Muriel Rukeyser's "Waiting for Icarus"

Thoughts on myths.

Waiting for Icarus

He said he would be back and we'd drink wine together
He said that everything would be better than before
He said we were on the edge of a new relation
He said he would never again cringe before his father
He said that he was going to invent full-time
He said he loved me that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky
He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax
He said Wait for me here on the beach
He said Just don't cry

I remember the gulls and the waves
I remember the islands going dark on the sea
I remember the girls laughing
I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me
I remember mother saying    :    Inventors are like poets,
         a trashy lot
I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse
I remember she added    :    Women who love such are the
    Worst of all
I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer.
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this.



from Muriel Rukeyser: Selected Poems (American Poets Project, 2004)

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A myth is a wonderful thing. You spend a thousand years telling a story, and then a thousand more trying to make sense of it.

For Auden, Icarus is:

Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky

He is, in that poem, a boy ignored, a disaster that is turned away from, a reminder of the suffering that “takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.”

And, for Tommye Blount, whose poem “Icarus Does the Dishes,” is a reworking of the myth as a story of caretaking and its manifold frustrations, Icarus is not much older than a child:

I'm twenty-five
and agile, it is no accident, but
a tantrum. I throw the dishes—shards
all around me like a constellation
of stars for which I have no names.

Icarus, for Blount, is lost and in love and in pain. He is who we are when we don’t have wings and yet want to fly away.

In James Hoch’s “Elegy for Icarus and the Heart of a Hummingbird,” a fallen bird reminds him of Icarus — a small, dead thing still caught up in the beauty of the world:

I found a hummingbird against the curb,
marveled at the glasswork of its stillness,
how the light was falling too, so I could
see shifting green and blue, the tiny cage,
the dark needle of its bill, the dark eyes
the ants will carry away. I can’t say
if it died from wanting too much
or from finding what it wanted too much.
Surely, Icarus had the heart of a hummingbird.

And, in thinking of birds, I think of flying, and I think of Jack Gilbert’s assertion that begins his poem, “Failing and Flying”:

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. 

This, too — makes me think of one line of Hafizah Geter’s:

So what if you are some kind of Icarus?

It’s interesting — what a poet makes of a story, and what the world does. But that’s the beauty of any story, how it is made and remade, how it is worked and reworked, until it is a reminder that so much of what we find in anything is about who we are and what we need.

And so I think of today’s poem by Muriel Rukeyser, which I adore. I adore it because, for so long, the narrative of Icarus symbolized something for me about humility. It was — and still is — a lesson I hold close. That we don’t have to travel too close to the sun. That what we need and who we are can be right here. Rukeyser, though, complicates that story. Centering a speaker left on the ground, she writes a poem that is not just about who or what we leave behind, but also about the stories we tell of those who fly and fail and fall.

And what I love about Rukeyser’s poem has something to do with all the different ways it can be read. I read it, at first, as a poem of the defiance of first love and young love, the way such love — in the eyes of adults, those who claim to know better — is said to be foolish and yet feels — which is to say, is — so real:

He said he loved me that going into me
He said was going into the world and the sky

(Before I continue, just take a second to appreciate the craft at work here, the way Rukeyser maintains the repetition at the start of each line while also looping that repetition into the line that comes before — “going into me / He said was going into the world.” It’s beautiful. It sings.)

And so, I first read this poem as a love letter to such transformation, such passion, and such defiance. I felt the speaker’s insistence on such love, even in its absence, as a reminder that there are some things worth sacrificing one’s life for, because a life lived in the absence that comes with their loss is still better than a life without the knowledge of such things at all.

In this kind of reading, the poem’s final lines are a mournful reminder that even (and perhaps especially) something as beautiful as love can make you feel like the loneliest person in the world:

I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer.
I would have liked to try those wings myself.
It would have been better than this.

And yet, I can also see this as a poem written from a place of incisive anger about the consequences of male fragility. In the poem’s opening stanza, where one might see love, one could also see bluster — that Icarus seems so certain and determined about his love and his personal journey that he cannot imagine a scenario in which he fails:

He said all the buckles were very firm
He said the wax was the best wax

In this reading, the speaker’s loneliness in the poem’s final stanza is not just a loneliness of love, but it is also a loneliness of anger, even rage. There is no one to turn to in this reading. The speaker is made out to be a fool by those who judge her, all while she judges the person who left her behind, someone who can no longer hear her, because he is gone from the world. Here, the final lines, especially the speaker’s desire to “try those wings myself,” shimmer with a pained, assertive insistence in the speaker’s own agency and selfhood. But it’s futile. Hence the pain. And the anger.

The truth is, though, that I see loneliness everywhere in this poem, regardless of how I read it. And I am reminded, by this poem, that the very act of reading is a transformative and malleable thing, that it is an act that changes us, and, in so doing, changes the way we read again and again, so that we turn toward or back into no story in the same way. These myths we make of life remake us as we remake them.

And so, yes. I see loneliness everywhere in this poem. I see loneliness in Icarus’s fragility, in his insistence that his wax is the “best wax.” I see loneliness in his journey, even as the fact of his journey is the catalyst for a loneliness caused by love. I see loneliness in what I imagine to be his anger — toward his father, toward a world that, most likely, continually shuns his desire for a world of “new relation.” I see loneliness in Icarus because I see his capacity for imagination, and I see — always — in those who insist on imagining a kind of loneliness brought on by that imagination. It is lonely to believe in a new way of seeing and relating the world and to live in this world, where it sometimes feels that we are caught in a way of relating that feels so old, so consistent, and so awful.

And yet, I also see in Icarus’s insistence on leaving a cause for his loneliness. I wish for him, in this poem, to lean into love rather than departure, to practice his new way of relating to the world with someone, rather than to depart from the world with just himself.

And I see loneliness, then, in who Icarus leaves behind. I see loneliness in a poem that puts into the past tense the verb of Icarus’s words — “He said” — and puts into the present tense the very act of memory — “I remember.” I see loneliness in someone trying to remember something about love while only hearing from others that the object of their love “only wanted to get away” from them. I see loneliness in the waiting. I see loneliness in a life spent listening to other people’s commentary about their life. I see loneliness in a laughter that one cannot participate in. I see loneliness in being left behind, and I see loneliness in being unconsidered even after one has been left behind. I see loneliness in someone who has been left to be lonely. And I see loneliness in the insistence — determined, relentless, resistant — that there is a better world than this, but that it only exists in a conditional tense.

Yeah. There is great loneliness in this phrase alone:

It would have been better than this.

The conditional tense is, maybe, the loneliest tense in the world. I think this is because it doesn’t exist. It never did and never can. It is lonely because it never happened, and yet it wants to replace what once happened, or what will happen. I want to hold the conditional tense, to bring it back to the present, which is where it is spoken. It is where it is sad, yes, and where it is lonely, too, but it is where it lives.

I turn to poetry because the world has never once made perfect sense to me. I don’t imagine that it ever will. And this place of confusion where sense-making often leads us can also be a place of loneliness. And so a poem — whether the act of writing one or the act of reading one — works that loneliness back into song, something shared or something made or something shared and then made or something made and then shared. It works that loneliness, sometimes, back into love.

I think of Icarus in that way, too. This character of myth, this character who will always exist for me. And how? I wonder. Perhaps now he is still a story for me about humility. Perhaps once he was a story about love. Perhaps later he will return to being a story for me about love, or passion, or flight. And perhaps I will one day stop thinking of him and think more about those he left behind. Like his father, or his lover. One day, maybe, I will think of those whose backs were turned when he fell out of the sky. And one day I will think of those who saw him but couldn’t quite make out what they saw. I will think; I will think; I will think. Trying to make sense. Never quite making it.

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Some ongoing notes:

1. As per a post I saw by the poet Niina Pollari, a bunch of presses and people are organizing in support of damage to western North Carolina as a result of Hurricane Helene. You can read the post for more information, and find links to donate here. When you submit your donation receipt, one of the presses involved will send a book your way.

2. I started following Workshops 4 Gaza, an organization of writers putting together donation-based writing workshops and readings in support of Palestine. You can follow them here and get more information about them here.

3. If you’ve read any of the recent newsletters, you’ve perhaps noticed that I am offering a subscription option. This is functioning as a kind of “tip jar.” If you would like to offer your monetary support as a form of generosity, please consider becoming a paid subscriber below. There is no difference in what you receive as a free or paid subscriber; to choose the latter is simply an option to exercise your generosity if you feel willing. I am grateful for you either way. Thanks for your readership.