Autumn Sequel by Louis MacNeice: One of a Possible Series of Posts

I very often, and increasingly often, berate my contemporaries for not reading enough poetry, and especially for not reading enough long poetry. Well, just like the doctor who chain-smokes, I should also berate myself, and I do. I haven't read nearly enough poetry, and I haven't read nearly enough long poetry.

Case in point: I have been trying to finish Louis MacNeice's Autumn Sequel for about thirty years, and I only succeeded a few weeks ago.

This despite the fact that Autumn Sequel has been an extremely important poem in my life, parts of which I've had memorized since my late teens.

I first discovered Autumn Sequel because a section from it was included as an epilogue to one edition of the Oxford Book of English Verse. About two pages of it was excerpted, and I'll only quote a few lines (you can read the whole excerpt here):

A cloud of witnesses. To whom? To what?
To the small fire that never leaves the sky.
To the great fire that boils the daily pot.

To all the things we are not remembered by,
Which we remember and bless. To all the things
That will not even notice when we die...

The whole excerpt thrilled me, but these lines especially. "The great fire that boils the daily pot" was the sort of affirmation of the ordinary, the daily, the social, that I yearned for as a teenager. It evoked the same mood as Chesterton's line, "The strong incredible sanities of the sun".

It's good to affirm life-- it's crucial, in fact-- but it raises problems. There are different ways we can affirm life. There's the approach taken by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass, a sort of mystical affirmation of everything equally:

I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journey-work of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren,
And the tree-toad is a chef-d’œuvre for the highest,
And the running blackberry would adorn the parlors of heaven,
And the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery,
And the cow crunching with depress’d head surpasses any statue,
And a mouse is miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.

Could this indiscriminate ecstasy be sustained, and does it not risk reducing everything to sameness? Indeed, it can create moral problems, as with the penultimate line of the very excerpt in the Oxford Book of English Verse from which I've just quoted, which is: "As life can be confirmed even in suicide." No, life cannot be confirmed in suicide.

G.K. Chesterton articulates the danger of affirming everything in his Autobiography, where he writes: "What could I have said, if some tyrant had twisted this idea of transcendental contentment into an excuse for tyranny? Suppose he had quoted at me my verses about the all-sufficiency of elementary existence and the green vision of life, had used them to prove that the poor should be content with anything, and had said, like the old oppressor, "Let them eat grass." "

Happily, although MacNeice certainly affirms life in Autumn Sequel-- including the ordinary, everyday things of life-- it's not an indiscriminate affirmation. He is questioning his own ideas throughout the poem, and he is not blind to the problem of banality-- real banality, the banality of commercialism and the mass media and the routine. At the time he wrote the poem, MacNeice was writing for the BBC, and in one section he describes his work on a documentary about Mount Everest. He is unsure whether he is justified in taking something grand and heroic, such as the conquest of Everest, and packaging it as entertainment:

What price

Should we demand for turning what was rare

Into a cheap couvade or proxy paradise

Just one more travelogue to make the groundlings stare?

Groundlings will never see why Mallory answered why

Men should climb Everest: because it is there.

("Because it is there" is one of the many phrases used as recurring motifs in the poem.)

But MacNeice is certainly not a snob, either. His ideal of a poet has been quoted many times, including on this blog. However, it deserves to be quoted again: "I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions."

The depth of the poem comes, among other things, from the contrast between MacNeice's immense erudition (he won a first-class degree at Oxford and was at one point a lecturer in classics) and his openness, often even his delight, in the everyday and modern.

I've written a lot about the flux of daily life on this blog, and my fascination with it. I've also written about my concept of "streams of time". This is very much the flavour of Autumn Sequel. It describes MacNeice's journey through the autumn of 1953, ending in a train journey on Christmas Day, in an all-but deserted carriage. (This part might appeal to Peter Hitchens.) We see him working, returning to his student haunts in Oxford, visiting an art gallery, attending the funeral of his close friend Dylan Thomas, and doing many other things. All the while he is pondering the meaning and value of his experiences, and applying them to the human condition in general.

Autumn Sequel is written in terza rima, a devilishly hard rhyming scheme to pull off. It's the rhyming scheme Dante used for the Divine Comedy, but it's much better suited to Italian than English. MacNeice very often has to use rather contrived rhymes to follow it. If you're bothered by (for instance) the use of the word "fife" to rhyme with "life", you might not like this poem. But why should you be bothered?

Why is it called Autumn Sequel? Because the poem is a follow-up to a previous long poem, Autumn Journal, which is critically much more highly regarded. (I'm not sure I can add "popularly", since neither of them seem popularly regarded at all.) I recently read a diary entry by an Irish writer, who recalled telling MacNeice that a friend of his had been reading Autumn Sequel. "I suppose he prefers Autumn Journal, like everybody else", said MacNeice. He was pleased to hear the contrary.

I hope to return to Autumn Sequel in future posts, but I will finish this one with a section from Canto 23. Since the European Championships are currently taking place (soccer, in case you didn't know), I thought MacNeice's meditation on sport might be suitable:

I slip off to where the unlettered hinds
And miners watch an oval ball cavort
In a huge roaring box, a black shirt grinds

A red shirt in the mud; the joy of sport
Identifies oneself with X or Y
Or even with that ball, which one minute gives short

Change with its bounce and at the next will fly
Madly beyond and over; while this crowd
Also is something to identify

Oneself with, lose oneself in, on one loud
Raised beach one pebble in fifty thousand, tinted
Pink by the sinking sun; those muddy but unbowed

Players are me, this crowd is me, that undinted
And indestructible mischievous ball is me,
And all the gold medallions ever minted

By sinking suns are mine..

[..]

Is it absurd
To have preferred at times a sport to works of art?
Where both show craft, at times I have preferred

The greater measure of chance, that thrill which sports impart
Because they are not foregone, move in more fluid borders.
Statues and even plays are finished before they start,

But in a game, as in life, we are under Starter's Orders.