Ovid and Later Poets Exploring the complex psychology of Ovid's myths through English and American poetry

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus Breugel, ca Landscape with the Fall of Icarus Breugel, ca. 1558 Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Belgium

“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” --William Carlos Williams According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry of the year was
awake tingling
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 Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons

“Musee des Beaux Arts” --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.

“The Tree” – Ezra Pound, 1921-24 I stood still and was a tree amid the wood,
Knowing the truth of things unseen before;
Of Daphne and the laurel bow
And that god-feasting couple old
that grew elm-oak amid the wold.
'Twas not until the gods had been
Kindly entreated, and been brought within
Unto the hearth of their heart's home
That they might do this wonder thing;
Nathless I have been a tree amid the wood
And many a new thing understood
That was rank folly to my head before.

“Where I Live in the Honorable House of the Laurel Tree” – Anne Sexton, 1960 I live in my wooden legs and O my green green hands. Too late to wish that I had not run from you, Apollo, blood moves still in my bark bound veins, I, who ran nymph foot to root in flight, have only this late desire to arm the trees I lie within. The measure that I have lost silks my pulse. Each century, the trickeries of need pain me everywhere. Frost taps my skin and I stay glossed in honor, for you are gone in time. The air rings for you, for that astonishing rite of my breathing tent undone with your light. I only know how this untimely lust has tossed flesh at the wind forever and moved my fears toward the intimate Rome of the myth we crossed. I am a fist of my unease as I spill toward the stars in the empty years. I build the air with the crown of honor; it keys my out of time and luckless appetite. You gave me honor too soon, Apollo. There is no one left who understands how I wait here in my wooden legs and O my green green hands.

“Ovid in the Third Reich” -- Geoffrey Hill, 1968 non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare, 
 solaque famosam culpa professa facit. 
 -- Amores, III, xiv I love my work and my children. God    Is distant, difficult. Things happen.    Too near the ancient troughs of blood    Innocence is no earthly weapon. I have learned one thing: not to look down So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,   Harmonize strangely with the divine Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.

“Daphne” – Alicia E. Stallings, 1999 Poet, Singer, Necromancer— I cease to run. I halt you here, Pursuer, with an answer: Do what you will. What blood you've set to music I Can change to chlorophyll, And root myself, and with my toes Wind to subterranean streams. Through solid rock my strength now grows. Such now am I, I cease to eat, But feed on flashes from your eyes; Light, to my new cells, is meat. Find then, when you seize my arm That xylem thickens in my skin And there are splinters in my charm. I may give in; I do not lose. Your hot stare cannot stop my shivering, With delight, if I so choose.

Sources Poems by William Carlos Williams and W.H. Auden: http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html Poem by Geoffrey Rich: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178125 Poems by Ezra Pound and Anne Sexton: www.poemhunter.com Poem by A.E. Stallings: www.poemtree.com