[Michael Cantor]

The Sunlight on the Garden
by Louis MacNeice

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

Comments:

Only a few times in my life have I recited a poem I’d never memorized. When it happened, it was the ultimate measure of “memorable speech.” It happened once when I was discussing the disaffection of a gay atheist, me, for Christmas; and somehow I dredged from uncommitted memory Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Oxen.” My host was Anthony Hecht, and his brandy was excellent. Tony held the poem in similarly high esteem, for he too shared my sadness at our youthful loss of faith, and my love for its vocabulary: “the lonely barton by yonder cwm.” “The Oxen” is widely admired, much written about, and I thought about adding this anecdote to its history, but my thoughts turned to another occasion on a sailboat. My first mate and I were heatedly discussing “Anthony and Cleopatra,” and I dredged from uncommitted memory one of the best trimeters in the English language, a poem I hadn’t read since my teenage years.

I have written abcbba trimeters, but this differs from what I have done. The first A rhyme is repeated in the first foot of line two, somewhat clumsily in the second sestet. The internal rhyme trick carries over to the enjambed lines three and four. And the fifth line of each sestet is two beats, a dimeter. This propels the poem giving it momentum. And of course line eighteen is Antony’s anguished cry to Cleopatra, claiming authority. But how could I have subliminally memorized this poem on a couple of readings in my teens?

I think it is the context of three wars. Caesar Augustus has sunk Cleopatra’s fleet, and the fifth act of Shakespeare’s play is immersed in a sense of doom. Louis MacNeice wrote his great lyric on the eve of WWII, and the sense of doom is deep. A generation later a boy facing the draft and the daft War in Vietnam reads MacNeice’s poem, reads it twice. “Every evil iron/ siren and what it tells.” Thirty years after that he says it, laboriously, carefully. He remembers the form, and that gets him through the text. The message of MacNeice’s little masterpiece is that we must give thanks for our minor blessings in the face of seemingly insuperable adversity.

Submitted by Tim Murphy