Selected poems of louis macneice sunlight
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Here is our pick of Louis MacNeice’s finest poems.
1. ‘Meeting Point’. ‘Prayer Before Birth’.
Another poem written during the Second World War, ‘Prayer Before Birth’ muses about the kind of world that an as-yet-unborn child will be brought into. Here: ‘The morning after was the first day.’ And end, too, is a beginning.
And with that, if you’d like to begin exploring the rest of Louis MacNeice’s great poetry, we recommend his Collected Poems.
They are poems of the 1930s, of the Great Depression and the imminent war, all from the same man, all on the same theme.
And yet one or two stand out: ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ is one of the best poems in the English language, casting a spell with its dazzling intricate rhymes sustained over four stanzas, insightful, wistful, immediately memorable, endlessly anthologised.
Mrs. Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion, Said to the midwife 'Take it away; I'm through with over-production'.
A good question, then, is why these two poems stand out against the rest in the book. The tone is set with the opening lines of the first piece, ‘An Eclogue for Christmas’:
A: I meet you in an evil time.Louis Macneice
The Best Poem Of Louis Macneice
Prayer Before Birth
I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.
I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.
I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.
I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.
I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.
I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.
I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.
Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.
‘London Rain’.
This masterly MacNeice poem, written against the backdrop of impending war (shortly before the outbreak of WWII in 1939), might be considered that conflict’s response to Edward Thomas’s ‘Rain’, written during the First World War. Like Thomas, MacNeice uses the rain pouring down outside as a springboard for meditations about life, death, war, and the numinous and religious.
Indeed, given the poem was written just before the Second World War cast a long shadow over Europe, this poem might also be regarded as MacNeice’s equivalent to the W.
H. Auden poem, ‘September 1, 1939’.
4. Yet unlike Auden, who left us ‘Stop All the Clocks’, MacNeice can be more difficult to pin down to one or two ‘best poems’ or ‘best-known poems’.
Drawing on the common association between apples and the Garden of Eden – apples often being named as the forbidden fruit eaten by Adam and Eve – ‘Apple Blossom’ is about losing, and trying to regain, one’s innocence.
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‘I Am That I Am’.
This poem centres on a serious of tautologies: ‘man is man’, world is world, tree is tree. ‘The British Museum Reading Room’.
Although it’s been criticised as an unsuccessful poem, ‘Meeting Point’ is an ambitious and, to our mind, very interesting attempt to capture the experience of being with somebody you love and feeling yourselves to be outside of space and time.
‘Prayer Before Birth’? The poem itself is almost like a cyclical dance, with each stanza ending where it began, like a variation on the villanelle form.
Oddly enough, the poem was first printed by W. B. Yeats’s sisters at the Cuala Press in 1940.
2. It relates specifically to his first wife having left him – he wrote this “love-song” for her after their divorce was finalised.
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 ask for pardon.‘Bagpipe Music’ is also very commonly anthologised because of its bounce, cynicism and humour:
The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober, Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.I think their common quality, largely lacking in all the other pieces, is that they are very easy to learn by heart and recite, they are almost singable even on a first reading. Pure poetry.
Related
‘Apple Blossom’. ‘Sunday Morning’.
The form of this poem, describing a Sunday morning with its church bells, a man tinkering with his car, and someone practising scales on a piano, is curious: it’s written in rhyming couplets but has fourteen lines, suggesting the sonnet form – and, indeed, MacNeice even describes Sunday morning as being ‘a sonnet self-encased in rhyme’.
This is another poem focusing on a moment, described as ‘this Now’.
9.
Yet these things have the potential to become ‘other than themselves’, an idea expressed through metaphor (a tree becomes a ‘talking tower’, for instance).
Its chilling closing line, ‘I am I although the dead are dead’, is particularly haunting given the poem’s publication date in 1940 – this is another poem that seems to respond to the horror going on in Europe.
6.
S. Eliot once wrote, ‘In my end is my beginning.’ MacNeice’s poetry often explores the relationship between beginnings and endings. A: The jaded calendar revolves, Its nuts need oil, carbon chokes the valves, The excess sugar of a diabetic culture Rotting the nerve of life and literature.
Throughout the book we have the passage of time with the deterioration of society, culture and one’s own life, expressed in a blending of old and new images, in rhyme.