Vol. 30 | March 2022 | Modernism, Memory and Time: A Reading of Louis MacNeice’s ‘Prayer Before Birth’, ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ and ‘Star-gazer’ | Saurabhi Sarmah

Abstract

The paper aims to read Louis MacNeice’s poetry in the light of his contemporary situation and his individual response to his surroundings as a sensitive individual and poet. In order to do so, the paper will touch upon the concept of Modernism and explore its impact on MacNeice’s poetry. The time frame in which Louis MacNeice had produced the chosen poems (‘Prayer Before Birth’, ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ and ‘Star-gazer’) was also the time of advent of Modernism a movement that bears a strong impact on society, culture and literature with its tendency to explore the ‘new’, the new sensibilities of the period (around late 19th to early 20th century). However, Modernism as a movement was also sceptical about the traditional ways of thinking and writing. The paper also aims to discuss the two important themes - memory and time - that seem to dominate MacNeice’s poetry. A cursory reading of ‘Star-gazer’ and ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ will reveal how the poet has constantly travelled back in time to recollect his past memories and find solace in the present. Amidst the ‘inevitable’ and ‘transitoriness’ of human existence and the sense of ‘doom’ created by War and industrialism, the feeling of hopelessness and anxiety experienced by the poet finds expression in these two poems. In a modern and developing society which is highly artificial, self-centred and materialistic, MacNeice’s poetry also tries to celebrate life by taking recourse to the past and spirituality.

Keywords: Modernism, Memory, Time, Modernist Poetry, MacNeice’s poetry, Industrialisation, War, Nostalgia.

Introducing Louis MacNeice

Louis MacNeice born in 1907 in Belfast – a city located in Northern Ireland was one the first generation of young modern poets of the 1930s and a member of the Auden Group, which included Stephen Spender, C. Day Lewis and Christopher Isherwood, along with W.H. Auden. Although the Auden Group were primarily leftist and was influenced by contemporary politics, Mac Niece’s poetry had a unique flavour of its own. It was mostly characterised by his thoughts and ruminations over life, ethics, time, memory, isolation, and the impact of industrialisation and wars on the lives of common people. Although he was a leftist and trained in classics, he managed to voice the concerns of the ordinary people quite effectively and with ease compared to his contemporaries. His reputation as a poet was firmly established with the publication of his Collected Poems in 1966.

MacNeice has an innovative style of writing marked by the presence of irony and mockery. His poetry seems to be a written record of the tendencies and temper of his time. As a writer, he prefers to include the changing landscape of his time in his writing and maintains a spontaneously humorous tone of expression. The experiences that MacNeice had as a child, the sense of isolation and void caused by the modem artificial lifestyle of people, the erosion of natural landscapes by the factories, the increased sense of loneliness and mutual indifferences in the wake of materialism – all these contemporary issues find their expression in his poems. Although his poems contain a sense of gloom and scepticism, they, at the same time, celebrate life with all its uncertainties.

This paper is an attempt to analyse the following poems - ‘Prayer Before Birth’ , ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ and ‘Star-gazer’ by MacNeice in the light Modernism with special reference to the presence of memory and time in his poetry. The concept of time and memory had been widely discussed in the literature produced during the late 19th century, which was also the time of Modernism in art, literature and culture. Louis MacNeice’s poetry produced during this period focused on recording the changing consciousness of that period marked by the modernist tendency. While doing so, the reciprocal relationship between past and present came into play where the past seems to have a strong bearing in shaping the present. In this above mentioned context, the concept of memory comes into play in the form of revisiting the past in the present, which seems to break as well as strengthen the presence of the poet. When we analyse the aforesaid poems by MacNeice, the present memory and time and their interrelations seem to be quite evident.

Modernism and MacNeice’s Poetry

As his poetry belongs to the modern period, which is characterised by the advent of new and distinctive features in the form, subject matter, concept and style of literature, the reflection of these changing sensibilities, tastes and the temper of his age are pretty much evident in his poetry. Even when MacNeice broods on the past or worries about the future, he is fully involved in the present moment. He was resistant to fixed positions and fond of innovation and newness, and he incorporated the same in his poetry in terms of themes and techniques.

Modernism as a movement in arts, culture and literature is characterised by it is a break from the past - the traditional approach to art and culture that pretty much relied on certain fixed and stereotyped norms. As a literary movement, Modernism received popularity during and just after World War -I. The War has been quite influential on this movement that was shaped by the challenges and loss experienced by humanity in the wake of the great world war. There seems to be a strong celebration of fragmentation and the contemporary uncertainties along with a search for the ‘new’ in modernist literature – be it poetry, drama or fiction.

The modernist tendency in literature was well summarised by the term “Make it New” by Ezra Pound in his collection of essays titled “Make it New”, where he appeals to the writers of his to address and explore the ‘new’ in their writings.

Modernism as a literary movement is marked by the advent of World War-I and carries its own distinctive features that include: break with tradition, the ‘new’ in subject matter, formal experimentation in terms of techniques, discontinuous composition, the renewal of the tradition, focus on the individual/ Individualism . Hence, the observation made by B. Prasad that modernist poetry is marked by its pluralistic complexities (87) sounds quite relevant in this context. Literature, especially poetry produced between 1920 to 1940, has been marked by the individual responses of the writers/authors to their surroundings characterised by loss, artificiality, social unrest and uncertainties.

If we analyse MacNeice’s poetry in the light of Modernism, we can see the reflection of the characteristics of Modernism in his writing. As a writer and poet, MacNeice was very much influenced by his time – a time of transition from tradition to modernity, a period that witnessed the changes created by industrialisation and the occurrence of the First World War. And in his poetry, MacNeice records the individual emotions against the then current occurrences with an element of self-consciousness and self-reference. His focus is on the individual, and his/her responses to their time is quite evident in his poems like ‘Prayer Before Birth’, ‘Star-gazer’, ‘Snow’, and’ Meeting Point’ to name a few.

An era characterised by industrialisation, capitalism, rapid social changes, War, advances in science and the social sciences, the modernist writers felt a growing sense of fragmentation and disillusionment; it had shaken their faith in the foundations of Western society and its moral standards. In a situation like this, the dilemma and challenges faced by the common people have been clearly represented by T.S. Eliot in his famous poems ‘The Waste Land’ (1922) and ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), where he talks about a land which is dead and spiritually empty, and from where a continuous search begins for renewal and meaningful existence.

And Louis MacNeice was also no exception to the then prevailing situation to which he responded and reacted through his writings. In his famous poem ‘Prayer before Birth’, MacNeice has projected the picture of a harsh world using the unborn child as his mouthpiece:

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me. (‘Prayer before Birth’, 193)

That there is a complete fall or degradation of the human race influenced by the industrial and corrupt social forces is pretty much evident in the beginning stanza when he says – “I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me” (‘Prayer before Birth’, 193). The world becomes an insecure place for the yet-to-be-born child who has constantly appealed to God to protect him from existing social evils in this cruel world. The poem highlights the different evil forces that have engulfed society, thereby making the lives of common and innocent people miserable. Here the unborn child can be considered as a symbol of innocence that has already received threats from the external forces before he/she is born.

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me. (‘Prayer before Birth’,193)

Thus we see that there is a constant threat from the outside world to invade the internal space of his protagonist. Here the images of the bloodsucking bat, the rat, the stoat, and the club-footed ghoul are used quite aptly to signify the inhuman, brutal and beast-like tendencies in people and the threat posed to humanity.

The tendency of his age and the individual’s position in it is reflected in the seventh stanza of the poem with the help of images like - lethal automaton, Cog in Machine, a thing with one face etc. The connotation carried by the above mentioned images seems to refer to a number crucial contemporary issues prevalent during that time such as the War and its’ adverse social impact, industrialisation and how it has turned us into machines devoid of human emotions, and the totalitarian regime and how it has repressed us and turned us into objects – ‘ a thing’. The poem seems to be a pictorial representation of the society that has experienced a massive degeneration due to the aforesaid social forces –

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me. (‘Prayer before Birth’, 193)

Therefore, there is a passionate appeal by the unborn to God to save him/her from men who have turned into beasts -

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me. (‘Prayer before Birth’, 193)

The poem is designed to expose the nature of contemporary society where an unborn child goes through a tremendous sense of insecurity and hence there is an appeal for help to cope up with the world. The use of phases like ‘hear me’, ‘console me’, ‘provide me’, ‘forgive me’, ‘rehearse me’, ‘come near me’, ‘fill me’, and if not ‘kill me’ throughout the entire poem express the sense of helpless and insecurity experienced by an individual in the hands of powerful machinery that regulates the society.

Memory and Time in MacNeice’s Poetry

While discussing memory and time in MacNeice’s poetry, we can see the poet recollecting his past with a strong sense of longing for it in the present in his poems like ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ (1937) and ‘Star-gazer’ (1963). The present seems to be less pleasing and satisfying compared to his past which was ‘intolerably bright’.

Memory and time are two commonly explored themes in the poetry of Louis MacNeice, and other modernist writers in the wake of disillusionment and disruption in faith in established traditions and humanity, due to War and other social evils. Reminiscing the past with all its pleasant memories acts as a coping mechanism for them as well as the common people living in the modern period characterised by isolation, uncertainties and hopelessness.

As a classicist and student of history, the past never escaped criticism in MacNeice’s poetry, but gradually after the War, the past was remembered with nostalgia. The greatness of the past was lost with the emergence of a comfort living and automobile worshipping society.

The poem ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ contains a sense of hopelessness and doom of a society which is heavily influenced by the impact of World War - I. As observed by Julian Gitzen, MacNeice’s humanistic faith fluctuated during the pre-post and wartime. A sense of hopelessness and doom are evident in his poems like ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ ‘Postscript to Ireland’ etc. - describing the hopelessness of a society numbering its final days. While poets like W. H. Auden and C. D. Lewis advocated and campaigned for changes in society, MacNeice could find no way of avoiding this disaster (139).

The poem begins with the following stanza -
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon. ('The Sunlight on the Garden', 1485)

The very beginning of the poem bears implications to some of the important issues pertinent to his period, and also characteristics of his writing. It seems, there are subtle references to time, loss and the horror associated with War. The poem was written at a time when the First World War was over and there was the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936). The imagery of the sunlight on the garden becoming harder and growing cold refers to the inevitable - the end which none of us can escape; it also refers to the sense of loss created by War. Society and the current generation have been doomed by the War and its destructive forces.

The first stanza also refers to time which unfortunately cannot be caged – “We cannot cage the minute, within its nets of gold” (The Sunlight on the Garden, 1485). There is a sense of loss here; time means ‘loss’ in MacNeice’s poetry. The pervading sense of loss caused by the transient nature of life experienced by an individual finds expression in the following stanza-

Our freedom as free lances.
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances. ('The Sunlight on the Garden', 1485)

Our freedom comes to an end, all good and pleasant things of the past have turned into memory, and they will never come back. And we all are moving towards the ‘end’. The use of words like ‘freedom’, ‘lances’ and ‘advances’, ‘evil’, ‘siren’ throughout the poem seems to hint at the War from which the soldiers perhaps cannot come back – their life advances towards its end, an end from which there is no escape. According to Jonathan Allison - “MacNeice’s poems about time depend primarily on the representation of memory in order to achieve their effects, conveying the sense of accelerated time as like a train, or fast-flowing water, or even a horse that no one can control and from which one cannot dismount” ( 246-247).

Nostalgia, which is a characteristic of romanticism, finds a place in the writings produced during the modern period, where there is a growing tendency to seek solace in the past amidst current uncertainties and loss. And MacNeice’s poetry was also no exception to this; we find him seeking solace in nostalgia to deal with his present situations. And this is the reason why MacNeice was called a sort of contemporary wandering Byron by V. S. Pritchett . Here, Ricardo J. Quinones’s discussion about ‘paradox of time’ seems relevant too. In his book Mapping Literary Modernism, Quinones has observed that the total the suppression of innovative aspect of time by the predictive aspect leads to a sense of triumph of space and repetitive sameness, affective the path to innovation and freshness. This is what he means by paradox of time in this context (38). The constant revisit to the past with a sense of nostalgia is indicative of the dominance of innovative or intuitive aspects of time – a time that was lived, the real time that was approached later with a sense of intuition, belongingness and sympathy to cope up with the present. This also an echo of the is reflective of the concept of realm time or duration

As the poet says in ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’, “The sky was good for flying” (1485), the use of past tense here to express his observations implies that he is also trapped by his time –a situation from which there is an escape and hence the acute realisation – “We are dying, Egypt, dying” (1485). The repeated use of the imagery of earth compels reaffirms his stance about time that nobody can hold back time and change what it brings to one’s life. So, there is a celebration of his past in the present coupled with a sense of sadness - as those days cannot be retrieved; they can only be recollected through memory.

According to Mclntire Gabrielle, “ to write of time during the modernist era was to write of a quickly shifting world, to write the mutable and the vanishing; it was simultaneously to create a new time and to celebrate, mourn, and eulogise the passing of the old” (2). And this is absolutely what we can see in most of the poems produced during the modernist period especially between times, especially in the writings of representative modern writers like T.S.Eliot, W.H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and MacNeice’s writings are also no exception to this.

The only way to overcome loss and resist time’s destructive forces is to seek comfort in nostalgia by remembering his good old days of childhood. Although there is a pervading sense of loss and pessimism in the poem, the poet seems to accept this situation and move on with a more accepting tone when he concludes the poem with the following stanza -

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden. ('The Sunlight on the Garden', 1485)

The poem also has an autobiographical flavour as there are subtle references to his personal life and relationship when he says – “But glad to have sat under, Thunder and rain with you, and soon, my friend, we shall have no time for dances” (The Sunlight on the Garden, 1485). The ‘friend’ here seems to be his first wife, Mary, who had decided to leave him and their son after a few years of their marriage. The time when the poem was written was also the time of his separation from her, a troublesome period of his life characterised by anxiety, despair and loss. MacNeice believed in ‘impure’ poetry, that is, poetry conditioned by the poet’s life and the world around him . A similar observation has also been made by Julian Gitzen, according to whom a consistent feature of MacNeice’s later as well as his early poetry is its autobiographical flavour. He wished the poet to be a representative man whose experiences would provide an illustrative basis for depicting the affairs of the human community (139). Thus, we can say that his poetry focuses on the self and its responses to the situations around him; there is an element of self–reflection in his poetry which is on par with the features of literary Modernism.

The subject matters of MacNeice’s poem were never fixed. There was a plurality in his selection of themes which reflects that he was opposed to a fixed mindset and quite innovative in his writings - a characteristic tendency possessed by the modernist writers. For example, in ‘Prayer Before Birth’, MacNeice talks about the existing social evils that have terrified child before his/her birth; in ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’, he talks about time and its destructive power, and in ‘Star-gazer’ we find him referring to memory and the important role that it may play in one’s life.

‘Star-gazer’ by Louis MacNeice is a beautiful poem representing the nature of time and the power of memory. The poem is centred on the relationship between past and present, and the differences between childhood and adulthood. There is a strong longing for the past followed by a sense of grief followed by the realisation that whatever has been lost can’t be recovered. Memory is one of the dominant themes of this short and beautiful poem that begins with the following lines –

Forty-two years ago (to me if to no one else
The number is of some interest) it was a brilliant starry night
And the westward train was empty and had no corridors
So darting from side to side I could catch the
Unwonted sight. ('Star-gazer', 1490)

The imagery of a brilliant starry night that he had witnessed forty-two years ago had set the main theme of the poem. The poet is referring to a period when he had witnessed an unwonted sight which has now become a part of his memory. There is a continuous reference to his bygone days in this poem with a strong sense of nostalgia –

And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive
In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not. ('Star-gazer', 1490)

Memory has occupied a significant space in contemporary socio-cultural and literary discourses. The retrieval of joyful or bitter memories of the past in the present either can make the life of a person more miserable or make a person happy by providing solace from the chaotic present. It also plays a major role in shaping one’s identity in the present. According to Paul Antze and Michael Lambek, the invocation of memory signals association as opposed to dissociation, continuity over discontinuity. Hence it speaks, implicitly and explicitly, to the temporal axis of personhood (xxv). Memory, through which we perceive events in a simple before-and-after sequence, gives rise to recollection involving the artful, though by means arbitrary, a transformation of mere chronological sequence into full-blown narratives (Hinchman 2).

Based on the above observations, we can say that the concept of memory bears two important features – one being its association with the past and it has a sense of continuity, and secondly, the selection of memory may be arbitrary in nature based on an individual’s interest or preferences. While analysing the ‘Star-gazer’ by MacNeice, one can see that he is not only recollecting but also admiring those by bygone days; there is a sense of admiration for the past, although he knows that he cannot access those moments again in the present. He says –

And this remembering now I mark that what
Light was leaving some of them at least then,
Forty-two years ago, will never arrive. ('Star-gazer', 1490).

Basically, what a reader can perceive from here, given that the background against which MacNeice’s life was set, is that the poet is celebrating his past in the present in order to cope with his current situation in a society which is predominantly artificial, self-centred and materialistic. An inherent quest for the past is quite prominent throughout the entire poem, while at the same there is a constant reminder about the transitoriness of human life and the probability of human extinction as he says –

In time for me to catch it, which light when
It does get here may find that there is not
Anyone left alive. ('Star-gazer', 1490).

In this context Jonathan Allison says - “The nightmare element in ‘Star-gazer’ surfaces most strongly with the thought of human extinction that emerges in response to the notion of astronomical distance and time, which has the effect of making human life insignificant...” (243).

Conclusion

The term modernism is widely used to identify new and distinctive features in the subjects, forms, concepts, and styles of literature and the other arts in the early decades of the present century, but especially after World War-I (1914-18) . Thus, if Modernism is characterised by ‘newness in terms of subject matter, form and style’ ‘ plurality’ ‘ self –reflexivity’ ‘focus on the individual’, ‘sense of isolation’ etc., we can definitely place MacNeice’s ‘Prayer Before Birth’, ‘The Sunlight on the Garden’ and ‘Star-gazer’ in the context of Modernism and analyse these poems in the light of the above discussion. There is a deep and serious realisation of the contemporary realities of his time in his poems. There is an experimentation with the form and style of writing where the emphasis was on free verse, repetition, alliteration, economy and concreteness coupled with a touch of colloquialism in the above mentioned poems. The individual and its responses to the external realities get the upper hand rather than mere fantasy and nostalgia. The acute sense of loneliness and frustration experienced by an individual with the advent of materialism and War was quite evident, and to cope with his current situation, the poet’s constant attempt to fly back in time using memory.

Endnotes:

[1] All quotes of the poem have been taken from Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems edited by E. R. Dodds (Faber & Faber, 1979).

[2] For details see, Make it New by Ezra Pound (Faber and Faber, 1934).

[3] In A Background to the Study of English Literature (Macmillan, 1999), B Prasad has discussed modernism and its various features, and mentioned the two world wars serve as the dividing line between modern and postmodernism. p 86-91.

[4] See Collected Poems by T. S. Eliot for The Waste Land, and The Hollow Men

[5] See 'Star-gazer' in The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Norton & Company, 2005), p. 1490.
   
[6] See “Louis MacNeice: The Last Decade.” Twentieth Century Literature, vol. 14, no. 3, p. 135.
  
[7] See “Louis MacNeice, 1907-1963: His Poetry.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, vol. 59, p. 257.
  
[8] Real time or duration - a concept of time developed by the French philosopher Henri Bergson according to whom time is shapeless, and pure time or duration exist only in consciousness where a space-time continuity exists; where our consciousness does not separate the present state from its previous states. Please see Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness (Dover Publications, 2001), p. 75-139.

[9] See The Linen Hall Review, vol. 12, no. 2, p. 17.
  
[10] Modernism as defined by M.H.Abrams in A Glossary of Literary Terms (Thomson Heinly, 2003), p.167.

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