Northern irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)
CATHERINE GRAHAM FEATURES LOUIS MACNEICE
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.
Louis MacNeice from The Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, Oxford University Press, 1967
I first read this poem by Louis MacNeice decades ago when I was studying poetry in Northern Ireland. Since then it has lived beneath my skin. The music, the magic, the stutter-stop of “suddener.” Once, when I shared this poem with my poetry class, a student exclaimed: That’s not a word! But it is and the poem makes it so.
Sometimes a room is “suddenly rich.” Or was it always that way and we just need to slow down and open to what’s there to see it?
Grief splits us open. Grief led me to poetry. The deaths of my parents became the catalyst. Loss and love co-exist in poetry. Poetry holds “the drunkenness of thigs being various.” It holds the concrete: the snow, the glass, the roses. It holds the tangy scent of a peeled tangerine, a hissing fire, the pit-spitting mouth. It holds the way eternity and the present moment entwine. “Was suddenly rich.” “Is suddener than we fancy it.”
Sometimes the mystery we live in gifts us with a glimpse. We leap from “word” to “world” in an epiphanic run: “On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of ones hands—”
And we return to the unknowing with a greater knowing that “there is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.”
Note: I chose the last line of “Snow” to be the epigraph of my 2023 poetry collection: Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected Poems.
Blog Post by Catherine Graham, August, 2023
Catherine Graham is a novelist, poet, podcast host and creative writing instructor based in Toronto. Her debut novel Quarry won an IPPY gold medal for fiction and was a finalist for the Sarton Women’s Book Award for Contemporary Fiction. The Most Cunning Heart and Quarry were both Miramichi Reader Best Books and finalists for the Fred Kerner Book Award. Her memoir, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric, was a finalist for the Trillium Book Award, Toronto Book Award, and won the Fred Kerner Book Award. The Celery Forest was named a CBC Best Book of the Year and was a finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award for Poetry. She teaches at the University of Toronto, leads the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Book Club and co-hosts The Hummingbird Podcast—part of the WNED PBS Amplify app, and is a judge for the 2023 CBC Poetry Prize. Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead: New and Selected Poems is her latest book. Visit: www.catherinegraham.com @catgrahampoet