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
The Silence of the Sirens Sirens. Canonically, Ulysses tied himself to his ship's mast so that he could experience the Sirens without being driven mad and jumping into the sea. He ordered his crew to stop their ears with wax, so that they would not be tempted by the siren song to steer the ship into the rocks on which the creatures perched. In Kafka's version, however, Ulysses puts wax in his own ears, and is then tied to the mast. Kafka's telling asserts that the Sirens' silence is an even more deadly weapon than their song, and further states that the Sirens fell silent