Louis macneice poems
CHAPTER TEN COME BACK EARLY, IF ONLY IN THE REFRAIN: LOUIS MACNEICE'S "AUTOBIOGRAPHY" AND THE POETICS OF RECOVERY RENATA SENKTAS
CHAPTER TEN COME BACK EARLY, IF ONLY IN THE REFRAIN: LOUIS MACNEICE’S “AUTOBIOGRAPHY” AND THE POETICS OF RECOVERY RENATA SENKTAS Let me start by contextualising the poem that serves as my basis, that is, “Autobiography.” It was written in September That year Louis MacNeice began to write his autobiography in prose, The Strings Are False (the book was never finished, and appeared posthumously in ), and wrote most of his book on Yeats, The Poetry of W.
B. Yeats (published in ). The coincidence is of importance because MacNeice spent in America and it was there that he was trying to come to terms with his past, which “continued to haunt him” (Dodds 14). Although the two travel books (Letters from Iceland and I Crossed the Minch) and the book about the London Zoo (Zoo) that MacNeice published in the s were, as Robyn Marsack observes, “full of personal asides.
. . . [t]he culmination of self-exploration was reached in The Strings Are False” (54). Here is a quote from MacNeice as recalled by Dodds in its introductory chapter: “I trail too many of these barren facts behind me. One must either forget them or arrange them in some kind of order” (15). It was also at that time that MacNeice was trying to “disentangle his own mixed feelings” about Yeats (Ellmann 10).
The book that resulted from that impulse is, as one critic says, “as much about MacNeice as it is about Yeats” (Thwaite 28) or, as another says, “is still as good an introduction to that poet [Yeats] as we have, with the added interest that it is also an introduction to MacNeice” (Ellmann 11). These endeavours meet in that both of them establish—or reestablish—MacNeice’s connection with his Irish background, also in the context of the urgent (we are in ) political choices.
America marked a “pause” in the poet’s life, or, as Dodds exaltedly put it, “a temporary limbo between two worlds” (12). What Dodds might mean by the “two worlds” Chapter Ten is MacNeice’s past in the “certainly disappearing world [he] had known” (Marsack 57) on the one hand, and his nearest future in Britain at the beginning of (and during) the Second World War on the other.
Remembering that particular year on his sea journey back to England, MacNeice “concludes”: It is, as I said, the same boat that brought me over. That was in January and this is December But before all that? I am 33 years old and what can I have been doing that I still am in a muddle? But everyone else is too, maybe our muddles are concurrent.
. . . Anyway, I will look back. And return later to pick up the present, or rather to pick up the future. (Strings 35) In “Broken Windows or Thinking Aloud,” an essay written probably shortly after (c. ) but published posthumously, MacNeice states: “I notice I have lost my nostalgia, am no longer worried by the passage of time.
Am ready to jettison the past—that is, my personal past” (Prose ). Still, although his poetry of the early s really marks the transition into more “impersonal meditations” (Marsack 68), childhood remains the period that MacNeice would soon continue to “pick up,” in both poetry and prose. Throughout his writing career, also in what is sometimes called “autobiographical criticism” (Longley 4), MacNeice resumes his childhood memories in order to provide insight into some of his imagery.
In the essay entitled “Experiences with Images” (), for instance, he speaks of “homey things, familiars” which might “sound trivial but they form an early stratum of experiences which persists in one’s work just as it persists in one’s dreams” (Criticism , ). In he undertook another longer autobiographical work that was meant to be “at once a new kind of autobiography and a new kind of travel book” (Strings 14).
What it eventually turned out to be was only the first two chapters dealing again with his childhood, and with early youth. After so many “rehearsals” MacNeice did not need, one might think, much preparation to talk about his life in Carrickfergus when in , shortly before his death, he was asked by a friend at BBC Belfast to talk about his recollections of childhood.
Indeed, the poet arrived at the studio without a scripted talk and the recording took place successfully, but not without an element of uncertainty signalled at the beginning: “I’m afraid I’ve not written these out, so don’t expect the exact word” (Prose ). Paul Farley, discussing MacNeice’s poem “Woods,” points to the fact that MacNeice “never ran out of childhood” (71) but the question remains whether he really ever ran away from it.
Edna Longley maintains that “MacNeice kept the past alive for artistic reasons, just as he cultivated Louis MacNeice’s “Autobiography” and the Poetics of Recovery dreams and nightmares” (3). Dodds, on the other hand, speaks of the poet’s “continuing preoccupation with his own past” which “amounted almost to an obsession” and which required of MacNeice “a necessary act of catharsis” (15).
These observations indicate how one’s need to return to one’s childhood can be an act of both missing and dismissing. In “Woods” MacNeice says that “The grown-up hates to divorce what the child joined” (). Yet to pay more attention to “joining” than to “divorcing”—which Farley seems to be doing when he quotes the line—would mean to neglect an alternative cultivated in the poem: “But I have also this other, this English, choice / Into what yet is foreign” ().
This proclamation of detachment turns out to be an illusion in another autobiographical poem, “Carrick Revisited.” In that poem MacNeice refers to his early Northern Irish experience in terms of an “interlude” that cannot be “cancelled,” or in terms of “what chance misspelt” that “May never now be righted by my choice” (). I mention all these facts as a kind of possible introduction to the poem “Autobiography,” whose refrain illustrates the fundamental hesitation between two extremities: nostalgia and anxiety.
It is a refrain that at once commemorates and exorcises what Edna Longley calls “the origins of nightmare” (9). It recurs eight times, dividing eight couplets, or distichs, each of which traditionally expresses a complete idea or, shall we say, is a summary of a particular memory, for example: My mother wore a yellow dress; Gently, gently, gentleness.
Come back early or never come. When I was five the black dreams came; Nothing after was quite the same. Come back early or never come. The dark was talking to the dead; The lamp was dark beside my bed. () This apparent completeness, or “wholeness,” forced by the poem’s simple yet strict “nursery-rhyme format” (Longley 9), challenges those of MacNeice’s autobiographical accounts that are haunted by the prefix “un-” as in the case of the earlier mentioned un-finished autobiography, the unwritten autobiographical travel book, the un-scripted radio talk.
Luckily Chapter Ten the poem “Autobiography” does not have to suffer from the same prefix.1 Does it imply that Carrickfergus—the embodiment of MacNeice’s whole childhood—needed to be reduced not only to the status of a “topographical frame” (as it is put in “Carrick Revisited”) (), but also to the minimalist frame of a couplet as a form?
In a letter to Eleanor Clark dated 3 September , while writing about a group of newly written poems, MacNeice implies the occasional necessity of a simple form for the otherwise hard to handle topic. He refers to the poem “Plurality” as “an 80 line philosophical [poem]” in which the “difficulty of content [is] balanced by an easy, almost slick, metre & rhyme scheme.” Then he qualifies “Autobiography” as “a naive-seeming kind of little ballad with refrain” (Stallworthy ).
These quick selfcomments overlap with each other. Moreover, they also connect with fragments of MacNeice’s criticism of Yeats’s late poetry “of the Crazy Jane type” (Yeats ), as in the following extract: Many of these poems belong to a peculiar genre—something between epigram and nursery rhyme. Some of them look superficially like light verse, even like nonsense verse; on examination they will be found to carry in a concentrated form the same passion and the same ideas that he uttered elsewhere ex cathedra.
() MacNeice’s “Autobiography,” too, is “superficially” easy, which a quick look at its form suggests: a nursery rhyme with a refrain. A more attentive look at these constituents, however, proves revealing as to the possible core of the experience sketched in the poem. Distichs were commonly used in Classical elegies (MacNeice was educated in Classics), while refrains were a common device in the ancient Egyptian Book of the Dead.
This is why I am tempted to classify “Autobiography” as an elegy whose subject, the dead mother, is being addressed in the regularly repeated refrain. “Come back early or never come” can be seen as a simplified 1 The second of MacNeice’s poems that has “biography” in the title is the much later “Notes for a Biography” (from Solstices, ), which really suggests “notes for an autobiography.” Here, again, the word “notes” implies the makeshift character of the piece.
It is also interesting that one autobiographical poem, “Tipperary” (chronologically belonging to Visitations, ), was “composed and abandoned” (McDonald ). What links some of MacNeice’s late “autobiographies” with “Autobiography” is that in various ways they continue that poem’s play with nursery-rhyme convention. “Notes for a Biography,” for example, manifests this affinity in the very first line, which alludes to the title of the well-known nursery rhyme “Oranges and Lemons”: “An oranges (sweet) and lemons (bitter) childhood” ().
Louis MacNeice’s “Autobiography” and the Poetics of Recovery reminiscence of a complex emotion—both hope and impatience—developed by a child waiting for the return of his or her mother from the hospital.2 MacNeice’s sister recalls: “Louis and I never saw her again . . . For a long time after her departure both Louis and I waited for and expected her return” (Strings 43).
MacNeice’s refrain transgresses its own convention. This variation is realised on many levels and amounts to the line’s growing autonomy between the poem’s other verses. Let me now further discuss its features and functions. The poet’s own views on the use of refrain can be of some help here. In The Poetry of W. B. Yeats he points to the two characteristics that make his predecessor’s refrains “unusual” ().
One of them is that unlike traditional refrains, which “ten[d] to be simpler in meaning than the rest of the poem” and “giv[e] the reader or hearer relief,” those of Yeats “tend to have either an intellectual meaning which is subtle and concentrated, or a symbolist or nonsense meaning which hits the reader below the belt” ().
The other characteristic is “the music” of Yeats’s refrains that “is often less obvious or smooth than that of the verses themselves” (). MacNeice’s “Come back early or never come,” similarly, is not merely decorative or facile but is in fact the most puzzling line in the poem. It appears troubling rather than comforting, and surely far more haunting than “giving relief.” The refrain disturbs the regularity of the couplets’ rhymes and becomes the most lively line in the poem, a surprise between the stanzas’ melodic predictability.
If indeed the mother is addressed here, we might treat this variation in the poem’s general monotony as a gesture that is feminine—remembering that movement (and change) and variety as antidotes against stasis, are often natural attributes of women in MacNeice’s poetry (as in “Leaving Barra”: “I thank you, my dear, for the example / Of living like a fugue and moving” 89).
Perhaps the dynamics of “Come back early or never come” can be read as an affirmation of the mother’s life rather than death? Moreover, placed between the descriptive couplets, the refrain strikes one as being an almost religious invocation. The word “come,” which both begins and ends the repeated line, and appears sixteen times, is mantric (“come .
. . come”), thus accentuating the speaker’s desire for the positive answer.
Autobiography poem louis macneice analysis group 1 "Autobiography" is a poem by Frederick Louis MacNeice, an Irish poet and playwright. The poem was first published in and is a powerful exploration of the themes of identity, memory, and self-reflection.It is actually very sensual and 2 In thinking of the simplification that the subject of death might demand or fail to avoid, Keith Douglas’s poem “Simplify Me When I’m Dead” () comes to mind. Its intention, especially in its two-line refrain: “Remember me when I am dead / and simplify me when I’m dead” (), resembles that of MacNeice’s in “Come back early or never come.” The two refrains show how the loss can be embodied in a simple phrase, which is an act of (still) remembering and of (gradual) forgetting at the same time (both “remember me” and “simplify me”).
Chapter Ten occurs in MacNeice’s other poems to summon some absent “her” who is often a fusion of mother and lover: “And therefore [I] cry to Her with the voice of broken bells / To come, visibly, palpably, to come” (“Troll’s Courtship” ) or: “If only you would come. . . .
Autobiography poem louis macneice analysis group Use the criteria sheet to understand greatest poems or improve your poetry analysis essay. The punctuation marks are various. Neither mark predominates. The author used lexical repetitions to emphasize a significant image; come, back, early, or, never are repeated. The poet used anaphora at the beginnings of some neighboring lines./ If only now you would come I should be happy / Now if now only” (“June Thunder” 57). This stress on “now” in the latter quote guides us to another important feature of the refrain of “Autobiography,” namely, that it does not fit in with the poem’s “chronology.” While the stanzas talk about two periods (as if)—before and after “When I was five” and are all kept in the simple past tense, the refrain speaks in the simple present tense, which communicates future.
“Come back early or never come” transforms the moment of past longing (the refrain sounds and looks like a quote) into the present moment of writing (and reading). This gives the effect of a future event yet unresolved, and—growing out of that—the illusion of the poet’s power to influence the course of past events. The illusion, however, turns into fact within the realm of the poem: the mother does “come back” each time that her absence is being voiced by the refrain.
Jerzy Ficowski, examining Bruno Schulz’s experiments with time, inspires yet another interpretation of the refrain in “Autobiography”: The imagination can halt or even turn back the flow of time back to its source. This is not a regression but, rather, a possible re-visiting of segments of time past . . . and annulling past events. Events over and done with may thus return to their own prehistory, to a stage of incompletion.
() It may be argued that in “Autobiography” this “stage of incompletion” is achieved by means of the refrain, which is forever suspended between the two alternatives: “early” and “never.” MacNeice’s decision to leave it open can be read as a form of compensation for his lack of choice “When [he] was five.” His choice in the poem then is to make the refrain not contribute to but go against the stream of narration which—with every stanza—wants to bring us closer to the negative (and) final answer.
The mother remains mute throughout the poem (in the sense that there is no direct reply to the refrain’s calling) but her message is conveyed through the images. Her attributes: “yellow” and “gently, gently, gentleness” change into—and are outnumbered by—“black,” “dark,” “dark,” “chilly sun,” and the negatives: “did not care,” “nobody, nobody,” “nobody, nobody” (the twice-repeated “nobody, nobody” that replaces “gently, gently” can be especially instructive as to who is missing and is being Louis MacNeice’s “Autobiography” and the Poetics of Recovery missed in the poem).3 The refrain enters between the couplets to interrupt and slow down this act of disappearing in the poem.
At the same time it further disrupts the already fragmented story. Is any recovery possible this way?
Louis macneice poetry: Use the criteria sheet to understand greatest poems or improve your poetry analysis essay. The punctuation marks are various. Neither mark predominates. The author used lexical repetitions to emphasize a significant image; come, back, early, or, never are repeated. The poet used anaphora at the beginnings of some neighboring lines.
The following fragment from The Strings Are False seems to hint at one possibility: Later I visited my mother in hospital and she offered me a box of chocolates. Something evil came up in me—I knew it to be evil . . . and I refused to take the box. I wanted the chocolates very much and also I wanted to be gracious to my mother, but something or other made me spite myself and her and stand there surly and refuse.
(43) The suspension that the refrain of “Autobiography” communicates becomes gradually more tiresome and “Come back early or never come” really begins to translate as: “if you do not come back soon, I will not be waiting.” This angry refusal to wait brings liberation. It allows negligence in the face of loss. And it allows forgetting: “if her recovery is impossible, then I want to recover from the trauma.” Canto XI of MacNeice’s Autumn Journal seems to support this interpretation.
It contains a fragment which speaks of a quest for the lost love whose “gentle” sleep is reminiscent of the dead mother’s “gentleness” in “Autobiography”: For suddenly I hate her and would murder Her memory if I could And then of a sudden I see her sleeping gently Inaccessible in a sleeping wood But thorns and thorns around her And the cries of night And I have no knife or axe to hack my passage Back to the lost delight.
() MacNeice’s memory of his mother’s death (a version of “the lost delight”) was not free from guilt. Here is a relevant quote from the poet’s sister’s memoir: 3 It is also interesting to consider the additional repetitions in the text of “Autobiography” that the composer Raymond Warren introduced when he set the poem to music after MacNeice’s death (“In My Childhood,” In Memoriam Louis MacNeice).
The most visible of these repetitions (and the most relevant one for my discussion) is that which really emphasizes the elegiac “never”: “Come back early or never come, or never never come” (). Chapter Ten I know from hearing my mother talk with her friends that she quite mistakenly believed that Louis’s difficult birth had in some way caused the uterine fibroid from which she suffered.
It is probable that Louis also heard this talk and from passages in his poetry and remarks made in later life, I believe that he had an irrational idea, perhaps only partly conscious, that his birth had caused his mother’s later illness and death. (Nicholson 16) Another possible function of the refrain in “Autobiography” then may be to exorcise this guilt—to repeat in order either to explain, gain a better understanding, or to “murder her memory” by saying “Come back early or never come” ad nauseam to the point where it is worn out and has become a cliché.
Defending the use of “repetition-devices” in twentieth-century poetry in his book on Yeats, MacNeice mentions the “danger of hypnosis” and concludes that “We must remember too that hypnosis can be illuminating” (). I would risk considering the last couplet of “Autobiography” epiphanic: “I woke up; the chilly sun / Saw me walk away alone” ().
The solitude in it (which in the first couplet was “plenitude”4) can be positive—a sign of independence from the burden of memories (or melancholy). It can be an example of those of MacNeice’s endings that make the poem “not circumscribe the experience, but launc[h] it” (Marsack 66). It also can be a sign of growing poetic maturity, if we regard the lapse in the final (nursery) rhyme as a sudden rejection of the inherited poetic form.
What partly leads to this lapse is the growing independence of the one-line refrain (in music, a “refrain” is also called a “burden”) which gradually loses its primal connotation—or rather, it is the addressee who loses his interest in why this should matter at all. In fact, MacNeice’s “Autobiography” undermines the concept of autobiography as a finished text.
It does so by contrasting the heavy title against the light form, and by the use of repetition (rhymes, refrain) which “mocks instead of reassuring, enacting the emptiness of ritual” (Marsack 62).
Autobiography poem louis macneice analysis group 2
"Autobiography" is a poem by Frederick Louis MacNeice, an Irish poet and playwright. The poem was first published in and is a powerful exploration of the themes of identity, memory, and self-reflection.Or it shows that autobiography is nothing more than text(s)—a play of the text, a play on the text. The more we repeat “Come back early or never come,” the more it turns into a game. And if it actually recovers nothing else in the poem, or by the poem, the refrain at least recovers its own lightness, when with every repetition it seems to sound more and more like: “Come back early or never mind.” 4 “In my childhood trees were green / And there was plenty to be seen” ().
Louis MacNeice’s “Autobiography” and the Poetics of Recovery Works Cited Dodds, E. R. “Editor’s Preface.” The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography. By Louis MacNeice. London: Faber, Douglas, Keith. “Simplify Me When I’m Dead.” The Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse. Ed. Philip Larkin. London: Oxford University Press, Ellmann, Richard.
Foreword. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. By Louis MacNeice. London: Faber, Farley, Paul. “His Inturned Eyes: MacNeice in the Woods.” Poetry Review (): Ficowski, Jerzy. Regions of the Great Heresy: The Life and Work of Bruno Schulz. Trans. Theodosia S. Robertson. London: Newman-Hemisphere, Longley, Edna. Louis MacNeice: A Study.
London: Faber, MacNeice, Louis. Collected Poems. Ed. Peter McDonald. London: Faber, —. The Poetry of W. B. Yeats. London: Faber, —.
Louis macneice autumn journal For my Poem for Lent this morning, I have selected ‘Autobiography,’ by Louis MacNeice. This is one of 11 poems he wrote during a week’s convalescence from peritonitis on an island in Connecticut in August and September , and it was published in his Selected Poems.Selected Literary Criticism of Louis MacNeice. Ed. Alan Heuser. Oxford: Clarendon, —. Selected Prose of Louis MacNeice. Ed. Alan Heuser. New York: Oxford University Press, —. The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography. London: Faber, Marsack, Robyn. The Cave of Making: Poetry of Louis MacNeice. Oxford: Clarendon, McDonald, Peter. Louis MacNeice: The Poet in His Contexts.
Oxford: Clarendon, Nicholson, Elizabeth. “Trees Were Green.” Time Was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice. Ed. Terence Brown and Alec Reid. Dublin: Dolmen, Stallworthy, Jon. Louis MacNeice. London: Faber, Thwaite, Anthony. “Defences against Dread.” Rev. of The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice, by Robyn Marsack. Times Literary Supplement 14 Jan.
Warren, Raymond, music by. “In My Childhood” (In Memoriam Louis MacNeice). Part-Song for SATB (unaccompanied). Words by Louis MacNeice. Part-Song Book. London: Novello,