sweating in the sun

Molly made fun of me for posting 'I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud'. I do in fact love the Romantic poets unironically -- I didn't always, but I had a very good Romantics professor -- but it must be said that they have a certain earnestness about nature and beauty that does not, perhaps, appeal to everyone. Lyrical Ballads. Anyway. In general, I do prefer poetry glorious and referential and complicated and subtle; I like verse that makes truth dangerous, and landscapes that are not quite so straightforward. Or possibly I am just getting all the poets named William out of the way in the first week.

According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring

a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry

of the year was
awake tingling
near

the edge of the sea
concerned
with itself

sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax

unsignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

~William Carlos Williams (1883-1963), Landscape With The Fall of Icarus.