Autumn Journal: A Poem

by Louis MacNeice

Written between August and December 1938, Autumn Journal is still considered one of the most valuable and moving testaments of living through the thirties by a young writer. It is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months, the trivia of everyday living set against the events of the world outside, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain.

Genres: Poetry, History, Nonfiction, Ireland, 20th Century, Irish Literature, War

104 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 1, 1939

About the author

Born to Irish parents in Belfast, MacNeice was largely educated in English prep schools. He attended Oxford University, there befriending W.H. Auden.

He was part of the generation of "thirties poets" which included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis; nicknamed "MacSpaunday" as a group — a name invented by Roy Campbell, in his Talking Bronco (1946). His body of work was widely appreciated by the public during his lifetime, due in part to his relaxed, but socially and emotionally aware style. Never as overtly (or simplistically) political as some of his contemporaries, his work shows a humane opposition to totalitarianism as well as an acute awareness of his Irish roots.

Reviews

[Atri · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only give us the courage of our instinct,
The will to truth and love's initiative,
Then we could hope to live
A life beyond the self but self-completing.

[Bettie · Rating 4 out of 5]

“September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy.
Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.”

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b084cs48

Description: Colin Morgan reads Louis MacNeice's poetic testament of life in 1938, written against the turbulent backdrop of the Munich Agreement, the fall of Barcelona and Britain's preparations for an inevitable war. Autumn Journal is an autobiographical long poem in twenty-four parts by Louis MacNeice. It was written between August and December 1938, and published in a single volume by Faber and Faber in May 1939

Author's Note: I am aware that there are over-statements in this poem-- e.g. in the passages dealing with Ireland, the Oxford by- election or my own more private existence. There are also inconsistencies. If I had been writing a didactic poem proper, it would have been my job to qualify or eliminate these overstatements and inconsistencies. But I was writing what I have called a Journal. In a journal or a personal letter a man writes what he feels at the moment; to attempt scientific truthfulness would be--paradoxically-- dishonest. The truth of a lyric is different from the truths of science and this poem is something half-way between the lyric and the didactic poem. In as much as it is half- way towards a didactic poem I trust that it contains some 'criticism of life' or implies some standards which are not merely personal. I was writing it from August 1938 until the New Year and have not altered any passages relating to public events in the light of what happened after the time of writing. Thus the section about Barcelona having been written before the fall of Barcelona, I should consider it dishonest to have qualified it retrospectively by my reactions to the later event. Nor am I attempting to offer what so many people now demand from poets--a final verdict or a balanced judgment. It is the nature of this poem to be neither final nor balanced. I have certain beliefs which, I hope, emerge in the course of it but which I have refused to abstract from their context. For this reason I shall probably be called a trimmer by some and a sentimental extremist by others. But poetry in my opinion must be honest before anything else and I refuse to be 'objective' or clear-cut at the cost of honesty. - L. M. March, 1939. Source

Youtube: Rare short film from Loopline's TV series 'Imprint' presented by Theo Dorgan was aired on RTE 1999. It celebrated the 60th anniversary of Louis MacNeice's epic poem 'Autumn Journal'.

[Khrustalyov · Rating 5 out of 5]

There may be too much made of the similarities between present rise of far-right populism and 1930s Europe. While it is undeniably true that the far-right are ascending to power across Europe and in the US, we do not see the 1930s counter to this movement, namely communism, nor indeed the war footing that Hitler forced Europe onto. That said, there were certainly some creeping parallels to be read in Louis MacNeice's disturbing and brilliant account of living through the late 1930s in England as I glanced above its pages to watch the 2024 US election unfold on the news. It is not even so much the political content or dynamics of each period read and experienced side by side, but more so the sense of something closing in - the season, the year, some sense of comfort and warmth and security being pushed out by a cold draught.

Autumn Journal is a long poem in many cantos that ranges quite widely in its topics but largely explores the place of MacNeice himself in the period in which he was writing, the autumn of 1938. It is a journal in the sense that the poet wishes to capture something of the confused zeitgeist of that fateful year and it is highly successful in how it instills a sense of panic for what is about to come - a panic made greater when we know, with hindsight, more than the poem's author knew at the time of its publication. Propaganda blares from radios, war planes fly overhead, woodlands are razed for gun emplacements, and MacNeice's persona - a stand-in for himself, as the preface more or less suggests - watches harried workers and out-of-time Edwardian pensioners drift by train windows. What, the persona asks, is the place of the Classicist and poet during such a time? Someone to chronicle that time in a highly personal and yet universal manner, it seems. And he does so with intelligence and artistry of the highest order.

[Sara · Rating 5 out of 5]

I needed to listen to this strange and sad journalistic poetry. Like it was great timing, seasonally, but also because so much of late 30s Europe feels relateable to current events ("current events!!" mr rhodes cackles as he rubs his hands together). I also just like the idea of a poetic diary.

[Courtney Johnston · Rating 4 out of 5]

Louis MacNeice's 'Autumn Journal' made me ask a question I've not really asked before - why write a poem?

I mean, I've read plenty of interviews where writers who write both fiction and poetry say that some ideas are better expressed, better fitted, for one form than the other. And beyond that, I guess writers are a little like runners - congenitally better suited to the sprint or the marathon.

MacNeice's long poem - 86 pages in the Faber and Faber edition I borrowed - records the months between August 1938 and the new year of 1939. In it, he is fully aware of the monumental events that are taking place (indeed, could anyone who lived through the Great War not feel that weight?) but also at the end of a love affair, voting in the Oxford by-election (fought over Chamberlin's appeasement policy), musing on Greek philosophy, and close observation of London life.

I guess today, I would expect this to all be written up as monthly installments in The Atlantic or the New Yorker. The confessional essay - where large matters are mixed in with individual life - seems like the closest match to what MacNeice is doing here. But as MacNeice writes in his introduction:

I am aware that there are overstatements in this poem—e.g. in the passages dealing with Ireland, the Oxford by-election or my own more private existence . . . if I had been writing a didactic poem proper, it would have been my job to qualify or eliminate these overstatements and inconsistencies. But I was writing what I have called a Journal . . . . It is the nature of this poem to be neither final nor balanced. I have certain beliefs which, I hope, emerge in the course of it but which I have refused to abstract from the context. For this reason I shall probably be called a trimmer by some and a sentimentalist by others.

The poem seems to offer freedoms the essay would not: to mention, elide, allude without explication, circle out, spend two pages on a simple observation. And at the same time, it offers boundaries and restrictions - rhyme, line length. There is something I am interested in, but don't yet fully understand, about taking any subject and treating it within a set of rules: the form stays the same, but culture and the world keep moving on.

I found MacNeice's story - half-polemic, half-personal - intriguing, even if my ear didn't thrill to his writing. Some images stick however: snow-covered cars in winter

Turn animal, moving slowly
In their white fur like bears

And the hopeful/melancholy/sad reflections on his lover:

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place;
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy;
Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow,
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.

There's also an of-the-momentness I really like, a sense of modernity in the very special sense that has of the 1930s. Not simply in the fact that MacNice is recounting events as they happen, but that he seems so tuned in to the grain of the moment, those things that will become period detail

Let the old Muse loosen her stays
Or give me a new Muse with stockings and suspenders
And a smile like a cat,
With false eyelashes and finger-nails of carmine
And dressed by Schiaparelli, with a pill-box hat.

Digging about online, I found this quote from MacNeice's own 'Modern Poetry: a Personal Essay' from 1937: “I would have a poet able bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, involved in personal relationships, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.” He couldn't have been more right.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

MacNeice, a poet and man of letters from Northern Ireland, wrote this long verse narrative between August 1938 and the turn of the following year. It’s simultaneously about everything and nothing, about everyday life for the common worker and the political rumblings that suggest all is not right in the world. As summer fades and Christmas draws closer, he reflects on his disconnection from Ireland; and on fear, apathy and the longing for purpose.

Two in every four lines rhyme, but the rhyme scheme is so subtle that I was far into the book before I recognized it. I tend not to like prose poems, but this book offers a nice halfway house between complete sentences and a stanza form, and it voices the kinds of feelings we can all relate to. How can this possibly be 80 years old? It is so relevant to our situation now.

we think ‘This must be wrong, it has happened before,
Just like this before, we must be dreaming…’

now it seems futility, imbecility,
To be building shops when nobody can tell
What will happen next.

There are only too many who say ‘What difference does it make
One way or the other?
To turn the stream of history will take
More than a by-election.’

Still there are … the seeds of energy and choice
Still alive even if forbidden, hidden,
And while a man has voice
He may recover music.

The university library copy I borrowed smells faintly of incense, so reading it was rather like slipping into the back pew of an old church and pondering timelessness.

Originally published on my blog, Bookish Beck.

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

From BBC Radio 3 - Drama on 3:
Colin Morgan reads Louis MacNeice's poetic testament of life in 1938, written against the turbulent backdrop of the Munich Agreement, the fall of Barcelona and Britain's preparations for an inevitable war. Introduced by poet Colette Bryce and interwoven with archive news reports from the era.

Part of Radio 3's 70th season, marking the anniversary of the creation of the Third Programme, Radio 3's predecessor in 1946, where MacNeice worked as a producer and writer.

Produced by Emma Harding.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b084cs48

[Matthew Ted · Rating 3 out of 5]

125th book of 2023.

3.5. I'm always more drawn to poetry in autumn than any other time of year and I grabbed this from work because of the beautiful autumn-coloured cover and because I needed a break from the Arthurian poetry I've been reading in the background. Not what I expected: I went in wanting nature poems, long lanes and falling leaves, and instead got the world on the brink of war: 1938. Still, some excellent poems from MacNeice. Others passed me by without much impact but some were striking. Quite often the way. On the whole, depressing, looming and pregnant with images of war, rape and destruction. Not quite my leafy little sidepaths.

[Kandice · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deceptively simple poetry that intertwines personal upheaval with the political instability of Europe in 1938. Certain passages haunted me for days after I finished it.

Read it if you love poetry. Read it if you think you hate poetry.

[Colin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Autumn Journal is something I've been meaning to read at this time of the year for absolutely ages. Its appearance on an excellent recent edition of the Backlisted podcast gave me the impetus to get on with it. A long poem of twenty four cantos, it vividly captures the last autumn of peace before the outbreak of the Second World War. It is a mixture of the personal and the public, as MacNeice evokes a lost relationship in a world that is slowly sliding into war. Hypnotic rhythm and rhyme take the reader on a journey through the dying days of the penultimate year of what another poet called a 'low dishonest decade', and through MacNeice's personal odyssey, the two frequently blurring at the edges.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm haunted by this work since it turned me on to a kind of journalistic way of writing poetry as an adolescent. The atmosphere of the impending war, being in love on the streets of London, musings on Spanish civil war and ancient Greek hedonists, the courage of ordinary people going to work every day "to build the falling castle". Also those beautiful long lines with their sly rhymes and cunning rhythms. I recently came across a tatty first edition without cover in a charity bookshop. It had those cut pages and a sense of being from its time. A treasure!

[Alice · Rating 3 out of 5]

Really liked the themes of autumn and war. A good and interesting collection, but doesn't quite make it into my heart.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

(The selection of quotes goodreads offers from this book is weird.)
And there should be some way of explaining why reading this in a stand alone edition is so much easier and more enjoyable than reading it in the collected.

Described as representing the Thirties in the way the 'The Wasteland' did the Twenties and like a lot of poems from that decade oddly caught in its own stylistic time bubble in a way the Waste Land never was.

One man's description of part of what what another Irish poet called the year of the "Munich Bother". It depicts the inevitable and looming war as it affects individuals, in small details; (People rushing to buy the late news and to see what Hitler has said or done is going to do; trees being chopped down on Primrose Hill to make room for anti aircraft guns. the sense of individual helplessness).

Immensely readable, but at the same time an interesting spectacle; one of the best lyric poets of the twentieth century going for the long haul. And compared to some of the other train wrecks of long poems attempted during the 20th Century, this one, though lacking the ambition of something like Paterson or the Cantos, works.

Sleep to the noise of running water
tomorrow to be crossed, however deep;
this is no river of the dead or Lethe,
tonight we sleep
On the banks of the Rubicon-the die is cast;
there will be time to audit
the accounts later, there will be sunlight later
and the equation will come out at last.

(and then how MacNeice ghosts a later generation, here particularly Derek Mahon.)

[Joce · Rating 5 out of 5]

Autumn Journal is perhaps the most self-aware modernist text that I have read. Written in the final quarter of a year before the calamitous 1939, MacNeice dryly and pertinently observes a world teetering on the edge of - well, something. Although he hovers in the modern world with a sort of conscious brutality, he often drops away back into the classical past, as though losing his footing in the present. He meanders through the drop into winter through various voices, and employs the most gorgeous turns of phrases: "carting round a toybox of hallmarked marmoreal phrases", "I loved my love with the wings of angels, dipped in henna, unearthly red..."

But ultimately for me, it was also simply delightful to have my particular interests in Ireland, poetry, modernism, and classical history blended so beautifully into one text.

[David Campton · Rating 4 out of 5]

MacNeice is often sneered at as a lesser member of the Auden/Day Lewis coterie, and unfavourably compared with other "Irish" poets, but I have a genuine love of this window into his private thoughts in response to the great events of 1938-9 and reflections on things "back home" in Ulster over the "marching season" of that year. There remains a relevance to it 50 years after his death and 75 years after he wrote it... sadly...

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

*****Update after my re-read*****

None of our hearts are pure, we always have mixed
motives,
Are self deceivers, but worst of all
Deceits is to murmur 'Lord, I am not worthy'
And, lying easy, turn your face to the wall.
But may I cure that habit, look up and outwards
And may my feet follow my wider glance
First no doubt to stumble, then to walk with the others
And in the end - with time and luck - to dance.

This is a long poetic journal taking us through Britain in 1938 as MacNeice faces up to a loss of love and an impending war. I found myself binge reading this tonight. Because although it is from the past - and so is the occasional phrase - it has a horrible echo in the now.

I have loved defeat and sloth,
The tawdry halo of the idle martyr;
I have thrown away the roots of will and conscience,
Now I must look for both,

It is meditational, elegiac, thoughtful, hopeful, romantic, cynical, and more. But it is a cry for something better from a time of crying out. There are phrases that catch your eye, like the sudden glint of the sun of the scales of a single fish inside a shoal. The shoal itself is hypnotically beautiful, but even with that a single scale, a single strike of light attracts your attention. Sometimes it is because it is line that seems aphorism:

Why bother to water a garden
That is planted with paper flowers?

The grate is full of ash but fire will always burn.

When we are out of love, how were we ever in it.

Sometimes because the line is an image or a thought that needs unpicking:

You were my blizzard who had been my bed.

But fundamentally one should be wary of tearing little pieces from a poem like this. It is a superb poem as a whole piece. Like a diamond. And individual phrases, like Clive James used to say, catch the light as you move around it and through it.

You want someone to seize now with the same smartness as MacNeice did. But this isn't just a work of the past, about the past. It has things to say for us now and always.

And every tree is a tree of branches
And every wood is a wood of trees growing
And what has been contributes to what is.

It makes many of the same points that W.H. Auden makes in his poem September 1, 1939. The language is similar. And here MacNeice, like Auden, uses his voice to "undo the folded lie."

You should read it.

[Kaethe · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been waiting more than 30 years to read this. Perhaps I would have liked it more then. As it is, the only passages that really grabbed me were ones I already knew:

September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place
So I give her this month and the next

Though the whole of my year should be hers who has
rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy;

Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow,

Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.

***

There will be time to audit
The accounts later, there will be sunlight later
And the equation will come out at last.

***

I had thought I was going to love it. The idea of a poem written in real time and published, same, autobiographical, capturing the time-before-the-war in anticipation of it. When it was about the vacation in Spain just before the fall to Franco, the trip's clichés given piquancy by the looming horror and very uncertain future, that was a poem I thought might give me some sort of solace, or at least perspective, when faced with our own uncertainty.

But no. All the rest of it is quite different: an election, a lost dog, a great deal of classical Greek references, most of which I didn't understand. Apparently it was quite popular in 38 and 39, so maybe readers then did find in it what I was hoping to.

At least it was possible to get through to the end, which seems like a near impossibility with new works just now.

Library copy

[Justine Kaufmann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Autumn Journal is Louis MacNeice’s autobiographical poem, written between August and December 1938. It is a poem written in real time, as world events and one man’s life unfurl on the cusp of winter and war. It is analytical and journalistic at times-- ruminations on society, war, and the world order we’ve created for ourselves, just as predictable and circular as the seasons. But at other times, MacNeice is personal, vulnerable, and sentimental. He gives us snapshots of London and the change of the seasons. He grapples with the literature and mythology that make up his days as a teacher. He reflects on a love lost but whose presence he has yet to disentangle from his memories and images of the London streets with lines understatedly beautiful but somehow powerful and haunting. Another great find from Backlisted.


Who am I-- or I-- to demand oblivion?
I must go out to-morrow as the others do
And build the falling castle


----


And I try to feel her in fancy but the fancy
Dissolves in curls fo mist
And I try to summarise her but how can hungry
Love be a proper analyst?
For suddenly I hate her and would murder
Her memory if I could…..
I have to try to assess
Your beauty of body, your paradoxes of spirit,
Even your taste in dress.
Whose emotions are an intricate dialectic…
Whose kaleidoscopic ways are all authentic,
Whose truth is not of a statement but of a dance.

[Elisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't normally read poetry but today a friend told me Colin Morgan's reading of this poem was available on the iPlayer so I gave this a go. And I liked it so much I went and bought the ebook off Amazon to be able to read along as Morgan read to be able to appreciate the poetry better. I liked the intimate tone of the verses (it's a diary, duh), the crucial historical moment it was set in (and was a bit unnerved by how relevant most of the political/social commentary still is), the everyday description and little snapshots of London life. Poetry still is definitely not my cup of tea but MacNeice's free verse (that's what I'd call it in Italian) flows so easily this was not a hardahip to read. In short, I'm glad I read this, something I'd have never sought on my own. So, thank you Colin Morgan for luring me in with your sexy Irish accent, I guess?

[alexandra pintea · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jurnal de toamna cu (printre multe, multe altele) crizanteme, dalii si foc (in camin):

'In this room chrysanthemums and dahlias
Like brandy hit the heart; the fire,
A small wild animal, furthers its desire
Consuming fuel, self-consuming.
And flames are the clearest cut
Of shapes and the most transient:
O fire, my spendthrift,
May I spend like you, as reckless but
Giving as good return - burn the silent
Into running sound, deride the dark
And jump to glory from a single spark
And purge the world and warm it.'

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece. I read it every October. Seems especially relevant this year.

[Tanya Petrova · Rating 5 out of 5]

Astonishingly evocative of the times we live in, indescribably beautiful, compassionate and kind. A must-read for any socially conscious and self-aware person out there. Stellar!

[Simon Barraclough · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the very few books I've started to read again as soon as I've finished: the others being Ulysses, Dombey and Son, and Heart of Darkness.

[Jenny Cooke (Bookish Shenanigans) · Rating 5 out of 5]

A new favourite.

[木漏れ日 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Good stuff, if occasionally shallow and a bit fustian.
MacNeice's "Journal" is, indeed, autobiographical, and perhaps that is where I take some issue—he's written his life in verse, not written the verse in his life. All the same, there are some moments of real beauty and profundity; MacNeice's language at once balances the elegant, luxurious, and glacé with the informal, intimate, and acrid. I reveled in "every tired aubade and maudlin madrigal" and shuddered at the "feathers sprouting from the rotted / Silk of my black / Double eiderdown." Every bit as bitter and solemn and jovial and elegiac and rollicky and romantic as the slow metamorphosis of the Autumn months themselves. Excellent read.

Some favorite moments:
"As if to live were not
Following the curve of a planet or controlled water
But a leap in the dark, a tangent, a stray shot.
It is this we learn after so many failures,
The building of castles in sand, of queens in snow,
That we cannot make any corner in life or in life’s beauty,
That no river is a river which does not flow"

"I loved her between the lines and against the clock,
Not until death
But till life did us part I loved her with paper money
And with whisky on the breath.
I loved her with peacock’s eyes and the wares of Carthage,
With glass and gloves and gold and a powder puff
With blasphemy, camaraderie, and bravado
And lots of other stuff."

"Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow,
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses."

"The days grow worse, the dice are loaded
Against the living man who pays in tears for breath;
Never to be born was the best, call no man happy
This side death."

"Spiritual sloth
Creeps like lichen or ivy over the hinges
Of the doors which never move;
We cannot even remember who is behind them
Nor even, soon, shall have the chance to prove
If anyone at all is behind them
The Sleeping Beauty or the Holy Ghost
Or the greatest happiness of the greatest number;
All we can do at most Is press an anxious ear against the keyhole
To hear the Future breathing; softly tread
In the outer porch beneath the marble volutes
Who knows if God, as Nietzsche said, is dead?"

"And while a man has voice
He may recover music."

[Hannah Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

"September has come and I wake
And I think with joy how whatever, now or in future, the system
Nothing whatever can take
The people away, there will always be people."

I love autumn and hate fascism so this was a real hit.

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

didn’t completely understand what was happening

[Vishvapani · Rating 4 out of 5]

We aren't in 1938, but there's something familiar in the sense MacNeice eloquently expresses of being in a bad time and watching vast forces push the world in a bad direction while one feels one's own confusion and impotence and watches, bemused, the responses of others.
The poem I'd put alongside it is Auden's New Year Letter, which was written in a similar style at precisely the same time and also combines autobiography, political observation and phiosophical reflection.
Having had only a passing acquaintance with Macneice's work, this was a powerful introduction.

[Amy Lutes · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first "read-through" was actually a "listen-through" to the BBC3 radio production of "Autumn Journal" as read by Colin Morgan. I found it to be beautiful and poignant, and I currently have the print book on order so that I can spend some more time with the words.

MacNeice can turn a phrase in a way that I haven't heard in a while, reminding me of some of the nature and observational poetry of the British Romantics (Wordsworth, Coleridge) and American Transcendentalists (Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson). Here are just a few of MacNeice's phrases that had me rewinding sections to listen to over and over and transcribe:

"Rumble of tumble, drums in the trees,
breaking the eardrums of the ravished dryads."

"I do not envy the self-possession of an elm tree,
nor the aplomb of a granite monolith.
All that i would like to be is human, having a share
in a civilized, articulate, and well-adjusted community
where the mind is given its due but the body is not distrusted.
As it is, the so-called humane studies may lead to cushy jobs
but leave the men who land them spiritually bankrupt intellectual snobs."

"What the wind scatters, the wind saves;
a sapling springs in a new country."

I look forward to reading the words on the page, the better to grasp everything MacNeice was trying to expound upon. I often take things in better by reading than by listening, but I must admit that Colin Morgan's lilting voice added a nice touch to the already beautiful words.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 4 out of 5]

September 2023: This reread brought to mind parallels with The Walls Do Not Fall by H.D. (written in 1942, not too long after MacNeice's late 1938 project). Autumn Journal offers beautiful words to savor for the "mind's museum."

"And so when the many regrets / Trouble us for the many lost affections, / Let us take the wider view before we count them / Hopelessly bad debts... / What has been contributes to what is. / So I am glad to have known them, / The people or events apparently withdrawn; / The world is round and there is always dawn / Undeniably somewhere" (70).

October 2020: "I see the future glinting with your presence / Like moon on a slate roof, / And my spirits rise again. It is October, / The year-god dying on the destined pyre / With all the colours of a scrambled sunset / And all the funeral elegance of fire" (38).

3.5 stars. I bought this book on a whim due to its gorgeous cover, and I was pleasantly surprised by some stream-of-consciousness poetry (written from August to December 1938) that reminded me of Hope Mirrlees' "Paris: A Poem" with some instants that smacked of T.S. Eliot. Full of heartfelt longing for a lost love and the innocence before war, this was the perfect read for a fall train ride.