I hope you have been enjoying these weekly top Irish poems. Every Friday, I send them out to my weekly dose of Irish. This week is an older poem from number 62 on the top 100 Irish poems. But I like learning and writing about these older Irish poems. Many of them seem just as relevant as they were back then in the present day, just like when I recently wrote about Yeat’s poem the host of the air.
The Irish poem Autumn Journal was written sometime between August and December 1938. Now, this top Irish poem is nearly 2,000 lines long! So I am not going to share it here, but my notes below look at how it ends.nbsp;
Back then, poem releases used to be so prominent. I like to think of them as a box office movie coming out today. But not a global film, more like a box office Irish movie that everyone wants to see, well, in this case, read.
The poems are all written directly with a lot of metaphors. It makes it surprisingly easy to follow, more like a story than some more complicated poems. It was also written at the time of the Munich crisis and the Spanish Civil War, which affected many Irish people. It is divided into 24 cantos, which I learned are the sections into which certain long poems are divided. For example, Dante’s Divine Comedy has 100 cantos.
My notes below look at the final section, Canto XXIV, and how the poem ends. If you are interested in buying the full selection of poems, they are available on Amazon here.
Who was Louis MacNeice?
Frederick Louis MacNeice CBE (12 September 1907 – 3 September 1963) was an Irish poet and playwright from Northern Ireland and a member of the Auden Group, including W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. More info on his Wiki page is here.
Autumn Journal Canto XXIV, Final paragraph
there will be sunlight later
And the equation will come out at last.
Canto XXIV is the last section of Autumn Journal, written as 1938 drew to a close. After twenty-three cantos about London life, a broken marriage, Ireland, Munich and the war in Spain, MacNeice ends with something close to a lullaby for the old year.
The mood is of letting go. Doubt and regret are put to sleep, and he turns to face whatever the new year will bring. Sleep, water and the crossing of a river run through the section, a sign that a line has been passed and there is no going back. With war close, he argues that our duty lies with the living.
What makes the ending so moving is its cautious hope. The final reckoning is put off rather than cancelled, and he still trusts that things will add up in the end. Faber published the whole poem as a single book in May 1939.
Autumn Journal is still in copyright, so I have not printed the extract here. You will find the full poem in Autumn Journal (Faber) and in MacNeice’s Collected Poems (Faber).
I also found this great clip from the archives. It features many prominent poets and authors reading Autumn Journal. It aired on RTE in 1999. It celebrated the 60th anniversary of Louis MacNeice’s epic poem ‘Autumn Journal’.