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Book Description
A historically significant collection of poems from one of Ireland's most treasured poets.
--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.
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The great achievement of MacNeice in Autumn Journal is the way in which he blends public events with his own personal emotions and experiences. It explores the way in which political and social developments inform ones private existence, and how ones personal beliefs influence the way in which one reacts to and interprets those public events. For example, a beautiful use of language contrasts the way politician's reputations and stocks "go up" with the literal way the Czechs "go down", with Chamberlain's agreement with Hitler. However, MacNeice refuses to moralise, and he records his honest initial reaction, which was to "Save my skin and damn my conscience", in the relief that a war had been averted.
Autumn Journal successfully incorporates a strongly autobiographical flavour, with poems about MacNeice's Irish heritage and his classical education's relevance in the modern world. The recent breakdown of his first marriage is also a strong presence, with section IV constituting one of the most moving tributes to a woman written this century. Again, part of its beauty and quality which makes it such an important statement of its age is the way in which this personal loss acts as an analogy for the passing of an era and way of life that the coming war was expected to sweep away.
Despite its undertones of approaching disaster, MacNeice's joy in everyday life and love of 'the moment' endows the poem with moments of optimism, most notably in the hope that he may transcend some of his own prejudices "with time and luck - to dance" with others. It is a moving testament to an age on the brink of war, which manages to take strength from everyday experiences and values that would be necessary in the coming darkness. Moreover, this is achieved in a sophisticated structure that is nevertheless highly entertaining and easily accessible to the general reader.
Amidst the resumption of teaching routines at Birmingham University (where MacNeice taught classics), love and its waning as he loves and falls out of love with Nancy Coldstream (`When we are out of love, how were we ever in it ?' (64)), and the continuing Spanish Civil War, one theme is pervasive: unease and uncertainty about the looming conflict. `All we can do at most/Is press an anxious ear against the keyhole/To hear the Future breathing' (60) sums up the sometimes contradictory emotions and the thoughts of a world in which `posters flapping on the railings tell the fluttered/World that Hitler speaks, that Hitler speaks' (14). I love the way the remorseless rhythm of that second line gives the sense of feet in lockstep, a hint of the coming conflict with the `legions' (a recurring image), the `beast'.
It must have been hard to believe that there was any hope, and there is certainly a fatalist tone to some sections of the Journal. And it's certainly not naïve about what is coming. But here and there (and it seems to me this is MacNeice's enduring achievement), the poet distils something - out of a trip to Oxford to vote in the General Election, out of childhood reminiscences - that energises, gives a sense of the humane fellow-feeling, the vision, the energy that will shape and transform destiny for good rather than evil. `Still there are still the seeds of energy and choice/Still alive even if forbidden, hidden/And while a man has voice/He may recover music' (62). Almost buried, it takes a poet's sense of rhythm and intuition to perceive that the way ahead lies through `the will to truth and love's initiative' (69), even as we sleep `[o]n the banks of the Rubicon' when `the die is cast' (83), ready for the conflict that must come. A remarkable testimony, from a remarkable year.
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