Fall of Icarus

The Fall of Icarus is the mythic failure of an attempted flight: Icarus, the son of Daedalus, flies too close to the sun, the wax holding his wings to his arms melts, and he falls into the sea and drowns. In Aniara, the allusion brings an ancient story of flight and fatal overreach into a poem preoccupied with modern catastrophe and journeys beyond Earth.

The Mythic Event

The explanatory note identifies Icarus as the son of Daedalus, who tries to emulate his father by flying. The flight ends when the sun’s heat melts the wax that fastens the wings to Icarus’s arms. He falls into the sea and drowns. The account presents a clear chain of action and consequence: the attempt to fly higher than the wings can withstand becomes a fatal fall.

The Allusion in Aniara

The note locates the reference at canto 76 of Aniara. Its concise explanation supplies the mythic background without turning the episode into a separate, elaborated narrative. Against the poem’s spacefaring setting, Icarus’s flight and fall can be read as a classical counterpart to the risks attached to human ascent and technological ambition; the evidence identifies the reference, though it does not establish a direct one-to-one allegory between Icarus and any particular character or event.

Historical Context

Aniara took shape amid circumstances that gave images of flight and disaster contemporary urgency. During the winter of 1939–40, Harry Martinson served with Swedish volunteers in Finland; the harsh conditions aggravated his uncertain health, and the ensuing years brought illness and silence. In 1953, news of the Soviet hydrogen-bomb test and warnings about the nuclear contest appeared alongside reports of advances in rocketry and observations of the Andromeda galaxy. News of long-distance jet and aircraft flights, and the preparation of the Swedish superliner Kungsholm for service, added to the period’s striking scale of transport and engineering. Martinson later described Aniara as a Titanic of outer space, and the poem’s first section grew into a larger work published in 1956. These details illuminate the setting in which its images of flight and catastrophe acquired force; they do not document a specific historical source for the Icarus allusion.