"A Splash Quite Unnoticed"

W.H. Auden wrote about the fall of Icarus in his poem, "Musée des Beaux Arts" about the apathy with which individuals view human suffering. The poem was written after his visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels in 1938 and is about the painting of Pieter Brueghel the Elder, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus". Auden uses juxtaposition, enjambment and flow-of-thought technique to contrast the Old Master's technique of depicting casual daily life with the contradicting tragedy of Icarus drowning.

The same painting was written about later in a poem by an American modern poet, Williams Carlos Williams, "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus." The use of enjambment in Williams' poem helps to create a spiraling sense of urgency and disorder to the flow-of-thought technique. The broken lines also force our eyes to spiral to the next line, to digress from the sky to the landscape and to the sea where Icarus fell in the painting, surprisingly almost insignificantly.

In each of their poems the poet and the artist are using similar techniques.



In another poem by Stevie Smith, "Not Waving But Drowning," the indifference of humanity to recognize the suffering of others is brought to the reader's attention with the technique of parallel writing, where the narrator and the subject are juxtaposed to draw the reader in and identify with the subject who has drowned.

In Stevie Smith's poem there is no painting, but the psychological imagery and auditory impression of the dead moaning are impressed upon the reader in a vivid way.