When I think of the story of Daedalus and Icarus my pleasant mood plummets faster than the actual fall of Icarus. What I found to be the most important allegory in this story was Daedalus’s wings. The reason I found his wings to be the most important out of these allegorical things was the pain of an artist represented through his work. An artist a lot of the time can be interpreted as a tortured soul. In Daedalus’s artistry we see directly how his passionate mastery consequently causes him to be a tortured soul. I actually had to read a poem for my English 123 class about a poet’s depiction of the Deadalus and Icarus story by W. H. Auden entitled “Musee des Beaux Arts”. He begins the poem by saying “About suffering they were never wrong. The Old Masters: how well they understood it’s human position”, he really believes this is a story of suffering and nothing less. This story of suffering fulfills him in a way; it is a story that has remained fresh for almost two thousand years.

What do we derive from this suffering though? Possibly one point that Ovid’s trying to make is that suffering as an artist comes from trying to rival the god’s skills. We certainly see this represented in the story of Archane and Minerva, is not possible this is a component of the story Daedalus and Icarus. The suffering in both these stories from “The Metamorphoses” adds to the redemptive power of art. So perhaps suffering is essential to art and the more suffered an artist the more redemptive the art.