Auden's answer to the reason for the human indifference to Icarus' tragedy in Brueghel's painting is that "it was not an important failure." I'm not sure what to make of that. The obvious question is, why wasn't it important? The next is, what failure or whose failure? As Auden writes, the ship "had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on." Also the sun "shone/ As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green/ Water." Are both poem and painting studies of a universe apathetic to suffering?
There is an interesting part of the painting that is difficult to see. On a branch coming out of the cliff just above the fisherman, there is a partridge, apparently the only thing looking at Icarus. The partridge is connected to the second story associated with Daedalus in Ovid's Metamorphoses. While Daedalus is burying his son, "A noisy partridge...drummed with her wings in loud approval." The bird is Talos Perdix (genus of partridge), the pupil and nephew whom Daedalus killed out of envy. However, Minerva (the Roman name of the Greek goddess Athena) had saved Talos and turned him into a partridge. So does this then become a story of revenge?
All of which makes me return to Daedalus, the character missing from poem and painting. He was after all, the instigator of events. What does he represent to Ovid, Brueghel, Auden?
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