Icarus by Edward Field
Only the feathers floating around the hat
Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred
Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore
The confusing aspects of the case,
And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.
So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply
“Drowned,” but it was wrong: Icarus
Had swum away, coming at last to the city
Where he rented a house and tended the garden.
“That nice Mr. Hicks” the neighbors called him,
Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit
Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings
Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once
Compelled the sun. And had he told them
They would have answered with a shocked, uncomprehending stare.
No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;
Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake:
What was he doing aging in a suburb?
Can the genius of the hero fall
To the middling stature of the merely talented?
And nightly Icarus probes his wound
And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn
Constructs small wings and tries to fly
To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:
Fails every time and hates himself for trying.
He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,
And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;
But now rides commuter trains,
Serves on various committees,
And wishes he had drowned.
I like talky church. The one I've been going to has the pageantry I love, plus a really loving and welcoming community. But I don't take communion and I do like the sermon. The priest at this church, Amy, is WONDERFUL. She should be back from the Tai Chi conference in China she went to a few weeks ago.
Interesting, Kat! I'd never heard that term before.
sara, my mom teaches at the Friends school in town, and she's always impressed with how well the kids, even the little ones, do in morning meeting.
I think I would love a meeting if there was a brief prompt. Something to focus my thoughts anyway. Otherwise I'm not sure it would be for me, although I agree with you about being preached to. Even when it's a great minister, it always irks me halfway in.
Guh. That is a powerful gut punch of a poem, for all that it's quiet.
msbelle, I can sympathize despite our difference in, uh, sympathies. This game has me twisted up in eight different directions.
Anne, isn't it great? Poignant. And actually way more moving than Auden's "Musee de Beaux Arts" (though that one is good too, just bigger and noisier). Where Auden's poem is a bang, this is Eliot's whimper.
I didn't design this lesson, but I did walk my students through it as a respite between
Invisible Man
and
Othello.
Can't wait to see how they'll handle the Field poem now that they have some things under their belt.
There was a great NYT article about the movie Anonymous that I cannot wait to share with my students because the conclusion is wonderful. Also, we've been analyzing political speech in my regular class so they've read Cain's and Perry's announcements about running for president and discussing ethos/pathos/logos.
Sometimes, I love my job so much because I get to read these things and share them. Sometimes I just hate it too.
That's a gorgeous poem, Kat. I don't know much about him.
Also, holy shit baseball, omg.
can't breathe, game tied...
