‘Autumn Journal’ by Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) is a long poem in twenty-four cantos, written between August and December 1938. It is very much a poem of its time, foreshadowing the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, which does not of course mean that it cannot be also a poem for our time.

MacNeice himself was curiously defensive about it in his introduction, as if he knew that some people might feel that this was not quite poetry as they knew it. ‘It is the nature of this poem to be neither final nor balanced. . . poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be ‘objective’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty’. This is in line with his advocacy in ‘Modern Poetry’ for what he calls ‘an impure poetry’ that is, poetry conditioned by the poet’s life and the world around him.

The result is discursive, conversational, charged with immediacy, irregular in its rhythms, moving from theme to theme: the Munich agreement, an Oxford by-election, a visit to Spain as it fell to Franco, the Irish situation, while also interweaving the personal in the shape of reminiscences of his ex-wife. Yes, it can be prosaic, and one should not go to it expecting much in the way of lyric intensity, such as is to be found, for example, in Larkin’s ‘MCMXIV’ (see week 315) with its evocation of the parallel period just before the outbreak of the First World War. But MacNeice’s much longer form does allow for far more in the way of reflection and analysis, and it is never less than intelligent and engaged.

I give here only the closing canto, that summarises his fear and hopes for the future.

Asclepius: the Greek god of healing.

Cagney, Lombard, Bing and Garbo: James Cagney, Carole Lombard, Bing Crosby, Greta Garbo: well-known film stars of the period.

Tir nan Og: the mythical Irish land of eternal youth.

a pillar of salt: a reference to biblical story of Lot, whose wife was allegedly turned to salt when she looked back on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah.Rubicon: the river in northern Italy that Caesar had to cross with his legions when marching on Rome to claim the dictatorship, now a byword for any critical and irreversible decision.

XXIV

Sleep, my body, sleep, my ghost,
    Sleep, my parents and grand-parents,
And all those I have loved most:
    One man’s coffin is another’s cradle.
Sleep, my past and all my sins,
    In distant snow or dried roses
Under the moon for night’s cocoon will open
    When day begins.
Sleep, my fathers, in your graves
    On upland bogland under heather
What the wind scatters the wind saves,
    A sapling springs in a new country.
Time is a country, the present moment
    A spotlight roving round the scene;
We need not chase the spotlight,
    The future is the bride of what has been.

Sleep, my fancies and my wishes,
    Sleep a little and wake strong,
The same but different and take my blessing —
    A cradle-song.
And sleep, my various and conflicting
    Selves I have so long endured,
Sleep in Asclepius’ temple
    And wake cured.
And you with whom I shared an idyll
    Five years long,
Sleep beyond the Atlantic
    And wake to a glitter of dew and to bird-song.
And you whose eyes are blue, and whose ways are foam,
    Sleep quiet and smiling
And do not hanker
    For a perfection which can never come.
And you whose minutes patter
    To crowd the social hours,
Curl up easy in a placid corner
    And let your thoughts close in like flowers.
And you, who work for Christ, and you, as eager
    For a better life, humanist, atheist,
And you, devoted to a cause, and you, to a family,
    Sleep and may your beliefs and zeal persist.

Sleep quietly, Marx and Freud,
    The figure-heads of our transition.
Cagney, Lombard, Bing and Garbo,
    Sleep in your world of celluloid.
Sleep now also; monk and satyr,
    Cease your wrangling for a night.
Sleep, my brain, and sleep, my senses,
    Sleep, my hunger and my spite.
Sleep, recruits to the evil army,
    Who, for so long misunderstood,
Took to the gun to kill your sorrow;
    Sleep and be damned and wake up good.

While we sleep, what shall we dream?
    Of Tir nan Og or South Sea islands,
Of a land where all the milk is cream
    And all the girls are willing?
Or shall our dream be earnest of the real
    Future when we wake,
Design a home, a factory, a fortress
    Which, though with effort, we can really make?
What is it we want really?
    For what end and how?
If it is something feasible, obtainable,
    Let us dream it now,
And pray for a possible land
    Not of sleep-walkers, not of angry puppets,
But where both heart and brain can understand
    The movements of our fellows;
Where life is a choice of instruments and none
    Is debarred his natural music,
Where the waters of life are free of the ice-blockade of hunger
    And thought is free as the sun,
Where the altars of sheer power and mere profit
    Have fallen to disuse,
Where nobody sees the use
    Of buying money and blood at the cost of blood and money,
Where the individual, no longer squandered
    In self-assertion, works with the rest, endowed
With the split vision of a juggler and the quick lock of a taxi,
    Where the people are more than a crowd.
So sleep in hope of this — but only for a little;
    Your hope must wake
While the choice is yours to make,
    The mortgage not foreclosed, the offer open.

Sleep serene, avoid the backward
    Glance; go forward, dreams, and do not halt
(Behind you in the desert stands a token
    Of doubt — a pillar of salt).
Sleep, the past, and wake, the future,
    And walk out promptly through the open door
But you, my coward doubts, may go on sleeping,
    You need not wake again — not any more.
The New Year comes with bombs, it is too late
    To dose the dead with honourable intentions:
If you have honour to spare, employ it on the living;
    The dead are dead as 1938.
Sleep to the noise of running water
    To-morrow to be crossed, however deep;
This is no river of the dead or Lethe,
    To-night we sleep
On the banks of Rubicon — the die is cast;
    There will be time to audit
The accounts later, there will be sunlight later
    And the equation will come out at last.

Louis MacNeice