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Poem for June 2008
• June Thunder by Louis MacNeice 1907-1963
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By
The Minx, Contributing editor
Monday,
2 June, 2008
The Junes were free and full, driving through tiny
Roads, the mudguards brushing the cowparsley,
Through fields of mustard and under boldly embattled
Mays and chestnuts
Or between beeches verdurous and voluptuous
Or where broom and gorse beflagged the chalkland--
All the flare and gusto of the unenduring
Joys of a season
Now returned but I note as more appropriate
To the maturer mood impending thunder
With an indigo sky and the garden hushed except for
The treetops moving.
Then the curtains in my room blow suddenly inward,
The shrubbery rustles, birds fly heavily homeward,
The white flowers fade to nothing on the trees and rain comes
Down like a dropscene.
Now there comes catharsis, the cleansing downpour
Breaking the blossoms of our overdated fancies
Our old sentimentality and whimsicality
Loves of the morning.
Blackness at half-past eight, the night's precursor,
Clouds like falling masonry and lightning's lavish
Annunciation, the sword of the mad archangel
Flashed from the scabbard.
If only you would come and dare the crystal
Rampart of the rain and the bottomless moat of thunder,
If only now you would come I should be happy
Now if now only.
Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
Frederick Louis MacNeice (September 12, 1907 – September 3, 1963) was a British and Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis.
Born in Belfast, he was educated first at Sherborne School in Dorset and then at Marlborough College in 1921, having won a classical scholarship. Marlborough was a less happy place, with a hierarchical and sometimes cruel social structure, but MacNeice's interest in ancient literature and civilisation deepened and expanded to include Egyptian and Norse mythology.
At Marlborough he was a contemporary of John Betjeman and Anthony Blunt, forming a lifelong friendship with the latter, and writing poetry and essays for the school magazines. In 1930 he married Mary Ezra (shocking his Protestant Irish clergyman father, who later became a Bishop.)
In the early 1930s he started to make a literary name for himself as part of the group of Irish poets and writers around W.H. Auden. Poems his first collection for Faber & Faber was published in 1935.
His son was born in July 1934 but in November 1934 his wife Mary left MacNeice and their infant son for a Russian-American graduate student called Charles Katzmann.
In July 1942 MacNeice married for the second time, Hedli Anderson, three months after the death of his father. Brigid Corinna MacNeice (known by her second name like her parents, or as "Bimba") was born a year later.
By the late 1950s the marriage was increasingly strained with MacNeice having several affairs and drinking heavily with his circle of Irish literary friends including W H Auden. All the time however
he continued to write poems and plays.
MacNeice was awarded the CBE in the 1958 New Year's Honours list. A South African trip in 1959 was followed by the start of his final relationship, with the actress Mary Wimbush, who had performed in his plays since the forties. He left Anderson in late 1960 and in early 1961, Solstices was published.
By this time he was "living on alcohol", and eating very little, but still writing.
In August 1963 he went caving in Yorkshire to gather sound effects for his final radio play, Persons from Porlock. Caught in a storm on the moors, he did not change out of his wet clothes until he was home in Hertfordshire. Bronchitis evolved into viral pneumonia.
He was admitted to hospital on the 27th of August, dying there on the 3rd of September. He was buried in Carrowdore churchyard in County Down, with his mother.
His final book of poems, The Burning Perch, was published a few days after his funeral – Auden, who gave a reading at MacNeice's memorial service, described the poems of his last two years as "among his very best".
The Naked Reader 2008
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