The Original Poetical Works of Louis MacNeice

Circe

"...vitreamque Circen"


Something of glass about her, of dead water,
Chills and holds us,
Far more fatal than painted flesh or the lodestone of live hair
This despair of crystal brilliance.
Narcissus' error
Enfolds and kills us--
Dazed with gazing on that unfertile beauty
Which is our own heart's thought.
Fled away to the beasts
One cannot stop thinking;  Timon
Kept on finding gold.
In parrot-ridden forest or barren coast
A more importunate voice than bird or wave
Escutcheoned on the air with ice letters
Seeks and, of course, finds us
(Of course, being our echo).

Be brave, my ego, look into your glass
And realise that that never-to-be-touched
Vision is your mistress.

(August 1931)

June Thunder

The Junes were free and full, driving through tiny
Roads, the mudguards brushing the cowparsley,
Through fields of mustard and under boldly embattled
    Mays and chestnuts

Or between beeches verdurous and voluptuous
Or where broom and gorse beflagged the chalkland--
All the flare and gusto of the unenduring
    Joys of a season

Now returned but I note as more appropriate
To the maturer mood impending thunder
With an indigo sky and the garden hushed except for 
    The treetops moving.

Then the curtains in my room blow suddenly inward,
The shrubbery rustles, birds fly heavily homeward,
The white flowers fad to nothing on the trees and rain comes
    Down like a dropscene.

Now there comes the catharsis, the cleansing downpour
Breaking the blossoms of our overdated fancies
Our old sentimentality and whimsicality
    Loves of the morning.

Blackness at half-past eight, the night’s precursor,
Clouds like falling masonry and lightning’s lavish
Annunciation, the sword of the mad archangel
    Flashed from the scabbard.

If only you would come and dare the crystal
Rampart of the rain and the bottomless moat of thunder,
If only now you would come I should be happy
    Now if now only.

The Sunlight on the Garden

The Window

I


Neck of an hour-glass on its side--
   Hermitage, equilibrium.
The slightest tilt and a grain would glide
   Away from you or towards you;
So without tremolo hold this moment
   Where in this window two worlds meet
Or family voices from the room behind you
Or canned music from beyond the garden
   Will irrupt, disrupt, delete.

Between this room and the open air
   Flowers in a vase imponderably--
The painter knew who set them there
   The knack of closed and open;
With highlights upon bloom and bulge
   He hung this bridge in timelessness
Preventing traffic hence and hither
And claimed his own authority
   To span, to ban, to bless.

The sands of light within, without,
   Equated and inviolable,
Allow no footprint and no doubt
   Of savagery or trespass
Where art enhancing yet revoking
   The random lives on which it drew
Has centred round one daub of ochre,
Has garnered in one square of canvas
   Something complete and new.

So there it rests the clump of flowers,
   Suspension bridge and talisman,
Not his nor hers nor yours not ours
   But everyone's and no one's,
Against the light, flanked by the curtains
   No draught  nor chatter can discompose
For this is a window we cannot open
A hair's breadth more, this is a window
   Impossible to close.

Thus pictures (windows themselves) preclude
   Both ventilation and burglery--
No entrance to their solitude,
   No egress to adventure,
For life that lives from mind to moment,
   From mouth to mouth, from none to now,
Must never, they say, infringe that circle,
At most may sense it at a tangent
   And without knowing how.



II



How, yes how!  To achieve in a world of flux and bonfires
Something of art's coherence, in a world of wind and hinges
An even approximate poise, in a world of beds and hunger
   A fullness more than the feeding a sieve?
For the windows here admit draughts and the bridges may not be loitered on
And what was ecstasy there would be quietism here and there people
   Here have to live.

Beginning your life with an overdraft, born looking out on a surge of eroding
Objects, your cradle a coracle, your eyes when they start to focus
Traitors to the king within you, born in the shadow of an hourglass
   But vertical (this is not art),
You feel like the tides the tug of the moon, never to be reached, interfering always, 
And always you suffer this two-way traffic, impulses outward and images inward
   Distracting the heart.

And the infant's eyes are drawn to the blank of light, the window,
The small boy cranes out to spit on the pavement, the student tosses 
His midnight thoughts to the wind, the schoolgirl ogles the brilliantined
   Head that dazzles the day
While the bedridden general stares and stares, embarking
On a troopship of cloud for his youth or for Landikotal, evading
   The sneer of the medicine tray.

Take-off outwards and over and through the same channel an intake--
Thistledown, dust in the sun, fritillaries, homing pigeons,
All to which senses and mind like sea anemones open
   In this never private pool;
The waves of other men's bodies and minds galumphing in, voices demanding
To be heard or be silenced, complied with, competed with, answered, 
   Voices that flummox and fool,

That nonchalantly beguile or bark like a sergeant-major,
Narcotic voices like bees in a buddleia bush or neurotic
Screaming of brakes and headlines, voices that grab through the window
   And chivvy us out and on
To make careers, make love, to dunk our limbs in tropical
Seas, or to buy and sell in the temple from which the angry
  Man with the whip has gone.

He has gone and the others go too but still there is often a face at your window--
The Welsh corporal who sang in the pub, the girl who was always at a cross purpose,
The pilot doodling at his last briefing, the Catalan woman clutching the soup bowl,
   The child that has not been born:
All looking in and their eyes meet yours, the hour-glass turns over and lies level,
The stopwatch clicks, the sand stops trickling, what was remote and raw is blended
   And mended what was torn.

And how between inrush and backwash such a betrothal should happen
Of tethered antennae and drifting vanishing filament
We do not know nor who keeps the ring and in passing
   Absolves us from time and tide
And from our passing selves, who salves from the froth of otherness
These felt and delectable Others;  we do not know for we lose ourselves
   In finding a world outside.

Loss and discovery, froth and fulfillment, this is our medium,
A second best, and approximate, frameless, a sortie, a tentative
Counter attack on the void, a launching forth from the window
   Of a raven or maybe a dove
And we do not know what they will find but gambling on their fidelity
And on other islanded lives we keep open the window and fallibly
   Await the return of love.



III



How, yes how?  In this mirrored maze--
   Paradox and antinomy--
To card the bloom off falling days,
   To reach the core that answers?
And how on the edge of senselessness
   To team and build, to mate and breed,
Forcing the mud to dance a ballet,
Consigning an old and doubtful cargo
   To a new and wayward seed?

But, hows apart, this we affirm
   (Pentecost or sacrament?)
That though no frame will hold, no term
   Describe our Pyrrhic salvoes,
Yet that which art gleaning, congealing,
   Sets in antithesis to life
Is what in living we lay claim to,
Is what gives light and shade to living
   Though not with brush or knife.

The painted curtain never stirs--
   Airlessness and hourlessness--
And a dead painter still demurs
   When we intrude our selfhood;
But even as he can talk by silence
   So, blinkered and acquisitive,
Even at the heart of lust and conflict
We can find form, our lives transcended
   While and because we live.

But here our jargon fails;  no word,
   'Miracle' or 'catalysis,'
Will fit what dare not have occurred
   But does occur regardless;
Let then the poet like the parent
   Take it on trust and, looking out
Through his own window to where others
Look out at him, be proudly humbled
   And jettison his doubt.

The air blows in, the pigeons cross--
   Communication.  Alchemy.
Here is profit where was loss
   And what was dross is golden,
Those are friends who once were foreign
   And gently shines the face of doom,
The pot of flowers inspires the window,
The air blows in, the vistas open
   And a sweet scent pervades the room.

(October 1948)