John Drexel’s “Classic Reading” of Louis MacNeice’s “Sunlight on the Garden”
by Ernie on 18/10/07 at 12:58 pm
John Drexel offers us a “Classic Reading” of Louis MacNeice’s poem “Sunlight on the Garden” in the new issue of the Contemporary Poetry Review:
Reviewing Stevie Smith’s Collected Poems in 1976, Seamus Heaney touched on “the whole question of poetry for the eye versus poetry for the ear.” One might be forgiven for momentarily thinking that the same question applies to the poetry of Louis MacNeice, which obviously is highly formal on paper but which gains much of its immediate appeal from its rhythms and the sound of its phrases. Indeed, according to George MacBeth, MacNeice “once said that if forced to choose between sound and sense he would have a slight preference for [sound].” However true this may be, I think it is safe to say that for MacNeice it ultimately is not a question of either/or. His is a poetry composed both for the eye and the ear; he is a poet whose eye for telling detail is allied to an ear attuned to the full resources of the English language and of English-language verse. Nowhere in MacNeice’s output is this more evident than in “The Sunlight in the Garden.”
MacNeice has long been viewed by some readers (though not the Irish) as an appendage to W. H. Auden. The fact that the two were contemporaries at Oxford in the 1920s and friends and collaborators in the 1930s may have made them seem representative of a certain literary sensibility related to their time and place, as has their appearance side by side in anthologies (with Auden inevitably given more weight).
Certainly MacNeice was always less political (and less religious) than Auden. At the same time, MacNeice wears his existential anxiety more openly on his sleeve than does Auden, who surveys his troubled landscapes from a great height, with a hawk’s eye. Even when MacNeice broods on the past or worries about the future, he is fully involved in the present moment, often obsessively so. It is a truism that Auden was concerned with goodness and truth, MacNeice with beauty. Perhaps the most useful thing that can be said about both poets in tandem is that they share a formal mastery. As Auden acknowledged in “The Cave of Making,” his tribute to MacNeice after the latter’s death in 1963, MacNeice was a “maker” who understood the “mystery” of the poet’s craft “from the inside.”
Read the rest of the piece here.
Marian
Jan 2nd, 2012
If we cannot live, then surely we must protect nature. Nature is the sine qua non of human existence. How can we conceive of ourselves being anything different ?
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