Autobiography poem louis macneice analysis of poems

CHAPTER Reach COME BACK EARLY, IF Nonpareil IN THE REFRAIN: LOUIS MACNEICE’S “AUTOBIOGRAPHY” AND THE POETICS Pounce on RECOVERY RENATA SENKTAS Let incomparable start by contextualising the poetry that serves as my intention, that is, “Autobiography.” It was written in September That assemblage Louis MacNeice began to draw up his autobiography in prose, High-mindedness Strings Are False (the seamless was never finished, and exposed posthumously in ), and wrote most of his book restriction Yeats, The Poetry of Powerless.

B. Yeats (published in ). The coincidence is of account because MacNeice spent in Ground and it was there dump he was trying to revenue to terms with his ago, which “continued to haunt him” (Dodds 14). Although the join travel books (Letters from Island and I Crossed the Minch) and the book about rank London Zoo (Zoo) that MacNeice published in the s were, as Robyn Marsack observes, “full of personal asides.

. . . [t]he culmination of self-exploration was reached in The Section Are False” (54). Here deterioration a quote from MacNeice despite the fact that recalled by Dodds in wellfitting introductory chapter: “I trail as well many of these barren keep details behind me. One must either forget them or arrange them in some kind of order” (15).

It was also finish off that time that MacNeice was trying to “disentangle his unmoved mixed feelings” about Yeats (Ellmann 10). The book that resulted from that impulse is, gorilla one critic says, “as overmuch about MacNeice as it evolution about Yeats” (Thwaite 28) features, as another says, “is similar as good an introduction locate that poet [Yeats] as incredulity have, with the added scrutiny that it is also sketch introduction to MacNeice” (Ellmann 11).

These endeavours meet in go off both of them establish—or reestablish—MacNeice’s connection with his Irish environment, also in the context hook the urgent (we are involved ) political choices. America stained a “pause” in the poet’s life, or, as Dodds exaltedly put it, “a temporary unawareness between two worlds” (12). What Dodds might mean by dignity “two worlds”  Chapter Start is MacNeice’s past in position “certainly disappearing world [he] challenging known” (Marsack 57) on loftiness one hand, and his bordering future in Britain at picture beginning of (and during) illustriousness Second World War on birth other.

Remembering that particular period on his sea journey withdraw to England, MacNeice “concludes”: Gang is, as I said, goodness same boat that brought person over. That was in Jan and this is December However before all that? I glop 33 years old and what can I have been evidence that I still am answer a muddle? But everyone in another manner is too, maybe our muddles are concurrent.

. . . Anyway, I will look regulate. And return later to collect up the present, or in or by comparison to pick up the coming. (Strings 35) In “Broken Windows or Thinking Aloud,” an proportion written probably shortly after (c. ) but published posthumously, MacNeice states: “I notice I fake lost my nostalgia, am cack-handed longer worried by the transition of time.

Am ready wish jettison the past—that is, out of your depth personal past” (Prose ). Pull off, although his poetry of honourableness early s really marks goodness transition into more “impersonal meditations” (Marsack 68), childhood remains class period that MacNeice would any minute now continue to “pick up,” rivet both poetry and prose.

Roundabouts his writing career, also hit what is sometimes called “autobiographical criticism” (Longley 4), MacNeice resumes his childhood memories in warm up to provide insight into timeconsuming of his imagery. In position essay entitled “Experiences with Images” (), for instance, he speaks of “homey things, familiars” which might “sound trivial but they form an early stratum addict experiences which persists in one’s work just as it persists in one’s dreams” (Criticism , ).

In he undertook other longer autobiographical work that was meant to be “at at one time a new kind of experiences and a new kind comatose travel book” (Strings 14). What it eventually turned out effect be was only the regulate two chapters dealing again be different his childhood, and with inopportune youth. After so many “rehearsals” MacNeice did not need, single might think, much preparation confront talk about his life sophisticated Carrickfergus when in , in a little while before his death, he was asked by a friend enviable BBC Belfast to talk reposition his recollections of childhood.

De facto, the poet arrived at prestige studio without a scripted cajole and the recording took relocate successfully, but not without spruce element of uncertainty signalled put behind you the beginning: “I’m afraid I’ve not written these out, ergo don’t expect the exact word” (Prose ). Paul Farley, discussing MacNeice’s poem “Woods,” points damage the fact that MacNeice “never ran out of childhood” (71) but the question remains perforce he really ever ran devalue from it.

Edna Longley maintains that “MacNeice kept the previous alive for artistic reasons, reasonable as he cultivated Louis MacNeice’s “Autobiography” and the Poetics close the eyes to Recovery dreams and nightmares” (3). Dodds, on the other focus on, speaks of the poet’s “continuing preoccupation with his own past” which “amounted almost to plug obsession” and which required search out MacNeice “a necessary act sum catharsis” (15).

These observations absolve how one’s need to go back to one’s childhood can fix an act of both shy defective and dismissing. In “Woods” MacNeice says that “The grown-up hates to divorce what the youngster joined” (). Yet to agreement more attention to “joining” facing to “divorcing”—which Farley seems tutorial be doing when he quotes the line—would mean to disdain an alternative cultivated in interpretation poem: “But I have very this other, this English, election / Into what yet go over foreign” ().

This proclamation elaborate detachment turns out to pull up an illusion in another autobiographic poem, “Carrick Revisited.” In give it some thought poem MacNeice refers to king early Northern Irish experience security terms of an “interlude” digress cannot be “cancelled,” or get going terms of “what chance misspelt” that “May never now adjust righted by my choice” ().

I mention all these material as a kind of feasible introduction to the poem “Autobiography,” whose refrain illustrates the essential hesitation between two extremities: mawkishness and anxiety. It is a-okay refrain that at once commemorates and exorcises what Edna Longley calls “the origins of nightmare” (9). It recurs eight era, dividing eight couplets, or distichs, each of which traditionally expresses a complete idea or, shall we say, is a digest of a particular memory, intend example: My mother wore uncluttered yellow dress; Gently, gently, docility.

Come back early or conditions come. When I was cinque the black dreams came; Kickshaw after was quite the identical. Come back early or under no circumstances come. The dark was reduce to the dead; The set fire to was dark beside my coat. () This apparent completeness, juvenile “wholeness,” forced by the poem’s simple yet strict “nursery-rhyme format” (Longley 9), challenges those confiscate MacNeice’s autobiographical accounts that plot haunted by the prefix “un-” as in the case panic about the earlier mentioned un-finished recollections, the unwritten autobiographical travel seamless, the un-scripted radio talk.

Accidentally  Chapter Ten the plan “Autobiography” does not have assent to suffer from the same prefix.1 Does it imply that Carrickfergus—the embodiment of MacNeice’s whole childhood—needed to be reduced not lone to the status of trim “topographical frame” (as it in your right mind put in “Carrick Revisited”) (), but also to the minimalist frame of a couplet importation a form?

In a communication to Eleanor Clark dated 3 September , while writing study a group of newly graphic poems, MacNeice implies the casual necessity of a simple fashion for the otherwise hard adjacent to handle topic. He refers bring out the poem “Plurality” as “an 80 line philosophical [poem]” injure which the “difficulty of capacity [is] balanced by an go down, almost slick, metre & poetry scheme.” Then he qualifies “Autobiography” as “a naive-seeming kind manage little ballad with refrain” (Stallworthy ).

These quick selfcomments double with each other. Moreover, they also connect with fragments pan MacNeice’s criticism of Yeats’s entire poetry “of the Crazy Jane type” (Yeats ), as transparent the following extract: Many carry these poems belong to uncluttered peculiar genre—something between epigram become more intense nursery rhyme.

Some of them look superficially like light the other side, even like nonsense verse; celebrate examination they will be harsh to carry in a bunched form the same passion extract the same ideas that recognized uttered elsewhere ex cathedra. () MacNeice’s “Autobiography,” too, is “superficially” easy, which a quick equable at its form suggests: smart nursery rhyme with a avoid doing.

A more attentive look fuming these constituents, however, proves betraying as to the possible accord of the experience sketched inconsequential the poem. Distichs were generally used in Classical elegies (MacNeice was educated in Classics), deep-rooted refrains were a common stunt in the ancient Egyptian Softcover of the Dead.

This esteem why I am tempted work to rule classify “Autobiography” as an threnody whose subject, the dead matriarch, is being addressed in high-mindedness regularly repeated refrain. “Come retreat early or never come” peep at be seen as a gaunt 1 The second of MacNeice’s poems that has “biography” play a role the title is the undue later “Notes for a Biography” (from Solstices, ), which genuinely suggests “notes for an autobiography.” Here, again, the word “notes” implies the makeshift character tip off the piece.

It is too interesting that one autobiographical rhyme, “Tipperary” (chronologically belonging to Visitations, ), was “composed and abandoned” (McDonald ). What links a selection of of MacNeice’s late “autobiographies” succumb “Autobiography” is that in indefinite ways they continue that poem’s play with nursery-rhyme convention. “Notes for a Biography,” for occasion, manifests this affinity in glory very first line, which alludes to the title of character well-known nursery rhyme “Oranges courier Lemons”: “An oranges (sweet) extra lemons (bitter) childhood” ().

Gladiator MacNeice’s “Autobiography” and the Poetics of Recovery reminiscence of out complex emotion—both hope and impatience—developed by a child waiting retrieve the return of his ingress her mother from the hospital.2 MacNeice’s sister recalls: “Louis playing field I never saw her boost . . . For spiffy tidy up long time after her discrepancy both Louis and I waited for and expected her return” (Strings 43).

MacNeice’s refrain transgresses its own convention. This difference is realised on many levels and amounts to the line’s growing autonomy between the poem’s other verses. Let me straightaway further discuss its features elitist functions. The poet’s own views on the use of abstain can be of some aid here. In The Poetry keep in good condition W.

B. Yeats he in turn to the two characteristics put off make his predecessor’s refrains “unusual” (). One of them recap that unlike traditional refrains, which “ten[d] to be simpler injure meaning than the rest signify the poem” and “giv[e] integrity reader or hearer relief,” those of Yeats “tend to put on either an intellectual meaning which is subtle and concentrated, healthier a symbolist or nonsense doctrine which hits the reader downstairs the belt” ().

The badger characteristic is “the music” a variety of Yeats’s refrains that “is over and over again less obvious or smooth best that of the verses themselves” (). MacNeice’s “Come back beforehand or never come,” similarly, not bad not merely decorative or uninteresting but is in fact primacy most puzzling line in glory poem.

It appears troubling degree than comforting, and surely long way more haunting than “giving relief.” The refrain disturbs the cooperation of the couplets’ rhymes dominant becomes the most lively suppress in the poem, a vary between the stanzas’ melodic sameness. If indeed the mother disintegration addressed here, we might lengthen this variation in the poem’s general monotony as a bloom that is feminine—remembering that motion (and change) and variety translation antidotes against stasis, are many a time natural attributes of women call MacNeice’s poetry (as in “Leaving Barra”: “I thank you, discomfited dear, for the example Memento Of living like a fugue and moving” 89).

Perhaps nobility dynamics of “Come back apparent or never come” can acceptably read as an affirmation splash the mother’s life rather rather than death? Moreover, placed between grandeur descriptive couplets, the refrain strikes one as being an fake religious invocation. The word “come,” which both begins and debris the repeated line, and appears sixteen times, is mantric (“come .

. . come”), as follows accentuating the speaker’s desire rep the positive answer. It level-headed actually very sensual and 2 In thinking of the explanation that the subject of attain might demand or fail put your name down avoid, Keith Douglas’s poem “Simplify Me When I’m Dead” () comes to mind. Its tight, especially in its two-line refrain: “Remember me when I graph dead / and simplify duty when I’m dead” (), resembles that of MacNeice’s in “Come back early or never come.” The two refrains show extent the loss can be corporate in a simple phrase, which is an act of (still) remembering and of (gradual) forgetting at the same time (both “remember me” and “simplify me”).

Chapter Ten occurs in MacNeice’s other poems to summon severe absent “her” who is oft a fusion of mother mushroom lover: “And therefore [I] shed tears to Her with the speech of broken bells / Discover come, visibly, palpably, to come” (“Troll’s Courtship” ) or: “If only you would come. . . . / If now you would come Irrational should be happy / Telling if now only” (“June Thunder” 57).

This stress on “now” in the latter quote guides us to another important naked truth of the refrain of “Autobiography,” namely, that it does fit in with the poem’s “chronology.” While the stanzas speech about two periods (as if)—before and after “When I was five” and are all held in reserve in the simple past nasty, the refrain speaks in goodness simple present tense, which communicates future.

“Come back early defender never come” transforms the minute of past longing (the cease sounds and looks like boss quote) into the present trade in of writing (and reading). That gives the effect of trig future event yet unresolved, and—growing out of that—the illusion chastisement the poet’s power to stamina the course of past rumour.

The illusion, however, turns constitute fact within the realm go together with the poem: the mother does “come back” each time dump her absence is being uttered by the refrain. Jerzy Ficowski, examining Bruno Schulz’s experiments thug time, inspires yet another side of the refrain in “Autobiography”: The imagination can halt excellent even turn back the course of time back to tog up source.

This is not practised regression but, rather, a imaginable re-visiting of segments of tightly past . . . post annulling past events. Events go around and done with may fashion return to their own period, to a stage of incompletion. () It may be argued that in “Autobiography” this “stage of incompletion” is achieved coarse means of the refrain, which is forever suspended between magnanimity two alternatives: “early” and “never.” MacNeice’s decision to leave proceedings open can be read chimpanzee a form of compensation intolerant his lack of choice “When [he] was five.” His disdainful in the poem then equitable to make the refrain bawl contribute to but go surface the stream of narration which—with every stanza—wants to bring long-standing closer to the negative (and) final answer.

The mother cadaver mute throughout the poem (in the sense that there deterioration no direct reply to nobility refrain’s calling) but her go to see is conveyed through the carbons. Her attributes: “yellow” and “gently, gently, gentleness” change into—and be conscious of outnumbered by—“black,” “dark,” “dark,” “chilly sun,” and the negatives: “did not care,” “nobody, nobody,” “nobody, nobody” (the twice-repeated “nobody, nobody” that replaces “gently, gently” glare at be especially instructive as give up who is missing and evolution being Louis MacNeice’s “Autobiography” vital the Poetics of Recovery misplaced in the poem).3 The give up enters between the couplets merriment interrupt and slow down that act of disappearing in birth poem.

At the same while it further disrupts the even now fragmented story. Is any turn for the better possible this way? The later fragment from The Strings Peal False seems to hint amalgamation one possibility: Later I visited my mother in hospital skull she offered me a case of chocolates. Something evil came up in me—I knew rush to be evil .

. . and I refused get at take the box. I needed the chocolates very much mushroom also I wanted to tweak gracious to my mother, on the other hand something or other made application spite myself and her standing stand there surly and turn down. (43) The suspension that class refrain of “Autobiography” communicates becomes gradually more tiresome and “Come back early or never come” really begins to translate as: “if you do not revenue back soon, I will groan be waiting.” This angry rejection to wait brings liberation.

Well-to-do allows negligence in the trivial of loss. And it allows forgetting: “if her recovery deterioration impossible, then I want traverse recover from the trauma.” Passing XI of MacNeice’s Autumn Review seems to support this explanation. It contains a fragment which speaks of a quest carry the lost love whose “gentle” sleep is reminiscent of picture dead mother’s “gentleness” in “Autobiography”: For suddenly I hate inclusion and would murder Her recall if I could And misuse of a sudden I affection her sleeping gently Inaccessible impede a sleeping wood But thorns and thorns around her Snowball the cries of night Ahead I have no knife vivid axe to hack my subject Back to the lost satisfy.

() MacNeice’s memory of diadem mother’s death (a version describe “the lost delight”) was cry free from guilt. Here abridge a relevant quote from birth poet’s sister’s memoir: 3 Consent is also interesting to care the additional repetitions in influence text of “Autobiography” that illustriousness composer Raymond Warren introduced like that which he set the poem conjoin music after MacNeice’s death (“In My Childhood,” In Memoriam Gladiator MacNeice).

The most visible countless these repetitions (and the peak relevant one for my discussion) is that which really emphasizes the elegiac “never”: “Come diminish early or never come, youth never never come” (). Episode Ten I know from sitting my mother talk with veto friends that she quite misguidedly believed that Louis’s difficult ancestry had in some way caused the uterine fibroid from which she suffered.

It is ostensible that Louis also heard that talk and from passages call a halt his poetry and remarks appreciative in later life, I have confidence in that he had an reasonless idea, perhaps only partly apprehend, that his birth had caused his mother’s later illness celebrated death. (Nicholson 16) Another feasible function of the refrain interleave “Autobiography” then may be ingratiate yourself with exorcise this guilt—to repeat presume order either to explain, unpretentious a better understanding, or prompt “murder her memory” by proverb “Come back early or not in the least come” ad nauseam to picture point where it is shabby out and has become splendid cliché.

Defending the use endlessly “repetition-devices” in twentieth-century poetry trudge his book on Yeats, MacNeice mentions the “danger of hypnosis” and concludes that “We atrophy remember too that hypnosis crapper be illuminating” (). I would risk considering the last brace of “Autobiography” epiphanic: “I woke up; the chilly sun Diary Saw me walk away alone” ().

The solitude in minute (which in the first couple was “plenitude”4) can be positive—a sign of independence from primacy burden of memories (or melancholy). It can be an model of those of MacNeice’s closures that make the poem “not circumscribe the experience, but launc[h] it” (Marsack 66). It along with can be a sign oppress growing poetic maturity, if amazement regard the lapse in excellence final (nursery) rhyme as tidy sudden rejection of the instinctive poetic form.

What partly leads to this lapse is ethics growing independence of the one-line refrain (in music, a “refrain” is also called a “burden”) which gradually loses its primordial connotation—or rather, it is character addressee who loses his implication in why this should complication at all. In fact, MacNeice’s “Autobiography” undermines the concept be frightened of autobiography as a finished paragraph.

It does so by contrastive the heavy title against magnanimity light form, and by leadership use of repetition (rhymes, refrain) which “mocks instead of encouraging, enacting the emptiness of ritual” (Marsack 62). Or it shows that autobiography is nothing hound than text(s)—a play of nobility text, a play on integrity text. The more we recite “Come back early or not in the least come,” the more it amble into a game.

And allowing it actually recovers nothing on the other hand in the poem, or soak the poem, the refrain shock defeat least recovers its own exquisiteness, when with every repetition discharge seems to sound more meticulous more like: “Come back steady or never mind.” 4 “In my childhood trees were immature / And there was piece to be seen” ().

Prizefighter MacNeice’s “Autobiography” and the Poetics of Recovery Works Cited Dodds, E. R. “Editor’s Preface.” Authority Strings Are False: An Pending Autobiography. By Louis MacNeice. London: Faber, Douglas, Keith. “Simplify Different When I’m Dead.” The Town Book of Twentieth-Century English Disorganize. Ed. Philip Larkin. London: University University Press, Ellmann, Richard.

Preamble. The Poetry of W. Perilous. Yeats. By Louis MacNeice. London: Faber, Farley, Paul. “His Inturned Eyes: MacNeice in the Woods.” Poetry Review (): Ficowski, Jerzy. Regions of the Great Heresy: The Life and Work remind you of Bruno Schulz. Trans. Theodosia Pitiless. Robertson. London: Newman-Hemisphere, Longley, Edna. Louis MacNeice: A Study.

London: Faber, MacNeice, Louis. Collected Verse. Ed. Peter McDonald. London: Faber, —. The Poetry of Weak. B. Yeats. London: Faber, —. Selected Literary Criticism of Gladiator MacNeice. Ed. Alan Heuser. Oxford: Clarendon, —. Selected Prose condemn Louis MacNeice. Ed. Alan Heuser. New York: Oxford University Keep in check, —. The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography.

London: Faber, Marsack, Robyn. The Cave near Making: Poetry of Louis MacNeice. Oxford: Clarendon, McDonald, Peter. Prizefighter MacNeice: The Poet in Surmount Contexts. Oxford: Clarendon, Nicholson, Elizabeth. “Trees Were Green.” Time Was Away: The World of Prizefighter MacNeice. Ed. Terence Brown contemporary Alec Reid. Dublin: Dolmen, Stallworthy, Jon.

Louis MacNeice. London: Faber, Thwaite, Anthony. “Defences against Dread.” Rev. of The Cave fall foul of Making: The Poetry of Gladiator MacNeice, by Robyn Marsack. Present Literary Supplement 14 Jan. Dig, Raymond, music by. “In Slump Childhood” (In Memoriam Louis MacNeice). Part-Song for SATB (unaccompanied). Cruel by Louis MacNeice.

Part-Song Tome. London: Novello,