[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

[Christopher ONeill]

I find myself something akin to bewildered at the considerable eclipse MacNeice' poetry has experienced since his death. I remember I tried three times to buy his Collected - which pops in and out of print like a comet. When I finally succeeded, it was easily worth the wait.

He is such a technical master, the c rime here catches me offguard every time; I suspect MacNeice might have kept the game up for many more verses, if he had wanted.

I suspect it wouldn't have been a popular poem at the time. Terence Rattigan's After the Dance has the same general message ('We never wanted another war, but we didn't do much to avoid one) - that very nearly destroyed Rattigan's reputation.

C Day Lewis 'Will it be so again' has much the same message - that nobody did anything much to avoid WWII. But Day Lewis plastered his poem with empty rhetoric, and was so much more acceptable.

It's interesting that the submitter connects this poem effortlessly with another daft war - Vietnam. Even with the benefit of hindsight Vietnam looks not entirely necessary. WWII might have been inevitable, but if France, Russia, and England had taken the possibility of another war more seriously WWII might have been much less of an apocalypse. (I heard Neville Chamberlain hissed in a Prague cinema as recently as 1996).

I suppose the weakness, and the strength, of this MacNeice poem is that it is so very uncomfortable. We don't like the way he is being flip about the rise of Hitler, the siege of Leningrad, and the Shoah - but really people were flip about those things; and in part this is why they happened.

We need reminding.

I think there are probably quite a few important poems whose only justification is that we need reminding.

It is a pretty fair justification for a poem.

[Bill Carpenter]

This poem has a wonderful impromptu quality, which is paradoxical in light of the close patterning the presenter describes. I am too unfamiliar with MacNiece, though we read his Faust translation in my freshman humanities survey.

The essay is magnificent, bearing the poem across decades of experience, life and the poem enriching each other back and forth across the decades.

[John Whitworth]

MacNeice is the goods all right. Here are the titles of two other poems you should all know, to be found in the Faber Selected, edited by Auden. They are both on the web, the second one read by MacNeice himself. He was at the BBC when that meant something. Unlike Auden he was attracted to women and they were attracted to him, even though he looked like a lugubrious camel. No he didn't. Actually he looked rather dashing.

The Streets of Laredo
Bagpipe Music (a great poem in my opinion. I read it first when I was sixteen). It should be in any anthology of 20th century verse in English.

[Nigel Mace]

Second Bagpipe Music. Absolutely memorable - and unexpected from its title.

[Tim Murphy]

It's no go the merry-go-round? Count me in. Think of all those boys together at Oxford in the Twenties: Auden, Isherwood, Spender, MacNeice. Tolkien never taught a more talented bunch of kids! Read Derek Mahon's At the Grave of Louis MacNeice, and weep for them. In the dining room of Christ Church, far from all the majestic portraits of the Chancellors of the Exchequer, right next to the kitchen door, is a tiny oil of young Auden. That's where the dons sat little me. The dover sole and the sauvignon blanc were excellent. It meant the world to me to read Beowulf for that college.

[Lance Levens]

A third hip-hip for Bagpipe Music and for this magnificent poem. The accompanying essay more than does justice to it. And the idea that poems are stored in our memory waiting to be released at that one urgent moment tells us so much about our memories and hearts and how poetry is woven into our very being.

[Tim Murphy]

I think Lance has it absolutely right. Great poetry insinuates itself into our nerves and sinews. Alan and I were becalmed in the Hawk Channel off the Florida Keys, and after I'd done Sunlight On The Garden, he asked me to go below, bring up the Collected Yeats from the tiny ship's library. I just started saying Yeats without the book, and I quit when the wind came four hours later and I had to go on deck and tend to the sails. Now those were poems I had very deliberately memorized as a boy, but I was astonished that I could do them thirty years later. I could no longer do that. "We grow old, we grow old..." After four hours of Yeats I was so spaced out I came within yards of running us aground on a shoal protruding from Key Largo.

[John Whitworth]

Good God, man. Christ Church? The bloody House? And they were letting in Americans. What is the world coming to? Merton for me. A good deal further Down Market. THEY took bank clerks. Or people who were going to be bank clerks.

[Amit Majmudar]

More poets need to do this two-line end word rhyme followed by beginning word rhyme thing ("in the garden / Hardens and grows....") Why isn't this immensely more popular as a musical effect? It must be difficult in practice. Do we know of any other good poems that use it? I feel like I don't see it very often.