40/50

The story that human beings are most inspired by is the hero’s journey.

In the story of Icarus, a young man, full of ambition and excitement, plummets to his death because he flies too close to the sun. How are we to interpret this death? Ovid suggests the story of Icarus is a cautionary tale: Fly the middle way! We can neither be ruled entirely by reason (the sun) nor by passion (the sea). We must balance these in order to live effectively.

But in Anne Sexton’s poem "To a Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph," the poet writes:

Consider Icarus, pasting those sticky wings on,
testing that strange little tug at his shoulder blade,
and think of that first flawless moment
over the lawn of the labyrinth.
Think of the difference it made!

Here, Sexton is talking about breaking through boundaries, testing the limits of what is considered possible. In this context, Icarus's adventure amounts to a freedom of the imagination from previous constraints:

There below are the trees, as awkward as camels;
and here are the shocked starlings pumping past
and think of innocent Icarus who is doing quite well:
larger than a sail, over the fog and the blast
of the plushy ocean, he goes.

I love this part of the poem; it is the perfect description of how we look back at our former constraints and see how "awkward" our thinking had been.

In the final section of the poem, Sexton asks us not to feel sorry for Icarus but rather to admire him:

Admire his wings! Feel the fire at his neck
and see how casually he glances up and is caught,
wondrously tunneling into that hot eye. Who cares
that feel back to the sea? See him acclaiming the sun
and come plunging down while his sensible
daddy goes straight into town.

Who cares that Icarus failed, she asks. He tunneled into that hot eye of the sun and in that moment he was fully alive. Icarus embraced pure knowledge, while his "daddy," safe but sadly "sensible," "goes straight to town."