Bliss Carman, 'The Blue Heron' and Breugel's 'Icarus'

Wm. Bliss Carman's poem 'The Blue Heron' from his Later Poems has left me unsatisfied in many ways.  Perhaps some critic or scholar has noted its resemblance to both a triptych and to the 'Icarus' painting of the elder Bruegel ('Landscape with the Fall of Icarus'.)

The mower is 'among' the hay - not as an insect or frightened rabbit - and the horses are being worked in the heat of day, rather than mowing the hay in the morning and later afternoon.  This is hay, not a cash crop in danger of frost.  He may not have known the cycle of farm labour.

The meadow lilies may be there in July, but for me they are late July and August.  And are they being mowed down, or does he take hay to be in a worked field, and not a meadow?

In July, the heron should have a mate and a fledged chick - it is not a loner soaring where the river may carry it.  The patient stalker was not merely 'among the reeds'. Or are we to go from Moses to the shepherd and his flock?  What were these trees in the Breugel?

These would not be concerns if it were not the argument of the poet which depends on his grasp of what is transpiring about him, both what is before him as evanescent and what is before him as cyclic, as unreal and as real.

The Breugel appeared in 1912 and this volume in 1922 (Auden on Icarus stems from 1938.)