Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus

The mythological story of Icarus stemmed from ancient stories and has been at the center of many poems. “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” a painting by Pieter Brueghel, serves as the inspiration for two poets, W.H. Auden and William Williams. Although the two poems are written about the same painting, each poet uses different and similar literary devices to describe their own interpretation of Icarus. Both poems share the same rhetorical devices to express the picture of Icarus’ fall. Enjambment creates expectations for the reader when each line ends with a strong word or phrase. In Auden’s poem, he uses words such as “understood” (2), “waiting” (6), “forgot” (10), and “seen” (21), to leave the reader with tension waiting for