Icarus

The teaching

Taught from Ovid's Metamorphoses and Art of Love, with Virgil and Pausanias, Bruegel's picture and Auden's poem.

The prisoner of Crete

Daedalus the craftsman, who built the Labyrinth, is kept on Crete by King Minos, sick of his long exile and longing for his own country, but shut in by the sea; Apollodorus says that Minos shut him and his son in the Labyrinth itself for showing Ariadne the way out. Minos may block the land and the waves, Daedalus says, but the sky at least is open, and that is the way we shall go: he may own everything, but he does not own the air. And he sets his mind to arts unknown, and changes the laws of nature.

The wings

He lays feathers in rows, beginning with the smallest, each a little longer than the one before, so that they seem to grow on a slope, as the old shepherd's pipe rises reed by reed; he binds them in the middle with thread and at the base with wax, and bends them gently into the curve of a bird's wing. The boy Icarus stands by, not knowing he is handling his own danger, laughing and catching at the feathers the breeze carries off, softening the yellow wax with his thumb, and getting in the way of his father's wonderful work. When it is done the craftsman balances himself on his wings and hangs in the beaten air.

The middle way

Then he teaches his son. Keep the middle course, Icarus, he tells him: too low, and the sea will weigh the feathers down; too high, and the sun will burn them; fly between the two. Do not look to the Herdsman or the Bear or the drawn sword of Orion, but follow where I lead. As he gives his counsel and fits the wings to the boy's shoulders, the old man's cheeks are wet and his hands tremble. He gives his son kisses that will never be given again, rises on his wings and flies ahead, afraid for the one behind, like a bird that leads its young from the high nest into the air, urging him to follow, teaching him the fatal art, beating his own wings and looking back at his son's. A fisherman with his quivering rod, a shepherd leaning on his crook and a ploughman on the handle of his plough look up and stand amazed, and take them for gods who can travel the sky.

The fall

Juno's Samos is on their left, Delos and Paros already behind them, Lebinthos and Calymne, rich in honey, on their right, when the boy begins to delight in his bold flight, leaves his guide and, drawn by longing for the sky, climbs higher. The nearness of the scorching sun softens the scented wax that binds the feathers; the wax melts, and he beats his bare arms, but without feathers they catch no air, and calling his father's name he is swallowed by the dark blue sea, which takes its name from him. The unhappy father, a father no longer, cries Icarus, Icarus, where are you, where shall I look for you, sees the feathers on the waves, curses his own arts, and buries the body in a tomb, and the land is called after the one buried there.

The partridge

As Daedalus lays his son in the tomb, a partridge watches from a muddy ditch and claps its wings and sings for joy, and Ovid tells why. Daedalus' sister had given him her son to teach, a boy of twelve with a quick mind, who took the backbone of a fish for his pattern, cut teeth in a strip of iron and invented the saw, and was the first to join two iron arms at a point so that one stands still while the other draws the circle. Daedalus, jealous, threw him headlong from Athena's citadel and said he had fallen; but the goddess caught him and made him a bird, the partridge, which keeps his old name and his quickness, and flies low and builds its nest in hedges, for it remembers its fall and fears high places.

Other tellings

Ovid had told the flight before, in the Art of Love, as a lover's jest: if Minos could not hold a man with wings, how can a lover hope to hold the winged boy Cupid? Virgil has Daedalus carve the whole Cretan story on the doors of Apollo's temple at Cumae, but twice he tried to shape his son's fall in gold, and twice his father's hands fell. Pausanias heard a plainer telling: Daedalus fled Crete in small boats he had built, inventing sails to outrun the oars of the king's ships, and Icarus, a clumsy helmsman, capsized and drowned; his body washed up on an island off Samos, where Heracles found and buried it, and the island and the sea took his name.

What the story warns of

The father's counsel is the old Greek rule of the mean, nothing in excess, and it has two halves. Francis Bacon, reading the myth in The Wisdom of the Ancients, made it the middle way in conduct, and added that if one must fail one way or the other, excess at least has something of greatness in it and a kinship with the sky, like a bird, while defect crawls on the ground like a creeping thing. Ovid lays a share of the blame on the maker himself, who teaches a fatal art and whose old crime the partridge remembers. And the painting in Brussels of the ploughman, the shepherd and the ship going about their business while a boy's legs vanish into the sea gave Auden his poem on the old masters: suffering takes place to one side, while others work or sail past, and the world that may have heard the cry goes on about its business.