Gottfried Benn’s Ikarus is unmistakably a description of the Brueghel painting, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,” which is patiently described in the poem.

I suspect Gottfried Benn, who approaches these things with the trained diagnostic eye of a doctor does. Who is the person speaking in his poem? Is it, as I imagine, the shepard with curiously Breughel-like features gazing heavenwards? In any event, the inner theme here is dislocation (daß ich hinrinne, a Hoffmansthal formulation; entstirnt), an individual losing consciousness of his Self and flowing into the all.