Biographical background
According to Jon Stallworthy, Louis MacNeice wrote The Sunlight on the Garden as a "love-song" for his first wife, Mary Ezra, shortly after their divorce was finalised in November 1936. [3] Mary had left MacNeice for Charles Katzman in November 1935, and she followed Katzman to America early the next year. MacNeice was initially "devastated". [4] However, by the time the divorce was finalised, MacNeice was able to contemplate the end of his marriage with acceptance (as in the first stanza of The Sunlight on the Garden) and to remember his time with Mary with gratitude (as in the last stanza). At the same time that MacNeice wrote The Sunlight on the Garden he was collaborating with W. H. Auden on Letters from Iceland, and in Last Will and Testament from Letters from Iceland MacNeice shows a similar spirit of generosity towards Mary:
Lastly to Mary living in a remote
Country I leave whatever she would remember
Of hers and mine before she took that boat,
Such memories not being necessarily lumber
And may no chance, unless she wills, delete them
And may her hours be gold and without number. [5]
On 6 November 1936, four days after the divorce was finalised, MacNeice moved into a flat at 4 Keats Grove, Hampstead, London. (The previous occupant of the flat was the poet and critic Geoffrey Grigson, and the flat was just fifty yards along the road from Keats House, the house once occupied by the poet John Keats). The Sunlight on the Garden was written while MacNeice was living at 4a Keats Grove, and as Jon Stallworthy notes, 4a was a 'garden flat'; "the three principal rooms of the flat faced south and, even in November, were lit by the low sun striking through the branches of two large sycamores at the back of the garden.". [6] Stallworthy associates The Sunlight on the Garden with the garden of 4 Keats Grove and other gardens MacNeice had known, going back to the garden at Carrickfergus Rectory where MacNeice had spent his childhood.
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon. [7]
"The Sunlight on the Garden", Stanza 1
The Sunlight on the Garden is a poem of four stanzas, each of six lines. It is a highly formal poem, and has been much admired as an example of MacNeice's poetic technique. All the lines are loose three-beat lines or trimeters, except for the fifth line of each stanza, which is a dimeter. The rhyme scheme is ABCBBA. The A rhyme in the first stanza ("garden/pardon") returns in the final stanza, but with the words reversed ("pardon/garden"). In addition to end rhyme, MacNeice makes use of internal rhyme, rhyming the end of the first line with the beginning of the second line ("lances/Advances") and the end of the third line with the beginning of the fourth line ("under/Thunder"). George MacBeth comments that the rhyme scheme "has the effect of dovetailing the lines together and producing a constant sense of echo emphasising the lingering, fading quality of the joys of life which the poem is talking about." [8]
Jon Stallworthy also comments on the effect of the rhyme scheme: "The poem, propelled by its insistent rhymes, seems to move in a circle that, on closer inspection, proves to be a spiral; its end revealing a knowledge, a wisdom, not present at its beginning.". [9]
A clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley. The first line is the name of the poem's subject, usually a famous person put in an absurd light, or revealing something unknown or spurious about them. The rhyme scheme is AABB, and the rhymes are often forced. The line length and metre are irregular. Bentley invented the clerihew in school and then popularized it in books. One of his best known is this (1905):
An ode is a type of lyrical stanza. It is an elaborately structured poem praising or glorifying an event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as emotionally. A classic ode is structured in three major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also enter.
Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language—such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre—to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.
Wystan Hugh Auden was an Anglo-American poet. Auden's poetry was noted for its stylistic and technical achievement, its engagement with politics, morals, love, and religion, and its variety in tone, form, and content. Some of his best known poems are about love, such as "Funeral Blues"; on political and social themes, such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"; on cultural and psychological themes, such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes such as "For the Time Being" and "Horae Canonicae".
The Golden Treasury of English Songs and Lyrics is a popular anthology of English poetry, originally selected for publication by Francis Turner Palgrave in 1861. It was considerably revised, with input from Tennyson, about three decades later. Palgrave excluded all poems by poets then still alive.
Terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme. It was first used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri.
Frederick Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright from Northern Ireland, and a member of the Auden Group, which also included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly or simplistically political as some of his contemporaries, he expressed a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his roots.
Onegin stanza, sometimes "Pushkin sonnet", refers to the verse form popularized by the Russian poet Alexander Pushkin through his novel in verse Eugene Onegin. The work was mostly written in verses of iambic tetrameter with the rhyme scheme aBaBccDDeFFeGG, where the lowercase letters represent feminine rhymes and the uppercase representing masculine rhymes. For example, here is the first stanza of Onegin as rendered into English by Charles Hepburn Johnston:
Professor Peter McDonald is a poet, university lecturer and writer of literary criticism. He holds the post of Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language at Christ Church, a college of the University of Oxford.
Jon Howie Stallworthy, was a British literary critic and poet. He was Professor of English at the University of Oxford from 1992 to 2000, and Professor Emeritus in retirement. He was also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford from 1986, where he was twice acting president. From 1977 to 1986, he was the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University.
Accentual-syllabic verse is an extension of accentual verse which fixes both the number of stresses and syllables within a line or stanza. Accentual-syllabic verse is highly regular and therefore easily scannable. Usually, either one metrical foot, or a specific pattern of metrical feet, is used throughout the entire poem; thus one can speak about a poem being in, for example, iambic pentameter. Poets naturally vary the rhythm of their lines, using devices such as inversion, elision, masculine and feminine endings, the caesura, using secondary stress, the addition of extra-metrical syllables, or the omission of syllables, the substitution of one foot for another.
The following outline is provided as an overview of and introduction to poetry:
Letters from Iceland is a travel book in prose and verse by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, published in 1937.
The Earth Compels was the second poetry collection by Louis MacNeice. It was published by Faber and Faber on 28 April 1938, and was one of four books by Louis MacNeice to appear in 1938, along with I Crossed the Minch, Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay and Zoo.
Zoo is a book by Louis MacNeice. It was published by Michael Joseph in November 1938, and according to the publisher's list belongs in the category of belles lettres. It was one of four books by Louis MacNeice to appear in 1938, along with The Earth Compels, I Crossed the Minch and Modern Poetry: A Personal Essay.
"Carrickfergus" is a 44-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was written in 1937 and first published in book form in MacNeice's poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). The poem reflects on MacNeice's childhood in Carrickfergus, a large town in County Antrim, Northern Ireland. Although the title of the poem is "Carrickfergus", the text of the poem refers to "Carrick", as the town is known locally and colloquially.
Rugby Football Excursion is a 44-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was written in 1938 and first published in book form in MacNeice's poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). The poem recounts an excursion taken by MacNeice from London to Dublin, in order to watch a rugby football match at Lansdowne Road stadium. MacNeice does not specify the occasion, but internal evidence from the poem establishes the match as a rugby football international when England defeated Ireland on 12 February 1938, 36 - 14.
"Epilogue For W. H. Auden" is a 76-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was written in late 1936 and was first published in book form in Letters from Iceland, a travel book in prose and verse by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice (1937). MacNeice subsequently included it as the last poem in his poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). "Epilogue For W. H. Auden" reviews the Iceland trip MacNeice and Auden had taken together in the summer of 1936; the poem mentions events that had occurred while MacNeice and Auden were in Iceland, such as the fall of Seville and the Olympic Games in Berlin.
June Thunder is a 28-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was first published in book form in MacNeice's poetry collection The Earth Compels (1938). The poem begins with memories of idyllic summer days in the countryside - "the unenduring / Joys of a season" - before returning to the present and "impending thunder". June Thunder is written in a loose form of the sapphic stanza, with three lines set in falling rhythm followed by a shorter fourth line. The poem was anthologised in A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920-1940 (1941), edited by Cecil Day-Lewis and L.A.G. Strong, and Penguin New Writing No. 2.
Autumn Journal is an autobiographical long poem in twenty-four sections by Louis MacNeice. It was written between August and December 1938, and published as a single volume by Faber and Faber in May 1939. Written in a discursive form, it sets out to record the author's state of mind as the approaching World War 2 seems more and more inevitable. Fifteen years later, MacNeice attempted a similar personal evaluation of the post-war period in his Autumn Sequel.
