Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

The figure of the farmer in William Carlo Williams’s poem serves as a symbol of human preoccupation with the mundane in the face of grand narratives—and the insignificance of those grand narratives in the face of the mundane. The second stanza describes the farmer working in his field as “the whole pageantry / of the year was / awake tingling (Lines 6-8).

The farmer’s labor is juxtaposed with the larger natural world but also with the fall of Icarus, underscoring the contrast between individual human activities and mythical events, while also highlighting that this contrast is ultimately meaningless. The farmer, like the rest of the bucolic “pageantry” unfolding in the landscape, is preoccupied with his own tasks, representing the human tendency to ignore what is not immediately relevant (such as the drowning Icarus). The farmer thus symbolizes the priority that the everyday takes over mythical narratives, whose grand tone belies their transience and insignificance.

The farmer also exists as a foil to Icarus—his own humble labor, which produces nourishment and works with the rules of nature, contrasts sharply with Icarus’s folly as he attempts to defy the natural order by flying too close to the sun.