering
they are seldom wrong
these reporters and their cameras,
the way they catch tragedy on the human face,
and yet sometimes they fix for us
in their instants and afterimages
…something achingly beautiful, incandescent…
so human, so human rising up.

Take this picture of Redgrave for example.
I have kept it here on my desk,
for weeks now, have studied her expression…
hand gesturing for some ideal, tender,
perhaps clear only to her.
I have met those eyes, the lips
pursed to appeal from her side.
I know little of sides and battles,
but I know that face.

Here are the poems which inspired me and my students:
MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS
By 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.
Copyright © 1976 by Edward Mendelson, William Meredith and Monroe K. Spears,
Executors of the Estate of W. H. Auden.

This one is from DOORS INTO POETRY, by Chad Walsh (Prentice-Hall, Inc. 1962)…

THE FALL OF ICARUS (From Brueghel’s painting)
by Charles F. Madden

The bulging sails by a riotous wind caught
pull the ships and their rigging nets toward shore
to be emptied. The sailors quickly will calm their floors
and their houses in the evening light will melt into the mountains.

And on the hill with one foot planted in the earth
his plowing almost done; his eyes cast down and fully shielded
from the sun which now is growing shadow, the farmer
turns in soil and toil the final circles of the day.

Below him a quiet pastoral: on lichen bearing rocks
the feeding sheep, the quiet watching dog, the silent shepherd
so stalking with his eyes the homing flights of birds
that neither he nor the intent fisherman closer to the shore,

none has seen the silent fall of Icarus
through the riotous wind and the shadows of the coming evening light,
nor do they hear his sigh, both of pity and delight
of his remembrd waxed and winged flight.

–Charles F. Madden

Advertisement