Hardened in Heart Anew: A Close Reading of “The Sunlight on the Garden” by Louis MacNeice

December 19^th, 2016

The most compelling aspect of “The Sunlight on the Garden” by Louis MacNeice is undoubtedly the fact that it tackles one of the most enduring human themes – the reality that life is both fleeting and precious – and does so in an incredibly multifaceted way. While the emotional essence of the poem is intuitively understandable, its inner workings are more obscure; the text is rich with complex abstractions and allusions, all working beneath the surface to present a work which is at once both a lament and a love-song. This essay will demonstrate exactly how these various moving parts all come together to contribute to the poem’s effectiveness as an artistic work. Specifically, it will examine MacNeice’s use of the narrative voice to create a sense of intimacy and dialogue; his use of dense, successive metaphors to convey the decay and wonder of life; and finally, his use of both internal and end rhyme to create an echoing rhythmic flow. Ultimately, this essay argues that the poetic features of the work all effectively enhance MacNeice’s core theme – the idea that life, people, and moments are transient, so one must appreciate these precious moments while they still can.

To facilitate an initial understanding of the poem, it is first important to establish the narrative voice MacNeice uses within the work. Most obviously, the poem is written in the first-person; the narrator refers to himself twice in the first stanza as “we,” as in, “we cannot cage the minute” and “we cannot beg for pardon.” Typically, the first-person perspective is used in poetry to create a sense of intimacy: it ties the arc of the work directly to how the narrator thinks and feels. This is precisely why MacNeice uses it in his poem. When the narrator says “we,” he is not speaking about humanity at large, but about his personal feelings of helplessness at the fleeting nature of life – the main focus of the work. Given this first-person tone, it is incredibly significant that he never actually refers to himself as “I,” instead using words such as “our” or the aforementioned “we.” While he is speaking about his personal experience, he does not actually describe himself as an individual, but as someone tied intrinsically to another person. It is thus appropriate to view his feelings about life through the lens of this relationship. From here, it becomes necessary to approach to the poem from a biographical perspective. While there is merit to the line of thinking that suggests poetry should be viewed independently from the life of the author, it nonetheless makes for a much richer interpretation of the poem if one considers the fact that, when “The Sunlight on the Garden” was written, MacNeice was going through a divorce; his wife had left him (Poetry Foundation). The narrator of the poem could thus be seen as MacNeice himself, lamenting his broken relationship as the joy of his life slowly slips away from him. The narrator never refers to himself independently of this other character, because the poem is about MacNeice in relation to his wife, mourning the fact that he will never be with her again. This explanation provides a very clear context for the relationship described in the poem. In particular, the last line of the third stanza lends credence to this theory, as MacNeice says, “We are dying, Egypt, dying.” This is an allusion to a line in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, in which Antony lays dying in the arms of his eponymous lover, having fallen on his sword, lamenting the tragedy of his death. By evoking this line, and changing the pronoun from “I” to “we,” MacNeice is effectively alluding to the fact that they are, in a way, both dying. Just like Antony and Cleopatra, the relationship between MacNeice and his wife is destined to fall apart. However, in the last stanza the narrator’s opinion lightens, and he turns the tone of the poem from one of lament to one of grateful remembrance: he recalls an image of himself and his lover sitting under “thunder and rain,” sheltered from the storm. This is the only instance in the poem where the narrator is given a sense of real presence – up until this point, his heavy use of metaphor and abstraction creates a sense of detachment within the work. When he finally comes to appreciate the joyful moments of his life rather than mourn them, the poem becomes grounded in reality, and his words become more plain – almost colloquial. This is a real memory the narrator has seen with his own eyes; he is given a sense of presence and sight within the poem only when he becomes grateful for the happy memories of himself and his lover. Overall, the crux of the poem is MacNeice’s narration. When the substance of the poem is focused on his pain, the narration is abstract and concerned directly with the pain of his wife’s memory; when the work turns around to a place of acceptance, the narration becomes much more grounded and present.

While the metaphors within the work do create a sense of distance, they serve a very clear purpose – they effectively convey how the narrator feels helpless and restricted by the nature of time. Given the incredibly complex nature of the poem’s poetic tropes, it is useful to examine the poem on a line-by-line basis, as to demonstrate how these almost cascading figures of speech develop over the course of the work. The poem begins with its dominant conceit of sunlight. Sunlight is often used to express joy, as the sun is a source of warmth and life, but here MacNeice notes that it loses its warmth: it “hardens and grows cold.” If one understands sunlight as a symbol of radiance, this metaphor effectively demonstrates how the narrator’s life has become dull and bereft of happiness, and how he is powerless to do anything about it. This idea continues in the second line, with the narrator’s assertion that he “cannot cage the minute / Within its nets of gold.” Here, the “gold” seems to refer to the aforementioned sunlight, which represents the joyful moments of the narrator’s life. He cannot “cage” the minute in the sense that one cannot stop time from slipping away, nor can one hope to capture nets of light: both of these things are intangible. This effectively conveys the central theme of transience, as one cannot hope to actually capture the happy moments of life before they slip away.

This idea of a cage – of captivity and restriction – is then strangely contrasted with one of freedom in the second stanza. However, the narrator quickly describes this freedom as fleeting. He says, “freedom as free lances / advances towards its end.” The most obvious meaning of “lances” is that of a military lance or spear. This, combined with the mention of “advances,” seems to suggests a march of soldiers going forward to their ultimate end. This likely goes hand-in-hand with the idea of hopelessness that was expressed in the narrator’s attempts to capture time. A march of soldiers moves forward, slowly and steadily, like an unstoppable wave, and there is nothing the narrator can do to stop it. He will lose his freedom, just as he lost the joyful sunlight. In the next line, when he explains that “The earth compels,” he means to say that this inevitable decline is the will of the planet: as a human, the narrator is from the earth, and he is thus caught up in its repetitious cycle of life and death. This is reflected in the fact that the phrase actually repeats itself in the third stanza, followed by the narrator’s allusion to Antony and Cleopatra: the fact that “We are dying.” Through this repetition of the earth metaphor, MacNeice is able to demonstrate the narrator’s view that nothing can ever truly last: everyone dies, lovers leave, and the world turns on indifferent to it all. His specific mention of sonnets and birds descending to the earth compliments this idea. With “sonnets,” he could be suggesting that the act of writing, of artistic expression, is pointless in the face of one’s mortality. Furthermore, the image of bird descending to the ground is often associated with it swooping down to prey on an animal. In this sense, the bird’s descent could be interpreted as the forces of time or fate coming to prey on the narrator, with him powerless to stop it, thus contributing to the poem’s emphasis on the inevitability of death. However, both these interpretations are tenuous at best. As the poem moves on, MacNeice’s metaphors become much more difficult to decipher. While they all evoke a general sense of futility and foreboding, their exact meanings seem almost intentionally obscure, as if MacNeice is attempting to evoke a sense of confusion as to parallel the narrator’s struggle.

This is no better seen than in the third stanza: MacNeice continues the idea of flight, but this time characterizes it, and the sky, as “good.” He quickly says that flying is an act of defiance in that it defies the church bells. On one hand, this could suggest that the narrator, by flying, is disregarding the moral influence of the church and giving over to reverie and sin. However, the church (and religion as a whole) is primarily concerned with the idea that life is fleeting – a common church motif being the inscription of memento mori: a Latin term meaning “remember that you must die.” In the bleak context of the poem, this interpretation suggests that the narrator’s flight and freedom is quickly interrupted by the tolling of the church bells, reminding him of his eventual death – how everything he holds dear will someday fade away. This is complimented by the poem’s use of the word “siren,” as it alludes either to alarm, signaling danger, or to a mythological siren, beckoning the narrator out of the sky and down towards his demise. In either case, the common trend of all these metaphors is that they each serve to demonstrate the narrator’s sense of foreboding – his lament at the idea that his joy, freedom, and flight might soon all come to an end.

Given the fact that the poem dedicates three stanzas entirely to this theme, gradually building denser and more obscure symbols throughout the course of the poem, it is strange that the entire tone of the work seems to shift in the last stanza, with the narrator suddenly expressing gladness. The sunlight metaphor appears again in the last line, once again representing the fleeting joy of life. However, while the narrator was once extremely concerned with the reality that these happy moments would soon fade (such that that first three stanzas were dedicated entirely to this anxiety) the narrator suddenly shows an appreciation of them – he recognizes their preciousness, and choses to be grateful for his life while he can. While this is the core theme of the poem, the actual transition from lament to appreciation seems slightly unearned. It perhaps would have been more fitting to for MacNeice to begin building this idea in the third stanza.

Almost as if compensating for this lack of transition, the poem enhances its lighter ‘turn’ through the use of a very structured, intricate rhyme scheme. This results in an almost musical quality, contrasting the darkness of much of the poem and reinforcing the narrator’s positive resolution. This is seen first in the poem’s use of end rhyme, as each stanza follows an ABCBBA scheme. The dominant ‘B’ rhyme effectively links much of the stanza together, making it cohesive, while the ‘A’ rhyme links the first and last line of the stanza together, containing the it, while at the same time giving each stanza a circular quality – as if each beginning leads to an end, and each end leads to a new beginning. This reflects the arc of the poem in that the narrator begins in a place of struggle and ends in one of calm, having gained a sense of wisdom. This idea of a circle gains even greater relevance when one considers the scheme of the poem as a whole: ABCBBA, DEFEED, GHIHHG, AKLKKA. What is most significant about this scheme is that the first rhyme of “garden / pardon” is repeated in the last stanza, only reversed, as “pardon / garden.” The first and last line of the poem are thus nearly identical, both containing “sunlight on the garden,” as if signifying that this metaphor is the most important one within the work. MacNeice’s framing of the poem in this manner could also suggest the idea of caging something (i.e. “We cannot cage the minute”), thus reflecting the narrator’s attempts to try and contain the moments of his life as they slowly slip away.

The sense of melodic flow within the work continues with the use of internal rhymes, as they do not simply stand on their own, but actively enhance the end rhyme scheme in a consistent, structured manner. In each stanza, the rhyme at the end of the first line extends into the first word of the second line, as in “The sunlight on the garden / hardens and grows cold.” This also applies to the next two lines within the stanza, in that the last word of the third line is shown to rhyme loosely with the first word of the fourth line. This is significant, as the third line in the standard rhyme scheme (‘C’) has no direct rhyming pair; MacNeice’s effective use of internal rhyme remedies this lack, linking each and every line of the poem together, thereby creating a strong sense of flow. Often, these rhymes go even further, incorporating alliteration, assonance, and consonance, as in: “The sky was good for flying.” This creates a very strong echoing effect, while also giving the poem a sense of forward momentum. This is no better seen than in the line: “Our freedom as free lances / Advances towards its end.” Here, MacNeice uses alliteration and internal rhyme to create an echoing effect – a sense of forward momentum to accompany the physical forward momentum of the lances and the soldiers, marching towards their deaths. As the meter of the poem is highly irregular, with inconsistent numbers of syllables in each line, the combined influence of all these aforementioned variations in internal and end rhyme effectively come together to counteract what might ordinarily be an awkward and metrically inconsistent poem. From a thematic perspective, this once again complements the journey of the narrator, who in the last stanza comes to realize that the rough reality of life pales in comparison to its wonder, just as the melodic wonder of the poem’s rhyme overshadows its deficits in meter.

Ultimately, Louis MacNeice’s “The Sunlight on the Garden” is an incredibly compelling poem that works on a multitude of different levels. Every significant poetic feature of the poem works in favor of the central theme – that life is at once both fleeting and precious – or otherwise contributes to the artistic effectiveness of the work as a whole. The narrative voice aids this idea in that it features a singular narrator caught in a crumbling relationship with another character; when the poem is viewed through the lens of his personal struggles and the real-life struggles of MacNeice himself, it becomes clear that the narrator’s sadness stems directly from his lost love. The various (sometimes incredibly obscure) metaphors of the piece further contribute to the feeling of foreboding in the poem, while also helping to reveal the narrators lament at the transience of his life and love. Lastly, the strong echoing effect produced by the structed internal and end rhyme is able to obfuscate the rough meter of the work, and well as produce a musical-like quality conductive to the poem’s flow and beauty. These formal features all reveal a poem of incredible depth and complexity, not unlike a clock or a well-oiled machine; while it is easy to understand on the surface, this understanding is enabled by a vast array of hidden mechanisms, metaphors, and allusions. In the end, the work captures the very essence of poetry. It reflects both the universal concerns of all people, and the personal conflict of a single narrator going from a place of inner conflict to one of acceptance and tranquility. Overall, the poem offers a very important and distinctly human message: that while life is fleeting, it is nonetheless an incredible privilege – we must be grateful for the sunlight on the garden, as it is precious, and will not stay for long.