This dramatic monologue (a poem told from the perspective of a particular character) retells the ancient Greek myth of Icarus. What sets this version of the Icarus myth apart is its unique perspective:
- In the conventional telling of the myth, Icarus is the central character: a young man who, in spite of his father's warnings, flies too close to the sun using wings made of wax and feathers. This foolish choice leads to his tragic—and literal—downfall.
- This poem, however, shifts the focus to a new character: Icarus's wife, who doesn't exist in the original tale.
The myth of Icarus is usually interpreted as a cautionary tale about the perils of excessive pride. In this short poem, the long-suffering Mrs. Icarus will reframe the story to remark on foolish male pride in particular.
As the poem begins, Mrs. Icarus is "stand[ing] on a hillock," getting ready to watch her husband take off on his doomed flight—and already expecting that it will all go terribly wrong. In the first line, she names herself as one of many generations of wives who have had to stand and watch while their husbands do something silly: "I'm not the first or the last," she remarks, with weary exasperation. Mrs. Icarus's simple, colloquial language makes her sound straight-talking and no-nonsense, in contrast with her husband's delusionally lofty ambitions.
The physical distance between her and Icarus symbolically suggests their conflicting worldviews. There's an emotional, psychological, and literal gap between them. Icarus is up there in the sky, following some misguided fantasy to its tragic end; Mrs. Icarus on the ground, rooted in reality.
In line 3, Mrs. Icarus describes her husband as "the man she married," a turn of phrase that sounds rather distant. Icarus isn't "her husband" here, but some silly "man" she just so happened to marry. Perhaps the phrasing even implies that their relationship has changed over time, almost as if she can hardly believe that Icarus is the same man she married. All in all, these first lines build up a picture of a woman who's seen plenty of foolishness from her husband over the course of a long, long relationship.
This free verse poem (which uses no regular meter) is built from a single sentence stretched over five lines through enjambment:
I'm not the first or the last
to stand on a hillock
watching the man she married [...]
Plunging past line breaks, this one sentence takes on a momentum that mirrors Icarus's fall: the words tumble down the page toward a final resolution.