The Sunday Night Poem - Louis MacNeice

Frederick Louis MacNeice, CBE was born in Belfast, Ireland in 1906, educated at Oxford and then lived in London not only as a poet but also playwright, college lecturer, novelist, translator, and writer and producer for the BBC. He is considered to be a major contributor to Irish poetry, possibly the Emerald Isle's finest after Yeats. His was a life bursting with life - marriages and affairs, friendships with Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis (father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis), travel, alcohol and finally death at age 55 from pneumonia caught while spelunking for sound effects for one of his many radio plays.

MacNeice believed that the best poetry comes from the writer who embraces his unique desires and hatreds and elegantly weaves them into his verse. He states this frankly:

My own prejudice is in favour of poets whose world is not too esoteric. I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspaper, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions. The relationship between life and literature is almost impossible to analyse, but it should not be degraded into something like the translation of one language into another. For life is not literary, while literature is not, in spite of Plato, second hand." (from Modern Poetry, Oxford, 1938)

Before reading the following poem, first take a moment to think of the unexpected events in your life. Think of disappointments and unwanted challenges, of the sudden whirlwind of chaos that blusters and then, as quickly as a traveling storm, rushes past, of preposterous love that now lies quietly pressed between the pages of memory. Now ask yourself, "Have these hurt or helped?" and click on the prompt below.

Variation on Heraclitus

Even the walls are flowing, even the ceiling,
Nor only in terms of physics; the pictures
Bob on each picture rail like floats on a line
While the books on the shelves keep reeling
Their titles out into space and the carpet
Keeps flying away to Arabia nor can this be where I stood -
Where I shot the rapids I mean - when I signed
On a line that rippled away with a pen that melted
Nor can this now be the chair - the chairoplane of a chair -
That I sat in the day that I thought I had made up my mind
And as for that standard lamp it too keeps waltzing away
Down an unbridgeable Ganges where nothing is standard
And lights are but lit to be drowned in honour and spite of some dark
And vanishing goddess. No, whatever you say,
Reappearance presumes disappearance, it may not be nice
Or proper or easily analysed not to be static
But none of your slide snide rules can catch what is sliding so fast
And, all you advisers on this by the time it is that,
I just do not want your advice
Nor need you be troubled to pin me down in my room
Since the room and I will escape for I tell you flat:
One cannot live in the same room twice.

(1961)