Last night I went with my two brothers to hear a reading of Louis MacNeice’s great poem “Autumn Journal.” It was read beautifully by the Irish actor Éanna Hardwicke, who had clearly memorised many of the 3000 lines. The poem was written between August and December 1938, a fraught time in Britain when people despised the government but passionately supported the appeasement of Hitler—because they remembered well the slaughter and horrors of the First World War. Neville Chamberlain made his “peace in our time” speech on 30 September 1938. Thirty-eight million gas masks were issued in Britain in September 1938, but there weren’t enough for everybody. People were fearful of a poison-gas attack. “Autumn Journal” was published in March 1939.

MacNiece described his poem in a letter to his editor, T S Eliot, as “not strictly a journal but giving the tenor of my intellectual experiences during that period. It contains rapportage [sic], metaphysics, ethics, lyrical emotion, autobiography, nightmare. It’s about nearly everything which I consider significant.” He writes in the introduction: “In a journal or a personal letter a man writes what he feels at the moment; to attempt scientific truthfulness would be—paradoxically—dishonest,” The poem is deep, light, tragic, and comic. My attention never wavered as I listened to the poem as it usually does waver when I listen to music.

At one point there was a shout from the audience for a doctor because an old man had slumped forward. A cardiologist appeared, but quickly the man recovered, talked, and walked from the theatre to an ambulance, apologising for having interrupted the show. My hypothesis is that he’d fallen asleep. This incident together with the cramped seat and the “depressing” poetry was too much for one of my brothers, who promptly left.
I read “Autumn Journal” several years ago and thought it marvellous. This morning I returned to it and have picked out the following extracts, most of which I highlighted when I first read the poem. This is what I wrote when I read the poem in October 2016: “I enjoyed this greatly. There’s something satisfying about a long poem, especially as one as lyrical, illuminating, and easy to read as this one. I’m almost tempted to start again immediately.”

You can access the whole poem here: https://ia801509.us.archive.org/7/items/in.ernet.dli.2015.184237/2015.184237.Autumn-Journal_text.pdf

As if to live were not
Following the curve of a planet or controlled water
But a leap in the dark, a tangent, a stray shot.
It is this we learn after so many failures,
The building of castles in sand, of queens in snow,
That we cannot make any corner in life or in life’s beauty,
That no river is a river which does not flow.

But good-bye also Plato’s philosophising;
I have a better plan
To hit the target straight without circumlocution.

And not return more than you could ever give.
And now I relapse to sleep, to dreams perhaps and
reaction
Where I shall play the gangster or the sheikh,
Kill for the love of killing, make the world my sofa,
Unzip the women and insult the meek.

None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed
motives,
Are self deceivers, but the worst of all Deceits is to murmur ‘Lord, I am not worthy’
And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.
But may I cure that habit, look up and outwards
And may my feet follow my wider glance
First no doubt to stumble, then to walk with the othersAnd in the end—with time and luck—to dance.

I must pursue this life, it will not be only
A drag from numbered stone to numbered stone
But a ladder of angels, river turning tidal.

I do not envy the self-possession of an elm-tree
Nor the aplomb of a granite monolith.
All that I would like to be is human, having a share
In a civilised, articulate and well-adjusted
Community where the mind is given its due
But the body is not distrusted.

Better authentic mammon than a bogus god.

That having once been to the University of Oxford
You can never really again
Believe anything that anyone says and that of course is an asset In a world like ours; Why bother to water a garden
That is planted with paper flowers?

Good-bye now, Plato and Hegel,
The shop is closing down;
They don’t want any philosopher-kings in England,
There ain’t no universals in this man’s town.

Sufficient to the moment is the moment.

The soul’s long searchlight hankers for a body,
The single body hungers for its kind,
The eye demands the light at the risk of blindness
And the mind that did not doubt would not be
mind
And discontent is eternal.

Open the world wide, open the senses,
Let the soul stretch its blind enormous arms,

The country is a dwindling annex to the factory.

Things were different when men felt their programme
In the bones and pulse, not only in the brain.

All we can do at most
Is press an anxious ear against the keyhole
To hear the Future breathing;

This is the extract I took as a result of last night’s performance:

May God, if there is one, send
As much courage again and greater vision
And resolve the antinomies in which we live
Where man must -be either safe because he is negative
Or free on the edge of a razor.
Give those who are gentle strength,
Give those who are strong a generous imagination,
And make their half-truth true and let the crooked
Footpath find its parent road at length.