Handmade Wings

Each morning, I wake to a little gift in my inbox, a poem from Poets.org. I signed up for “A Poem a Day” a few years ago during National Poetry Month and each day a poem arrives. Sometimes, I don’t have time to read them but many days I do. Starting a morning with a poem, even for a quick minute, sets the world on a slightly different spin, a better one.

Today,  a poem arrived, "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert. I remembered seeing the poem before and, after I read it, I knew why I loved it. It centers on the idea that what may look like a mistake or even a spectacular fall to the observer may not entirely be the case. Between the attempt at something and a fall or an end, there was life lived.

  

It can be found here: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/16872

It begins this way:
"Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly."  

 While the poem is about a marriage or relationship that did end, he focuses on some of the moments in between; beautiful moments happened  that can’t be denied or forgotten.

I never was a fan of Greek mythology. I didn’t care much about Icarus until I shared a painting and another poem with a class of mine and some of the kids starting talking about how cool it was that Icarus actually did try to fly close to the sun to see it in all its brightness. They liked how he tried to soar, even if he was using wings made of wax and feathers, even though his dad said, “Hey, fly but don’t fly close to the sun.”  Being fourteen and fifteen years old, this made utter sense to them. Wings, sun, flying, a parent saying,  “Be careful!” - of course he would fly upward toward the sun.

But then of course, he falls.

In the painting "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" by Pieter Brueghel,  (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Bruegel,_Pieter_de_Oude_-_De_val_van_icarus_-_hi_res.jpg)

a small pair of legs stick out of the water and a whole landscape, several people, animals and a traveling ship seem to pay not a whit of attention. He tried to soar; he fell and no one notices.
Still, it mattered.  I think that is the point.

We are all flying around on these handmade wings, on journeys epic and small, toward love or a new job or a creative inclination, stepping off and out toward a possibility. The falls happen, so do the mistakes. In his poem Gilbert seems to be saying ah, but the attempt! 
The chances we chase and take, they are what make life quite sad sometimes but also good and, every now and then, absolutely grand.

After I read the poem, I wanted to see if I could write to Gilbert and tell him how much I liked the poem and so many others of his, "A Brief  for the Defense" and "Horses at Midnight without a Moon." I went in search of a mailing address this morning and, sadly, I found out that Gilbert died this week at 87 after years of fighting Alzheimer's. The poem sent this morning from Poets.org was a quiet tribute.
I went back to the poem and felt cheered by the last lines, his own hurrah:
"I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph."

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Icarus turns up in a number of other poems like:

“Musee des Beaux Arts” by W.H. Auden

“Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” by William Carlos Williams

I’m more intrigued by Greek mythology now, thinking about how a story travels on and on across centuries and landscapes, how a myth leads to a painting. Then a poet writes a poem about a painting about a myth.

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