Belfast poet Louis MacNeice s Irish heritage was close to his heart irishcentral.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from irishcentral.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
“So much for Christmas”
Vita brevis, ars longa. The week before Christmas finds MacNeice in London’s National Gallery. Outside, movement continues and suggests ephemerality. Inside, “Other worlds persist,” caught and elevated to significance by the artists’ attention, by the achievements of form.
Last March, sensing how things were going and that museum doors would soon be shut, I stole an hour between meetings to duck into the Smith College Museum of Art. The visit felt like a last leave-taking from old friends (I took quick photographs of some favorite works) and like a farewell to the very act of standing in front of paintings (as opposed to staring at reproductions). During the intervening months, that experience of seeing art, of finding some consolatory order and endurance in the frame, was one I keenly missed. I’ve been able to get back into galleries lately, and I have found the frantic rhythms of my mind soothed by those long moments before the canvases. MacN
“Now I must make amends.”
It is often said (when people are talking of the “Auden group,” those poets who came to prominence with Auden in the Thirties) that MacNeice was the collective’s resident skeptic. Others, you will hear from Samuel Hynes in his book,
The Auden Generation, from Edna Longley in her study of MacNeice, from Robyn Marsack and Beret Strong and Peter MacDonald in chapters on MacNeice, even from Seamus Perry and Mark Ford in their recent
London Review of Books podcast episode on MacNeice flirted with political commitment (Stephen Spender is usually singled out as the most gung-ho enthusiast for movements, but Auden and C. Day Lewis also get credit, or blame, for at least provisionally throwing their weight behind some cause), but MacNeice stayed scrupulously on the sidelines. One way to read the whole of
A clear, cold winter morning dawns and London’s pigeons, night-shift workers, breakfast cookers, and babies are all up and moving. “O what a busy morning,” abuzz with engines, wires, machines, and butchery: “The housewife . . . Watches the cleaver catch the naked / New Zealand sheep between the legs.” Amid the commerce and commotion, MacNeice finds his mind turning back to his breakup, to lost love no longer recognizable as the love into which he had fallen. Time and busyness and the slow erosion of routine have moved him from the excitement of September and the fresh heartbreak of October to a complacent December chill: “The hypnosis is over and no one / Calls encore to the song. / When we are out of love, how were we ever in it?”
“So much for Christmas”
Vita brevis, ars longa. The week before Christmas finds MacNeice in London’s National Gallery. Outside, movement continues and suggests ephemerality. Inside, “Other worlds persist,” caught and elevated to significance by the artists’ attention, by the achievements of form.
Last March, sensing how things were going and that museum doors would soon be shut, I stole an hour between meetings to duck into the Smith College Museum of Art. The visit felt like a last leave-taking from old friends (I took quick photographs of some favorite works) and like a farewell to the very act of standing in front of paintings (as opposed to staring at reproductions). During the intervening months, that experience of seeing art, of finding some consolatory order and endurance in the frame, was one I keenly missed. I’ve been able to get back into galleries lately, and I have found the frantic rhythms of my mind soothed by those long moments before the canvases. MacN