This work contains the following individual pieces:
- Canto XXIV: ‘Sleep, my body, sleep, my ghost’
- Canto XXIII: ‘The road ran downhill into Spain’
- Canto XXII: ‘December the nineteenth: over the black roofs’
- Canto XXI: ‘And when we clear away’
- Canto XX: ‘Nelson stands on a black pillar’
- Canto XIX: ‘The pigeons riddle the London air’
- Canto XVIII: ‘In the days that were early the music came easy’
- Canto XVII: ‘From the second floor up, looking north, having breakfast’
- Canto XIV: ‘The next day I drove by night’
- Canto XIII: ‘Which things being so, as we said when we studied’
- Canto XII: ‘These days are misty, insulated, mute’
- Canto XI: ‘But work is alien; what do I care for the Master’
- Canto X: ‘And so return to work – the M.A. gown’
- Canto IX: ‘Now we are back to normal, now the mind is’
- Canto V: ‘To-day was a beautiful day, the sky was a brilliant’
- Canto IV: ‘September has come and I wake’
- Canto III: ‘August is nearly over, the people’
- Canto II: ‘Spider, spider, twisting tight’
- Canto I: ‘Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire’
- Canto XV: ‘Shelley and jazz and lieder and love and hymn-tunes’
- Canto XVI: ‘Nightmare leaves fatigue’
- Canto VIII: ‘Sun shines easy, sun shines gay’
- Canto VII: ‘Conferences, adjournments, ultimatums’
- Canto VI: ‘And I remember Spain’
Locations in Harold's Library
- Louis MacNeice: Collected Poems (book)
- page 99
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2 thoughts on “Autumn Journal”
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Reading Canto V from the London anthology. I absolutely love the mix of beautiful poetic descriptions (of people, of places, of times and of moral dilemmas) which run side-by-side with totally unpoetical snippets of conversation, some which are jolted into poetry by line-breaks which all add to the edgy feeling,
Others jolt us back out of the 21st century and back to the first half of the 20th:
I’d read two-thirds of the way through the poem before noticing the rhyme structure which runs all the way through the Canto; ABCB etc etc; it was two B lines
that suddenly jumped out at me, particularly troubling as I’m seldom one to miss a rhyme. It must have been the longer length of the A and C lines, and the greater irregulairty of their metre, which caused me to miss it. I must write more irregular verse.
The poem caught my eye while flicking through for two lines close to the end of the Canto
That’s basically the Brecht Dreigroschenoper opening stage direction (Die Bettler betteln, die Huren huren, ein Moritatensänger singt einen Moritat …), but it’s lifted away from feeling too much like a Lehrstück by the two lines that precede it:
I hadn’t realised char-/chore shared the same root, and that clopping of the hooves, the simplicity of “Milk at the doors” but using that to set up the “workers of the world” noun-verb pairings that follow without being too simplistic is just right for me.
It’s all kind of teetering just on the brink between being Kiplingesque verse (I’ve just been reading In Partibus) and something more poetically polished. And I really really like that …
Canto III opens with a lovely triangle of images around “tanned”, “joie de vivre” and “contraband”; the happiness of those returning from abroad with holiday photos and all the physical signs of having had a good relaxing time are guilty pleasures to be furtively sneaked past friends who haven’t, or friends who won’t, or friends who never will again. Perhaps there’s something about “black market” which, for me, links “contraband” and “tanned” through more than just the rhyme scheme.