Question

How does Dobyns’s use of unusual structure affect the meaning of “Icarus’s Flight?”

“Icarus’s Flight” by Stephen Dobyns
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

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?
He flew just far enough. He flew precisely
to the point of wisdom. Would it
have been better to flatter ignorantly

from petal to petal within some garden
forever? As a result, flight for him was not
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.
Cushion enough for what he wanted.

Answer 1

D. The way sentences extend from one stanza into the next pull the reader along.

Step-by-step explanation:

The myth of "Icarus" and his flight to the sun bringing his fall from the sky is a story we are all familiar with. It was this story that gives us the lesson of not going beyond what is dictated or not to be too curious or greedy.

Stephen Dobyns' version/ poem of the same myth presents the same case, but the only difference is that he presents the other possibility or other nature of the flight. For him, the escape doesn't merely mean an escape from the island or captivity, but it also signals the realization of what freedom is and to what extent it is available. For him, it was "a great uplifting", "fly[ing] precisely to the point of wisdom".

This unstructured and unusual pattern of poetry, the way the sentences are pulled along to the next stanza, without much punctuation makes the reader eager to keep reading. It entices and arrests the reader's interest, pulling us along until the end.

Thus, the correct answer is option D.