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Thursday, September 27, 2007

Louis MacNeice...

...a great, undervalued poet, was born one hundred years ago this month. The Economist magazine, in a brief appreciation of him, quotes MacNeice on why he writes:

"I write poetry because I enjoy it, as one enjoys swimming or swearing, and also because it is my road to freedom and knowledge.”






Snow


The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -
There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.





There's a pretty bit of poetic knowledge for you, knowledge gotten at not by reading, or by listening to someone wise, but by having a strange and stirring personal experience -- in this case, by standing in a room during a snowstorm and seeing, as one image, interior roses standing in a window, and snow beating outside against the same window.

The soundless interaction between these two incompatible and yet somehow, now, collateral objects, thrills the poet with an expanded sense of how much the world can encompass.

They create, together, spring and winter all at once, two seasons simultaneously collateral and incompatible... And this moment of excitement isn't only about one consciousness unexpectedly seeing that the world can be many mutually exclusive things at once; it's about a poet's consciousness getting the shock of metaphor -- a new poetic metaphor being, like roses and snow, a melding of things that had seemed alien to one another, yet which, in the hands of the poet, create a new kind of coherence, a new way of seeing, and a new form of beauty.

To realize the richness of the world -- actually to witness it generating new forms of life -- is to feel a disorienting sensual intensity, "the drunkenness of things being various," as in the way fire can bubble like water.

There's not much to do with this ecstatic perception other than feel it, on the tongue, eyes, ears, and palms. We can't really understand all that there is besides glass between the snow and the roses, all that exists in the world in the act of our perceiving it, but we can understand, through the senses, that there is a magical fullness latent in our human setting. Poetry like this captures and celebrates this magic. Poetic euphoria excites our own collateral euphoria.