Close and Slow

A Weekly Appreciation of Poetry Pt.3

**Trigger Warning: this poem and post reference childhood trauma**

Many of us feel a bit inadequate when it comes to reading poetry, perhaps suspecting that there is some higher learning or personal initiation required in order to appreciate verse. ‘Close and Slow’ is a new regular feature here on ‘The Sounding Board’ providing some pointers as to how to read and enjoy poetry, taking an individual poem for each post and highlighting some ways in which it can be read. I trust that this feature might open poetry to those keen to read it but a little overwhelmed, and showcase some of the amazing work that is out there to be discovered. Pt.1 on John Hewitt’s ‘The Ram’s Horn’ can be read here and Pt.2 on Eavan Boland’s ‘Patchwork’ can be read here.

‘Autobiography’ by Louis MacNeice

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) was an Irish poet of considerable significance to the Modernist era. Born in Belfast, he spent his early childhood in Carrickfergus where his father was a Church of Ireland rector. He was later educated in England. A friend of WH Auden and highly esteemed by TS Eliot, MacNeice’s work straddles the imaginary boundary between ‘major’ and ‘minor’ poet. MacNeice’s poetry concerns itself with matters of belonging, identity, belief, and public life. The title for this entire series of poetry critiques (‘Close and Slow’) is borrowed from a line in what is arguably his most important poem, Autumn Journal.

Under consideration in this week’s post is his 1940 work ‘Autobiography’, a touching and deceptively simple poem that explores some of his early experiences of trauma and grief. As has been the case with previous instalments of ‘Close and Slow’, we will take time to listen to the voice of the poem, explore its form, and think through how its themes intersect with our own lives.

Listen to the voice of the poem

When it comes to understanding and appreciating poetry there is no better discipline that simply reading a poem over and over again. As we will see later, ‘Autobiography’ is a rhythmic piece of work with a consistent rhyme scheme and an incessant refrain. This makes the ‘music’ of the poem evident, clear and even pleasant on the ear. MacNeice’s work suffers from not having a wide catalogue of audio resources to accompany it but snatches of his verse being read can be found online. You might want to explore this video (recorded on mobile phone, for some reason) in which actor Stephen Rea gives a touchingly slow rendition of ‘Autobiography’. However you read or listen to the poem, don’t rush past this early and most important step. Taking a poem apart and discerning its themes can be very fulfilling, but if we fail to truly ‘hear’ and ‘feel’ what it is saying we will ultimately have lost out.

Put form first

The next step in appreciating a poem is thinking about how it expresses itself. This is sometimes referred to as ‘poetic form’, and entails asking some key questions of the poem early on in our reading of it. These might include: does the poem rhyme? Does the poem have a specific metre that it follows? Is the poem a certain recognised shape (sonnet, sestina, villanelle etc.)?

While MacNeice does not adhere to a specific literary form in ‘Autobiography’, there is a lot for us to note in terms of how he conveys its message. The first obvious feature is the rhyme scheme of the poem, laid out below by using letter notations:

As you can see from the annotations above, this poem is written in rhyming couplets. This is not typical of MacNeice’s poetry in general and comes with some significant challenges in terms of the poem sounding organic and authentic. In ‘Autobiography’ this is a studied form of simplicity that is serving a bigger agenda on the part of the poet (more on that later) and is designed to have a specific effect on the readers. If reading this poem aloud reminds us of a nursery rhyme, we have already stumbled on one of its key meanings.

The second most outstanding literary device in the poem is its use of refrain. Once again, this is not a common feature in poetry, particularly when written in the overall framework of Modernism. The actual words used in the refrain are also striking for how non-specific they are ‘Come back early or never come’. Strictly speaking, this phrase does not make any real sense when taken on its own but its overall effect will be explored when we come to examine the poem’s themes. At the time of ‘Autobiography’ being written, MacNeice was working on a study of the poetry of WB Yeats and had become convinced afresh of the utility and effect of refrain upon the reader. He understood that rhythmic words used repetitively could be almost hypnotic, and this is undoubtedly what is aimed at in this poem.

Another formal feature of the poem that we can note is MacNeice’s clever use of characterisation and repetition. A key section of ‘Autobiography’ is the poet’s description of his parents, his father first and then his mother. Both parents are represented via synec doche. This is a literary device in which one small part of a person or scene is used to represent the whole. MacNeice’s father is represented by incongruity (his clerical collar is captured as being ‘the wrong way round’) and by the resonance he leaves in MacNeice’s memory (‘My father made the walls resound’). This key character in the thematic drama that we will think about later is seen directly by the reader but heard and manifested through a sense of the absurd in his dress. By contrast, MacNeice’s mother is portrayed sympathetically and evocatively: the ‘yellow dress’ floats on the thermals of ‘gently, gentle, gentleness’ - an ephemeral, fleeting persona whose clothing and movements speak of a delicate if not fragile demeanour.

This portrayal of MacNeice’s parents gives a key to one of the unique capacities of poetry. We feel the resonances of MacNeice’s father’s voice and there is a tripping lightness conveyed to us in a sensory way through his mother in her floating yellow dress.

Repetition is exploited throughout the poem - perhaps nowhere more effectively than in the lines diagrammed above. Negation is piled upon negation (‘nothing’, ‘nobody’, ‘nobody’) exposing a howling absence in the poet’s childhood.

Identify clear themes

Having worked through some of the beautiful and formal features of this poem, we are now ready to unpack the themes it brings to us. ‘Autobiography’ is a snatch of the story of MacNeice’s childhood which proved formative for the rest of his life. His mother, Lily, suffered from severe mental illness, culminating in her being removed from her family home when Louis was just seven years old. In his adult life MacNeice would recount memories of Lily ‘walking up and down the bottom path of the garden, the path under the hedge that was always in shadow, talking to my sister and weeping’. This was a fragment of memory of the day when she was taken away to a Dublin nursing home, and neither MacNeice nor his siblings would ever see her again. Louis MacNeice believed throughout his life that his mother’s health was fundamentally broken by difficulties she had in giving birth to him, and that he bore something of the blame for her mental health struggles. MacNeice’s father, Frederick, would later remarry and this would be a contributory factor in Louis being moved to England to board as a schoolboy.

With this information to hand, we can begin to penetrate some of the darkness and incongruity of the poem. The nursery rhyme quality lulls the reader into a false sense of security, only to be jarred by the tragic events the poem touches on. The lilting, hypnotic refrain belies a darkness and bereavement on the part of the poet and offsets the brightness of childhood with the heartbreaking realities that invaded his life. The poem carries a quality of nightmare and dysfunction, perhaps best portrayed by the lines that describe the poet’s bedroom as a child,

Talking darkness and dark lamps are the components of horror, of a gothic and crepuscular sense of threat and vulnerability. These inanimate objects become proxies for the poet’s own pain and mental struggle as a child, with his mother’s removal from the family home. These experiences are encapsulated by the words ‘silent terror’. Such heavy and hard images draw us back into the refrain over and over again, and the ‘come back early’ becomes a plaintive keening after the mother whom MacNeice loved but lost forever.

The conclusion of the poem finds MacNeice alone in the sun with a mother who never returns, and a comfort that is withheld from him right across the years. Understood in these terms, this is a heart-rending poem, an abstract account of a concrete loss, a poetic reimagining of childhood trauma that is lyrical, raw, and profoundly revealing.

Piece it all together

Edna Longley is arguably the foremost scholar of the life and poetry of Louis MacNeice. Her insight into how MacNeice used memory is extremely helpful to us in landing the message of ‘Autobiography’ in our own lives,

Loss drew MacNeice to autobiography as a means of knitting fractures, though not solely for egocentric reasons: ‘Maybe, if I look back, I shall find that my life is not just mine, that it mirrors the lives of the others - or shall I say the Life of the Other?’

This explains to us something of what the poet is doing in this heartbreaking poem. It is vital for us to remember that MacNeice was writing in the 1940s, a time when the kind of vulnerability that ‘Autobiography’ embodies was not common place. His confessional verse and psychological vulnerability are studied, considered, and pastoral in purpose. By reaching back into the insufferable traumas of his own life, the poet is opening a space for his readers not merely to understand him, but to understand themselves.

Giving trauma a space to speak, containing it within poetic form, using language that is evocative and emotive, all work on the reader to open their heart to hard and hurtful things. Any sensitive reading of ‘Autobiography’ makes us feel for the poet, but a more discerning reading of it allows us to feel for ourselves. The poem charts a path back to pain, organises it into strict poetic form, and then invites us to see that the saying of harm can be part of how we deal with it and, perhaps, heal around it.

This post began with a content warning, and for many readers ‘Autobiography’ could be a hard read. But allowing this kind of language - this articulation of grief and loss - into our lives can liberate us every bit as much as it might evoke hard emotions. MacNeice faces his grief, he formats it into containable form, and he allows his life not just to be his own but ours as well. By gently lifting the lid on his own trauma he may just be allowing us to find fraternity in our own brokenness, and to finally find some words that can edge us closer to saying the unsayable.

‘Autobiography’ is a hard read, but it is also a ‘heart read’ - a poem with a pulse and with the pastoral capacity to allow us into the life of Louis MacNeice as well as into the darker corners of our own troubled lives. It is an almost perfect example of what poetry can do and why poetry ultimately matters so much.