Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (poem) Daedalus, took flight from Crete, where he and his father were trapped in exile, wearing wings made from wax and feathers. Icarus, disregarding his father's wishes that he not fly too close to the sun, did just that and melted his way to a feathery demise, drowning in the sea. This subject—and Bruegel's painting—are also treated by another Modernist poet, W. H. Auden, in "Musée des Beaux Arts". Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (poem) "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" is an ecphrastic poem by the 20th-century American poet William Carlos Williams that was written in response to "Landscape
East of the Sun and West of the Moon some candles, and tells her to light them at night, to see what is sharing her bed. The youngest daughter obeys, and finds he is a highly attractive prince, but she spills three drops of the melted tallow on him, waking him. He tells her that if she held out a year, he would have been free, but now he must go to his wicked stepmother, who enchanted him into this shape and lives in a castle east of the sun and west of the moon, and marry her hideous daughter, a troll princess. In the morning, the youngest daughter