Desert Island Poems: The Sunlight on the Garden by Louis MacNeice

Discover Andrew's thoughts on this poem by Louis MacNeice as he asks: does this poem deserve its popularity?

MacNeice as Example?

My relationship with poetry, in many ways, is down to Louis MacNeice. By extension, though, as I’ve come to understand more about poetry, and read more of it, and become more critical with training, I’ve also come to find deficiencies in his work, to the point where, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure if the poet whose poems I fell in love with still resonate with me in the same way as I enter my forties. 

A Changing Relationship

So, my relationship to the poetry of MacNeice has changed slightly as I’ve gotten older. While there are still elements of it that I love, I do also take issue with some of his writing, whether this is stylistically or thematically. I’ve come to question, with a bit of retrospection, that maybe the poetry I fell in love with as a teenager maybe wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. So, here, I take ‘The Sunlight in the Garden’ and use it as a way of interrogating the poetics of MacNeice and what I really think about him after all these years. In many ways, I should not necessarily like him or see him as an example, but certainly have things in common: we come from the Protestant community in Northern Ireland, to an extent we were both educated in England (though the East London environment of my uni days differed somewhat from his Oxford setting), and we ended up largely living in England, going back to Northern Ireland and feeling like as Mahon describes MacNeice ‘a tourist in his own country.’ But in other ways we couldn’t be more different: he went to public school, and led a pretty privileged life in West London working for the BBC and swanning around with a rather upper-middle class milieu. I see him now as very much a poet not only of the establishment, but of the institution: Prep School, Marlborough, Oxford (where he read Classics  – that most public school of subjects, largely as it wasn’t taught in state schools and was therefore, by default, a marker of a more privileged education), Faber and Faber, BBC, lecturer at a redbrick university (this – Birmingham – I suppose, would be the exception of the lot as it’s perceptibly less elite, and by all accounts he hated it there, struggling to write poems and finding the students a lesser calibre compared to those he’d known at Oxford). 

The MacPrivileged Group?

So, in many ways, when we look at the life of MacNeice we might be forgiven in thinking to ourselves, ‘well, he had it all on a plate didn’t he? Someone in his position could probably have done whatever he wanted such were the doors open to him. What did he have to struggle against?’ And yet, despite this lack of struggle his poetry is quite downbeat and doom-laden at times. Prayer After Birth being one such poem. Yeats referred to MacNeice’s generation as the ‘pylon poets’ and I wonder if maybe he was being polite with this phrase, at times. The MacSpaunday group, a name by Roy Campell given to group together chiefly Auden, MacNeice, Spender and Day-Lewis) were in many ways The MacPrivileged group. Yet despite these criticisms and reservations about MacNeice that I harbour, there is a tenderness in his writing which I think redeems it and keeps me returning to it.

Which MacNeice Poem?

I was going to write about Prayer After Birth because I felt like I should, what with it being political commentary and having a message about society, but, you know what, I’d much rather write about The Sunlight on the Garden. It’s autumn now as I write this and sunlight is scarce. This morning for example, in my dark little, windowless study with only a gap in the wall above for daylight (it’s not exactly a prison cell but doesn’t have a window - I actually like it like this, if you must know) there was a moment when the books on the shelf up above me caught a glimpse of the mid-morning sunlight, and I was grateful for it. And gratitude is the key word here, as it’s the overarching sentiment of MacNeice’s The Sunlight on the Garden. 

Me and MacNeice

MacNeice was the first poet who drew me into poetry. I was sitting in the living room watching TV one night as a teenager, and someone came on and started reading Meeting Point. And that was pretty much it for me. I was transfixed by the repetition, the imagery, the rhythm, and, as a love-stricken late teen, the love. So, you might wonder why I’m not, then, writing about that here. Well, I could easily have done, but I’ve only got about 45 minutes to get this down before I go and pick my son up from school, and Sunlight on the Garden is shorter - sorry, if that’s a more prosaic reason than you were expecting. Also, I want to properly devote myself to a longer analysis of that poem as it’s very important to me and deserves its own, as they say, ‘deep-dive’. Also, and this is probably the most important reason,  I was a love-blind, heartstricken teenager when I encountered Meeting Point. Now, over twenty years later, I’m married with two kids and it just doesn’t cast the same spell on me. I feel like I’ve moved on from that impulsive, perhaps overly emotional connection with poems, which maybe suggests to me that maybe MacNeice’s writing is that of an underdeveloped emotional (dare I say immature) sensibility. But, I suppose that’s always the risk you run when you take the empiricist approach to poetry that MacNeice did.

Why ‘Sunlight on the Garden’?

Anyway, here I am with The Sunlight on the Garden, a poem I love no less than Meeting Point, just for different reasons. MacNeice, I think, has three strands to his poetry: love, politics and time. Prayer After Birth is a good example of him being political; Meeting Point is a good example of him writing about love; and The Sunlight on the Garden for me is a good example of him primarily writing about time (and by time, I suppose I mean its passing). Now, there may be those among you who, having read what I’ve just written, might be saying ‘Ah, but Andrew, don’t you know a poem can be all three?’ And yes, okay, yes, they can. And that’s what I think makes The Sunlight on the Garden so strong, and an exemplary MacNeice poem for different reasons, because it showcases all three of his big themes in one poem – all we have to do is look a bit more closely. 

Archetypal Anglo-Irish Poet?

Much has been made about MacNeice’s identity – is he Irish? Is he British? Who cares? For me, I think it is an important question to a point. I think, for me, MacNeice is a bit of both and why can’t he be? The problem with the question is that it presupposes that we must assign one single definition to the poet, but I don’t think that’s the case, particularly with a poet such as MacNiece who revelled in ambiguity and the ‘drunkenness of things being various’ as he wrote in one of his other most popular and highly anthologised poems ‘Snow’. I think MacNeice’s attraction as a writer, in fact, is that he floats between Irishness and Britishness in his poetry and this makes him all the more intriguing. I also find it interesting how this sense of mixed identity manifests itself in the technique of MacNeice. Anyway, let’s get on with the poem shall we?

The Problem with MacNeice

As much as I do love the poetry of MacNeice, well most of it, I don’t think he’s the perfect poet. In fact, I think there are patches of his oeuvre which are really quite rickety and, well, patchy. Autumn Journal, for example, has some great points,  but is very long and not sustained, though I admire the ambition. Also, I feel like when he gets too bogged down in politics he takes the place of preacher as opposed to questioner (his father was a clergyman, so perhaps this was no coincidence). I feel like he writes best when his writing is perched on a fence as opposed to being on either side of it. This is why I’ve chosen The Sunlight on the Garden, which is finely balanced. In a previous post, The Seven Cs of Poetry, I’ve expanded upon this idea in greater depth. 

The Poem Itself

The first thing we notice about the poem is the title, which has a rather annoying definite article before Sunlight on the Garden. In fact, in the course of writing this article so far, I’ve had to go back and correct all mentions of the title as I;ve left off the ‘The’ from the front of the title. Why is this important? Well, I think it adds a sense of formality to the poem which is reflected in its form. I can’t help but feel like it’s a rather unoriginal title for a poet who came up with titles such as ‘Blind Fireworks’, ‘The Burning Perch’, ‘Ten Burnt Offerings’ and ‘Holes in the Sky’. Indeed, the collection in which this appears is ‘The Earth Compels’ a line from this very poem in question. I wonder what happened here? It’s particularly disappointing considering the first line repeats the title, The Sunlight on the Garden, I mean come on, Louis. What else would he call it? I don’t know, but surely there was an opportunity here for him to choose something more obscure and give the poem another dimension. Anyway, the title is the title. The fact the poem ends with the line as well also makes the case for changing the title all the stronger; the sunlight on the garden appears no fewer than three times in the poem. I suppose what is going for the title is a sense of simplicity, the kind of simplicity that hooks the reader. In fact, perhaps he’s trying to wrongfoot the reader into thinking this is some kind of pretty ditty, to be found in the anthologies like ‘The Nation’s Favourite Poems.’ But this poem has a much darker side to it. 

The Opening

We see this darker side to the poem almost instantly as the opening line and title are immediately undercut with ‘hardens and grows cold’ followed by ‘we cannot cage the minute/ within its nets of gold.’ It then rapidly gets even darker, as the fifth line with its arresting and abrupt four-syllable line length and two iambic stresses, ‘when all it told’ kicks in, only to be followed by ‘we cannot beg for pardon.’ There is a part of me which wonders whether the poem has descended too quickly here into the depths of despair and whether MacNeice successfully handles the transition from sunlight on the garden to a deep, searching philosophical rumination full of despair – I even wonder at times if he descends into a parody of himself here. In other words, I just wonder whether the opening is too much too soon and whether MacNeice has bitten off more than can be handled in the opening six lines of a poem, leading then to an effect of, dare I say, pomposity? This word pompous, indeed, is an element of MacNeice’s work I think we have to watch out for. I don’t really think MacNeice was a man of the people. He trod a well trodden line of a certain class: prep school (boarding), public school (boarding), Oxford, Faber and Faber, BBC, living out most of his life in a West London coterie of artists, writers and critics. The only real anomaly in his career was having to take a lecturing role in the Classics department at Birmingham University, which by all accounts, he couldn’t bear. See his poem ‘Birmingham’ and where he was distinctly unimpressed by the level of the students which, for me, also casts aspersions for me about his ability, patience and inclusivity as an educator –  it strikes me as the attitude of a spoiled brat and someone who had lived for too long in an exclusive bubble of old boys. In most of the pictures taken of him he looks surly and unapproachable. Derek Mahon writes about attempting to visit him in London, and ultimately wishing he hadn’t bothered. As I say, I don’t get the down-to-earth genial Heaney vibes from MacNeice. Anyway, that’s beside the point, or it would be if it wasn’t also apparent in his poetry (such as the opening six lines of this poem), which can, as I say, be haughty and preachy at times, which coming from one as privileged as MacNeice is kind of rich and I don’t think would be wholeheartedly accepted in today’s climate of checking our unconscious bias and privilege. 

Movement 

We then move into the second stanza which is no more uplifting than our freedom as free ‘lances/ advances towards its end’ which is an archetypal MacNeicean phrase about the transience of time, and a great example of it. But this sense of loss is counterweighed by the wonderfully uplifting image of the sonnets and birds, however it’s interesting how they ‘descend’ as opposed to ‘ascend’. Even in this moment of what should be uplift MacNeice finds a way to pull the image down, before another gloomy ending of ‘we shall have no time for dances.’ When I read this again now it seems to me to be very weary and pessimistic. I’m not saying that all poems should offer hope, and indeed I realise the thirties when he was writing were a time of post war despondency (and the Spanish civil war had just broken out) but I do feel like at times here the tone is overly solipsistic. There is something about his use of ‘my friend’ which also seems insincere - it’s a very ‘performative’, public, vague notion of friend, particularly as the poem is not dedicated to anyone, and also, we must admit, suit the rhyme scheme very conveniently. In short, I can’t help but feel the endings of these six line stanzas are a bit rushed and bent to the rhyme scheme.

Rhythm

The poem is largely written in a kind of disguised alexandrine with a line of 12 syllables with six iambic stresses broken equally over two lines. The alexandrine, as MacNeice would well have known as a Classicist, has its roots in the verse of ancient Greek and Latin. The only place this changes is in the last two lines of each stanza where he drops an iamb in the penultimate line to abruptly slow the poem down, and gives it this very dramatic quality, which I’ve mentioned already is arguably a bit more melodramatic than he would have liked. 

Internal Rhyme

The most impressive technical element of the poem, though, despite my criticisms, is the internal rhyme, which is surprisingly and pleasingly consistent throughout. It’s not just impressive in this sense but also how it happens directly at the point of one line tipping into the next, ie. the last word in the line rhyming with the first word in the next. We see it in: ‘garden/hardens’, deviously subtly in ‘minute/ within its’, ‘lances/advances’, ‘upon it/sonnet’, ‘flying/defying’, iron/siren’, ‘pardon/hardened’, ‘under/thunder.’ While it is impressive, it makes you wonder, though, whether the poem eventually becomes undone by its technical underpinning, and the rhyme is achieved at the expense of the overall effect of the poem, which is slightly underwhelming.

‘We are dying, Egypt, dying?’

Is the grandest, yet most pretentious part of the poem his allusion to Antony and Cleopatra? I think so. It seems so melodramatic and out of place that on reflection I feel like it’s another example of MacNeice bending something to the rhyme, particularly as it doesn’t really follow on from ‘the earth compels’.

The Last Verse

‘And not expecting pardon’ – where does this line come from? And why, in the context of this poem, would the speaker be expecting pardon? And why have they become hardened in heart anew? I suppose what I’m getting at here is that on the surface this poem, skips merry along, but when  we start to probe it and its rhythm and rhyme schemes we start to see it fall apart at the seams a little bit and essentially not really make any sense at all, resolving as it does with a fairly banal image of ‘oh well at least we sat in the sunlight in the garden…’  MacNeice was a stylist and as with most stylists when we really hold the magnifying glass over their work it’s maybe not as impressive as it was at first sight. There is also something passive about the poem as the speaker and their acquaintance have done nothing but ‘sat under/ thunder and rain with you…’ which they are as grateful for as the ‘sunlight on the garden’. The use of ‘glad’ and ‘sat’ also don’t ring entirely true. Who sits under thunder? Maybe ‘beneath’ but not ‘under’ - this is where he has been snookered by his own rhyme scheme. Is ‘glad’ the right word, either? He is ‘glad’ and then ‘grateful too’ but being glad and being grateful are two very different emotions. Methinks he was looking for a single syllable that would do the trick here and ‘glad’ worked well enough… except it doesn’t, quite sit.

The Ending

Jon Stallworthy writes of the ending: "The poem, propelled by its insistent rhymes, seems to move in a circle that, on closer inspection, proves to be a spiral; its end revealing a knowledge, a wisdom, not present at its beginning." While I like the idea of the poem being a spiral and think there’s something in that,  I’m not seeing the wisdom at the end. The poem feels rather abandoned than finished, and circling back to the first line, which is also the title, in order that it appears for the third time cannot have been something MacNeice seriously would have preferred to do – most poets hate repeating themselves and using an individual word twice, let alone a single line that isn't a refrain three times. No. To me this seems like a quick, easy, almost desperate way for MacNeice to round off the poem - it has the air of ‘that’ll do’ about it, which is a shame. 

Simple and Clear?

Allpoetry.com explains this poem thus: ‘with its simple and clear language, [it] captures the fleeting nature of time and the beauty of the world.’ On the surface, most people would say this of the poem. However, as I’ve argued here, I don’t think the language used is really that simple or clear, indeed I feel like, while it appears this way on the surface, when we spend longer reading it and examining its grammar, it’s really a hodge-podge of images and sentences bolted together largely to satisfy quite a convoluted rhyme scheme in an odd rhythmical pattern. It pains me to write this as I do enjoy the poetry of MacNeice, but perhaps we should take more of his poetry to task in a similar way. 

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Andrew Jamison is a poet and teacher, and you can read more articles on his blog here or get a paid subscription and access all previous and future posts here. You can also browse his poetry collections and buy signed, first editions of each of them here.