Poets' Corner

Number Seventeen : 16^th January 2014

The Fall of Icarus

In the 1930s , W.H. Auden wrote this poem after a visit to the Musee des Beaux Arts during a cold Brussels winter. It concerns a painting by Pieter Bruegel known as The Fall of Icarus :

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 …...

In Bruegel'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.

Bruegel lived during momentous times in Europe , when religious differences were promoting widespread bloodshed. His home provinces of the Netherlands were caught in a violent struggle between native Protestants and their Spanish Catholic rulers. As witnessed in his depiction of children's games , the young in particular continued to amuse and divert themselves in their usual way. I started attending grammar school in 1956 , vaguely aware that me and my brother were becoming the first in our proletarian family tree to be fully educated. In 1957 , Richard Hoggart's classic book The Uses of Literacy was published. It contained a detailed account of an earlier twentieth century working-class community in Leeds and the pressures to which its indigenous culture was subject. He was uneasy with the dawning attraction of US-style materialist consumerism and the Admass culture that came with it. His anxiety proved prophetic as the following decades witnessed the disintegration and ultimate disappearance of all such communities.

“ One can plausibly argue that in some sense British society was 'frozen' during the decade after the war , that there was for most people an instinctive retreat to familiar ways , familiar relations , all in the context of slowly lifting austerity and uncomfortably limited material resources. The continuing bombsites in city centres were a visually eloquent symbol of this protracted hiatus pending a barely imagined onslaught from the – far from unwelcome – forces of change. This was the final authentic phase of what before long would come to seem a distant , irrecoverable epoch of urban civilisatation , stretching back to the late nineteenth century and rent asunder from the mid-1950s.”
David Kynaston , Family Britain 1951-57.

The tumultuous political and cultural events out in the wider world were barely noticed by teenagers of the time. The Hungarian Revolt , brutally suppressed by the Soviet Army , polished off all but the most obstinate of British communists. Look Back In Anger caused a media stir over here , as the publication of Ginsberg's HOWL did in America. The Suez crisis came to define the tone of Arab-Israeli relations thereafter , as it underlined Britain's imperial decline and future subservience to American economic pressure. All of these shinnanikins were as peripheral for us as Icarus dropping into the sea was for Bruegel's ploughman. What we were paying attention to were the U.K. record releases of The Rock Island Line , Long Tall Sally and Heartbreak Hotel as they each made quite a splash in the popular (youth) culture of the day.

Archive

Poets' Corner #1 – Poetic Pessimism, 13^th September 2012
Poets' Corner #2 – The Workman's Friend, 10^th October 2012
Poets' Corner #3 – On The Trail of Two Dylans, 12^th November 2012
Poets' Corner #4 – Omar Khayyam, 14^th December 2012
Poets' Corner #5 – William Blake, 25^th January 2013
Poets' Corner #6 – A Minor Poet, 19^th February 2013
Poets' Corner #7 – Thomas Hardy, 20^th March 2013
Poets' Corner #8 – Shakespeare's Sonnets, 21^st April 2013
Poets' Corner #9 – Edward Thomas, 20^th May 2013
Poets' Corner #10 – Harry Smith's Anthology, 19^th June 2013
Poets' Corner #11 – William Plomer, 21^st July 2013
Poets' Corner #12 – Ghosts , 20^th August 2013
Poets' Corner #13 – William Dunbar, 20^th September 2013
Poets' Corner #14 – Bathtub Thoughts, 20^th October 2013
Poets' Corner #15 – Bagpipe Music, 20^th November 2013
Poets' Corner #16 – Sylvia & Emily, 20^th December 2013
Poets' Corner #17 – The Fall Of Icarus, 16^th January 2014
Poets' Corner #18 – Those Gone Before, 20^th February 2014
Poets' Corner #19 – Rudyard Kipling, 20^th March 2014
Poets' Corner #20 – Martin Bell, 20^th April 2014
Poets' Corner #21 – Another Modest Proposal, 20^th May 2014
Poets' Corner #22 – Thomas Gray and The Eighteenth Century, 20^th June 2014
Poets' Corner #23 – Edgar Allan Poe, 18^th July 2014
Poets' Corner #24 – Tread Softly, 19^th August 2014
Poets' Corner #25 – Mad To Be Saved, 24^th December 2015
Poets' Corner #26 – Wants, 20^th January 2016
Poets' Corner #27 – Samuel Johnson, 15^th February 2016
Poets' Corner #28 – T.S.Eliot, 10^th March 2016
Poets' Corner #29 – Alfred Lord Tennyson, 18^th April 2016
Poets' Corner #30 – Leonard Cohen, 12^th November 2016