Brueghel's Icarus and W.H. Auden

A visual, social historical study of Bruegel's painting.

The myth of Daedalus and Icarus has been the subject of numerous literary texts as well as artworks in the Western tradition. The Turkish poet Nazmi Ağıl's two ekphrastic poems 'Bruegel: The Landscape as Icarus Falls' and 'Auden's Icarus' are retellings of the myth with reference to Ovid's Metamorphoses, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, and W. H. Auden's 'Musée des Beaux Arts'. If ekphrasis is the representation of a work of art in literature, then Ağıl's poems are re-representations of both verbal and visual frames by critiquing Auden's interpretation from the mouth of a storyteller Kamil in the former poem and Daedalus in the latter. Ağıl's aim in alluding to the Western sources is to highlight political issues in Turkey. This paper, then, argues how Ağıl's poems complicate the reading process by playing with verbal and visual frames.

's ekphrastic poem, " Musee des Beaux Arts " meaning The Museum of Fine Arts, showcases the indifference with which humans perceive suffering. This title, though fancy, is quite ironic in that, the subject it outlines does not reflect anything that of which is fine. Auden, through an unnoticed persona or third person, critically recaptures , with careful poetic dexterity, Pieter Brueghel's painting which outlines a farmer, a sailing ship, a shining sun and a drowning boy. Auden illustrates this same scenario in his poem. After careful observation, he paints a general picture of how suffering is common – placed to the daily practices of human beings. The painting done by Brueghel seems to be the inspiration for Auden's poem. The poem, written in third person, starts off by giving general views about suffering and how it happens while humans and animals are carrying on with their day to day routines: " how it takes place/ while someone else is eating or opening a window or just/ walking dully along/ where the dogs go on with their doggy life... " (Lines 4, 5, 13). This speaks directly to how universal the subject of the poem is. Auden gives his personal conviction when he suggests that " The Old Masters " , written in capital letters, this suggests experts of the past like Brueghel, who is the only one who knows about and understands the hardship and suffering people face. The persona also speaks about how nonchalantly children react to suffering as opposed to elderly folks who await another birth while turning a blind eye to human suffering. In addition, the second section of the poem moves away from a general commentary to an analogy, narrowing its focus to " Brueghel's Icarus ". This further concretizes and exemplifies the situational irony of how " the plowman "-an ordinary person-and " the expensive delicate ship " –

This article is an exploration of the painting The Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel through Panofskian meanings of visual art: pre-iconographical description, iconographical analysis and iconological interpretation. Erwin Panofsky used the terms Preiconography, Iconography and Iconology to interpret any piece of visual art. The paper aims to explore the three different meanings of the painting as objectively as possible. His idea can be very clearly explored to analyze the piece of the painting as it depicts the multiplicity of meaning. It gives sensory details, allegorical associations and ideological interpretation. The piece of painting is such a piece of art that fulfills the passion of the onlookers, tells the myth on it, and also expresses the ideology of the painter.

Icarus ignored: Abstract: In his 2007 book dealing with poetry in English, Terry Eagleton sacrifices integrity on the altar of the popularizing impulse. His partial analysis of an Auden poem also treated by Michael Riffaterre reveals the advantages of a semiotic approach, which can show how images on the textual surface signify indirectly by pointing to an underlying matricial structure. The author’s expanded version of Riffaterrian theory accounts for the added complexity conferred by two matrices, each founded on a proposition. In sum, Eagleton’s employment of a traditional “lit-crit” approach – with its prose-based preoccupation with surface details – fails to identify the semiotic structure of the poem as a signifying totality. Keywords: Riffaterre, Eagleton, Auden, indirect signification, matricial structure, interpretant 1 Preamble

his article situates Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts in the process of his conversion to Christianity. The author argues for the layered intertextuality of the poem, in which allusions to Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Census at Jerusalem, and The Massacre of the Innocents can be recognised. Moreover, Philippe de Champaigne’s Presentation in the Temple and Peter Paul Rubens’s The Martyrdom of St Livinus (in the same museum in Brussels) seem also to have influenced the poem. Finally, there is reason to suppose that John Singer Sargent’s Crashed Aeroplane influenced Auden. In an analysis of the structure of the poem, the author argues that there is a clear structure hidden under the surface of day-to-day language. He connects this hidden structure with Auden’s poem The Hidden Law, and suggests that Auden wished to claim that even though we cannot understand suffering, it has a hidden meaning known only to God. This hidden meaning connects our suffering with the self-emptying of Christ, a connection which the author demonstrates is in fact also made in Musée des Beaux Arts.

Perichoresis, 2016

This article situates Auden’s poem Musée des Beaux Arts in the process of his conversion to Christianity. The author argues for the layered intertextuality of the poem, in which allusions to Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, The Census at Jerusalem, and The Massacre of the Innocents can be recognised. Moreover, Philippe de Champaigne’s Presentation in the Temple and Peter Paul Rubens’s The Martyrdom of St Livinus (in the same museum in Brussels) seem also to have influenced the poem. Finally, there is reason to suppose that John Singer Sargent’s Crashed Aeroplane influenced Auden. In an analysis of the structure of the poem, the author argues that there is a clear structure hidden under the surface of day-to-day language. He connects this hidden structure with Auden’s poem The Hidden Law, and suggests that Auden wished to claim that even though we cannot understand suffering, it has a hidden meaning known only to God. This hidden meaning connects our suffering with the se...

2019

The mythical narratives which represent collective consciousness harbour variousimages. The myth of Icarus is one of them, shedding light on the images of flight and fall,light and darkness. In the story, the hero desires to escape the darkness of the labyrinthhe is confined in and to reach the sun with his wings. As these images have anontological root, they appear in different cultures’ literature even in different times. Thesimilar mythical elements are also embedded in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as aYoung Man in which Dedalus’s spiritual enlightenment or elevation is followed bydeflation. Likewise, in The Candle and the Moth (Şem’ü Pervane), which is one of theproducts of Eastern literature and is written by Feridüddin Attar as well, the candle andthe butterfly motif provides an insight into the image of light and darkness. In thisrespect, the myth of Icarus, James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and The Candle and the Moth have shared images. On the other hand, these images function indifferent ways, as each text reflects different cultural codes. This study aims to compare and contrast different meanings of the images in the myth of Icarus, The Candle and the Moth and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, offering an insight into different cultural values. Keywords: Icarus, the Candle and the Moth, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,culture

Theatre Topics, 2016