Favourite Poems: Sunday Morning by Louis MacNeice

I prefer Advent to Christmas. I prefer the weeks leading up to the holidays, when the workaday world (which I love) is still thrumming along, but there's Christmas lights and Christmas decorations everywhere.

I actually don't like it to end, so every Christmas I find myself contemplating a Christmas tree or an Advent wreath or some such seasonal spectacle, trying to step outside the stream of time and immerse myself in the moment.

It's one of the tragedies of the human condition that we can never fully achieve this. 

C.S. Lewis put it masterfully, in an essay on storytelling: "In real life, as in a story, something must happen. This is just the trouble. We grasp at a state and find only a succession of events in which the state is never quite embodied. The grand idea of finding Atlantis which stirs us in the first chapter of the adventure story is apt to be frittered away in mere excitement when the journey has once been begun. But so, in real life, the idea of adventure fades when the day-to-day details begin to happen. Nor is this merely because actual hardship and danger shoulder it aside. Other grand ideas – homecoming, reunion with a beloved – similarly elude our grasp. Suppose there is no disappointment; even so – well, you are here. But now, something must happen, and after that something else. All that happens may be delightful: but can any such series quite embody the sheer state of being which was what we wanted? If the author’s plot is only a net of time and event for catching what is not really a process at all, is life much more?"

In poetry, this thought has been expressed superbly by Louis MacNeice in his poem "Sunday Morning". I've never liked Sundays myself, and I prefer the working week to the weekend, but the idea he's getting at is probably universal. The paradox is that his poem does, to a certain extent, achieve the very thing it claims to be impossible. Perhaps nothing ever achieves it better than art.

Sunday Morning by Louis MacNeice

Down the road someone is practising scales,
The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails,
Man's heart expands to tinker with his car
For this is Sunday morning, Fate's great bazaar;
Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now,
And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead anyhow,
Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast
That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past,
That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.

But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire
Open its eight bells out, skulls' mouths which will not tire
To tell how there is no music or movement which secures
Escape from the weekday time. Which deadens and endures.