“Icarus’s Flight”: Paraphrase By: Stephen Dobyns Rewrite each stanza in your own words. When you are done, reread the paraphrased poem in order to better understand its meaning. There was nothing else Icarus could What else could the boy have done? Wasn’t have done. Flying would allow him to escape and would give him a feeling of flight both an escape and a great uplifting? freedom. So he flew. However, he could not be grateful for his freedom And so he flew. But how could he appreciate until he knew when his freedom would his freedom without knowing the exact point end. where freedom stopped? So he flew upward 5 and the sun dissolved the wax and he fell. But at last in his anticipated plummeting he grasped the confines of what had been his liberty. You say he flew too far? He flew just far enough. He flew precisely 10 to the point of wisdom. Would it have been better to flutter ignorantly from petal to petal within some garden forever? As a result, flight for him was not upward escape, but descent, with his wings 15 disintegrating around him. Should it matter that neither shepherd nor farmer with his plow watched him fall? He now had his answer, laws to uphold him in his downward plunge. Cushion enough for what he wanted. 20
“Icarus’s Flight”: Paraphrase By: Stephen Dobyns Rewrite each stanza in your own words. When you are done, reread the paraphrased poem in order to better understand its meaning. What else could the boy have done? Wasn’t flight both an escape and a great uplifting? And so he flew. But how could he appreciate his freedom without knowing the exact point There was nothing else Icarus could have done. Flying would allow him to escape and would give him a feeling of freedom. So he flew. However, he could not be grateful for his freedom until he knew when his freedom would end. 5 where freedom stopped? So he flew upward and the sun dissolved the wax and he fell. But at last in his anticipated plummeting he grasped the confines of what had been his liberty. You say he flew too far? 10 He flew just far enough. He flew precisely to the point of wisdom. Would it have been better to flutter ignorantly from petal to petal within some garden forever? As a result, flight for him was not 15 upward escape, but descent, with his wings disintegrating around him. Should it matter that neither shepherd nor farmer with his plow watched him fall? He now had his answer, laws to uphold him in his downward plunge. 20 Cushion enough for what he wanted.