Rethinking love poetry - Louis MacNeice

Roses are red...

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Forget the lame rhyming couplets of a greetings card, forget Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “How do I love thee? Let me count the ways”, forget Shakespeare’s many sonnets. Love poetry doesn’t need to be mushy, it doesn’t need to be sentimental, it doesn’t need to be idealised. Love poetry can capture the image, the very essence of someone’s feelings, and for me, thirties poet Louis MacNeice’s Canto (chapter) IV of Autumn Journal does this perfectly.

Written in late 1938, the year before the outbreak of the Second World War, Autumn Journal is a record in poetry of MacNeice’s life, hopes and fears from September 1938 – December 1938. He is an author more associated with politics than love or romance and for MacNeice love was a balance of opposites, his poetry a mixture of romantic images tempered by a very distinct style of realism. Canto IV looks back upon a love affair that is coming to an end, a love that was far from perfect. His love is flawed, she talks too much, she says things that hurt him, but he loves her. He has created a portrait of a very much living person, a real person rather than a perfect idea of what love should be.

An extract of Canto IV of Autumn Journal

September has come, it is hers,

Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,

Whose nature prefers

Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place;

So I give her this month and the next

Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already

So many of its days intolerable or perplexed

But so many more so happy;

Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls

Dancing over and over with her shadow,

Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls

And all of London littered with remembered kisses.

So I am glad

That life contains her with her moods and moments

More shifting and more transient than I had

Yet thought of as being integral to beauty;

Whose mind is like the wind on a sea of wheat,

Whose eyes are candour,

And assurance in her feet,

Like a homing pigeon never by doubt diverted.

To whom I send my thanks

That the air has become shot silk, the streets are music,

And that the ranks

Of men are ranks of men, no more of cyphers.

So that if now alone

I must pursue this life, it will not be only

A drag from numbered stone to numbered stone

But a ladder of angels, river turning tidal.

Off-hand, at times hysterical, abrupt,

You are one I always shall remember,

Whom cant can never corrupt

Nor argument disinherit.

Frivolous, always in a hurry, forgetting the address,

Frowning too often, taking enormous notice

Of hats and backchat - how could I assess

The thing that makes you different?

You whom I remember glad or tired,

Smiling in drink or scintillating anger,

Inopportunely desired

On boats, on trains, on roads when walking.

Sometimes untidy, often elegant,

So easily hurt, so readily responsive,

To whom a trifle could be an irritant

Or could be balm and manna.

Whose words would tumble over each other and pelt

From pure excitement,

Whose fingers curl and melt

When you were friendly.

I shall remember you in bed with bright

Eyes or in a cafe stirring coffee

Abstractedly and on your plate the white

Smoking stub your lips had touched with crimson.

And I shall remember how your words could hurt

Because they were so honest

And even your lies were able to assert

Integrity of purpose.

MacNeice, Louis. Autumn Journal. (London: Faber and Faber Ltd, 1998), pp.11 – 13.

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