Jeepers cripes! Ain't we got a bunch a' edumacated folk commentin' on this here web address? Why just this past week, we had someone talkin' about fissix! Now, someone's talkin' about po'try? This is umpossable.
William Carlos Williams's "Landscape With The Fall of Icarus" is a poem about a Bruegel painting recalling Ovid's interpretation of the Greek myth of Icarus, who — if you'll recall your Greek myths — escaped from imprisonment on the island of Knossos via a set of wax wings made by his father, Daedalus. That is, until Icarus started enjoying flying too much, and he flew too close to the sun. The wax wings melted, and he plunged into the sea. Ovid recalled the myth in one of his elegiac poems about seduction — Icarus having been seduced (and doomed) by his own joy. Pieter Bruegel used some of Ovid's imagery in his painting. Williams, by waxing poetic about Bruegel's painting, employed a device known as ekphrasis — in which one medium of art refers to another, usually in another medium. Just as Bruegel had with Ovid.
On the occasion of today's flying Honda Civic hoon, Streetside Stig reinterpreted Williams's poem in the online medium (that sort of counts), using the parody device — and even added a reference to another Jalop commenter. It's a lengthy, pithy chain of learnin' that's worthy of today's COTD, if just for making our head esplode. Here he goes:
According to Spiegel
when VTECus fell
it was springa race fan was taping
his yump
the whole pageantryof the stage was
awake tingling
nearthe edge of Europe
concerned
with itselfbreathing in the fumes
that spewed from
the fart canunsignificantly
in the woods
there was
a crunch quite ridiculed
this was
VTECus squealing