Louis MacNeice
1907-1963
In November, 1936, the Irish poet Louis MacNeice composed “The Sunlight on the Garden,” a lyric poem of surpassing power and beauty. A meditation on impermanence, uncertainty, and loss, the poem is also a luminous celebration of the here and now. Integrating a prophetic awareness of historical forces with a profound appreciation of the present moment, the poem also reconciles two disparate poetic traditions and an Anglo-Irish poet’s own divided loyalties.
Here is the poem in its entirety:
THE SUNLIGHT ON THE GARDEN
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told,
We cannot beg for pardon.
Our freedom as free lances
Advances toward its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.
The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying
And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.
Although this poem, like most love-lyrics, is cast as a direct address, and its tone is intimate and conversational, its historical context is as relevant as the personal. Six months earlier, civil war had broken out in Spain. Pitting Republicans against Nationalists, communists against fascists, the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was seen by many Europeans at the time as a harbinger of a second World War. Born in 1907, MacNeice well understood what war and its constraints would mean for art, culture, and individual freedoms. High-flown sonnets would become a luxury. Secular hedonism would give way to austerity and self-sacrifice. And the familiar sound of parish church bells (MacNeice grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland, the son of an Anglican bishop) would be drowned out by klaxons warning of incoming air raids. In the vision projected by MacNeice’s poem, these future changes appear both imminent and inevitable.
Yet against the thunderclouds of impending war, MacNeice introduces the countervailing image of sunlight on the garden. At the time of writing, MacNeice was living in a “garden flat” in London. Facing south, its main rooms looked out on a garden, where sunlight filtered through sycamore trees, creating “nets of gold.” Ever the realist, MacNeice depicts those nets as “hardening” and growing cold in the mid-November air. But the extended metaphor of light, in the context of a prevailing darkness, creates the central thematic tension in the poem.
That tension mirrors the times in which MacNeice was living, but it also reflects the poet’s personal circumstances and his complex state of mind. In November, 1935, MacNeice’s first wife left him for another man. A year later—and five days after his divorce was finalized—MacNeice wrote the poem at hand. Although he had initially felt angry and betrayed, the feelings he expresses here are primarily those of acceptance, gratitude, and generosity. He addresses his former wife as “my friend.” And rather than bitterly mourn the impermanence of their relationship, he honors it, fondly remembering their hours together. In quoting a famous line from Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (IV, xv, 41), spoken by Marc Antony as he is dying in the Queen of Egypt’s arms, the poem invokes the tragic-romantic ambience of that scene. But in its present context the quoted line bears less on MacNeice’s failed marriage than on the historical moment that he and his former wife are both enduring, albeit apart. Neither should expect “pardon” from the punishing days ahead.
The spirit of reconciliation evident in the thematic content of MacNeice’s poem is also embodied in its form. In its symmetries and balances, its iambic rhythms and expressive concision, the poem lies squarely within the English lyric tradition, particularly the “Metaphysical” poetry of the early seventeenth century. However modern in idiom, it is continuous with the love poems of John Donne. At the same time, the poem’s dense, intricate, and song-like quality reflects the influence of Old Irish verse. That quality is heightened by MacNeice’s use of “aicill” or internal rhyme, a distinctive feature of Irish Bardic poetry. In MacNeice’s twentieth-century poem, as in medieval Irish verse, the end word of one line rhymes with the initial word of the next (garden/hardens; lances/advances, etc.), imparting a musical, “inwrought” feel to the poem’s aural texture. However subtly or obliquely, this artful interweaving of the cultural traditions of two recently warring nations expresses a tacit call for solidarity and a sense of common cause. Whatever our troubled history, the poet seems to be saying, to his former wife and to the world, we now face a threat larger than ourselves, and we’re in this together. In its masterly synthesis of Irish and English formal elements, the form of his poem is saying much the same.
Louis MacNeice, “The Sunlight on the Garden,” Collected Poems (Faber, 1966), 84-85.
One Time, One Meeting 