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I received Autumn Journal in my stocking last year, and have had it perpetually on-the-go ever since. This is the sort of poetry that you dip in and out of when you’re on the train, in between lectures, over a coffee while you’re waiting for someone. The title couldn’t be more apt: it generates the mood and atmosphere around autumn with beautiful description, ‘From the second floor up, looking north, having breakfast/I see the November sun at nine o’clock/Gild the fusty brickwork of rows on rows of houses/Like animals asleep and breathing smoke/And savouring Well-being/I light my first cigarette’…
Autumn Journal is listy and self-consciously intellectual: frequent Greek phrases or references to philosophy litter the verse; I tend to read it in a half-dream, carried along by the beauty of it but almost certainly not understanding everything it has to say. And that is one of its strengths rather than failures: it is highly re-readable (as you seem to take in more each time you read it) and incredibly evocative. The tone and rhythm of the entire journal is the same, but it is not monotonous. Patient, observational, nostalgic at times, and above all, candid. The ‘journal’ is broken up into cantos, effectively, with canto iv being perhaps his most famous for its beautiful and fragile description of the state of being in love: ‘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’. MacNeice captures the quotidian moments of love, and the reader feels a behind-the-scenes, privileged look into MacNeice’s private moments, such as, ‘I shall remember you in bed with bright/Eyes or in a café stirring coffee/Abstractedly’.
But the delight of love fades just as quickly as it is introduced, as MacNeice marks through the ups-and-downs of his life, the daily joys, his obvious pleasure in certain images, and his pain at others. This particular thread of the entire tapestry of Autumn Journal is broken strangely and unexpectedly in canto xix with a kind of exultation of his freedom: ‘When we are out of love, how were we ever in it?’ But whilst that theme that predominated his autumn is over, MacNeice continues to write about the burgeoning war with Germany and the political strife in Spain, having visited Barcelona at the end of 1938. Canto xxiii begins ominously, ‘The road ran downhill into Spain’, and continues almost prophetically: ‘Our sins will find us out, even our sins of omission’. Yet MacNeice has omitted nothing in this volume of poetry. Autumn Journal is often regarded as one of, if not his greatest, works, and I would agree, simply because it seems to encompass the multitude of images and moments and experiences – both personal and global – that combine in one person’s life, and his painful realization that ‘the ranks/Of men are ranks of men, no more of cyphers’. It is both the most poignantly personal piece of writing, and also incredibly relatable, as it draws on the gamut of universal human experience. If you’re going to pick it up, read it in the beautiful autumnal afternoon light that York has at the moment. Every autumn thereafter will make you want to pick it up again.
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