0:00:05 > 0:00:08Poets have always written about the landscape
0:00:08 > 0:00:12and many form intense relations with either their own special corner
0:00:12 > 0:00:17of the country or else a particular aspect of the natural world.
0:00:19 > 0:00:23This programme is about one of my favourite poems of all time.
0:00:23 > 0:00:25It's a poem by Louis MacNeice
0:00:25 > 0:00:29that over a short space of page does so many things at once.
0:00:29 > 0:00:34It takes a reader on so many different journeys.
0:00:34 > 0:00:41The poem is called Woods and it takes you down a path that leads both into one of the great recurring
0:00:41 > 0:00:47features of the English landscape, as well as into the life and mind of an outstanding poet.
0:00:49 > 0:00:55There are places that speak telling the stories of us and them.
0:00:55 > 0:00:59A village asleep loaded with dream,
0:00:59 > 0:01:03an ocean flicking its pages over the sand.
0:01:03 > 0:01:08Eventually we reply, a conversation of place and page over time
0:01:08 > 0:01:14inscribing the map so that each in turn might hold the line.
0:01:23 > 0:01:26When Louis MacNeice wrote the poem, Woods, a year or so after
0:01:26 > 0:01:30the end of the Second World War he was at the top of his game.
0:01:30 > 0:01:33A well known poet, major literary figure
0:01:33 > 0:01:40and a friend and collaborator with the other great names of the day, Eliot, Auden and Dylan Thomas.
0:01:40 > 0:01:44Also a playwright and broadcaster, by the time of his death in 1963
0:01:44 > 0:01:48he'd produced an impressive 16 books of poetry.
0:01:48 > 0:01:55Woods may not be one of MacNeice's best known poems but for me it's a masterly piece of writing.
0:01:55 > 0:01:58A wonderful avocation of woodland that also digs deep
0:01:58 > 0:02:03into the heart of Louis MacNeice and his troubled sense of identity.
0:02:04 > 0:02:08MacNeice is one of those figures who's hard to pin down.
0:02:08 > 0:02:11He was Irish and yet in so many ways English.
0:02:11 > 0:02:15He was darkly handsome and sociable but also notoriously reserved.
0:02:15 > 0:02:22One of his girlfriends once described him as looking like a horse who was about to shy.
0:02:22 > 0:02:26MacNeice wrote Woods some time around his 40th birthday.
0:02:26 > 0:02:30The poem is both a portrait of a man trying to work out who he is
0:02:30 > 0:02:35and a subtle lament on the disappointments of middle age.
0:02:38 > 0:02:42'My father who found the English landscape tame
0:02:42 > 0:02:44'Had hardly in his life walked in a wood,
0:02:44 > 0:02:47'Too old when first he met one; Malory's knights,
0:02:47 > 0:02:50'Keats's nymphs or the Midsummer Night's Dream
0:02:50 > 0:02:55'Could never arras the room where he spelled out True and Good
0:02:55 > 0:03:00'With their interleaving of half-truths and not-quites.
0:03:00 > 0:03:05'While for me from the age of ten the socketed wooden gate
0:03:05 > 0:03:07'Into a Dorset planting, into a dark
0:03:07 > 0:03:10'But gentle ambush was an alluring eye;
0:03:10 > 0:03:13'Within was a kingdom free from time and sky,
0:03:13 > 0:03:18'Caterpillar webs on the forehead, danger under the feet,
0:03:18 > 0:03:21'And the mind adrift in a floating and rustling ark.'
0:03:25 > 0:03:28Those are the first two of seven verses from Woods
0:03:28 > 0:03:32over which MacNeice tries to reconcile what he saw
0:03:32 > 0:03:35as the two very different halves of his identity.
0:03:35 > 0:03:37The English part
0:03:37 > 0:03:38and the Irish.
0:03:42 > 0:03:45Louis MacNeice's childhood began in Northern Ireland.
0:03:47 > 0:03:51He tells his own story in a poem named after the town where he grew up.
0:03:53 > 0:03:56'I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
0:03:56 > 0:04:00'to the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams.
0:04:00 > 0:04:06'Thence to smoky Carrick in County Antrim where the bottleneck harbour
0:04:06 > 0:04:12'collects the mud which jams the little boats beneath the Norman Castle.
0:04:12 > 0:04:15'The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt.
0:04:15 > 0:04:19'The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses
0:04:19 > 0:04:23'but the Irish quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.'
0:04:26 > 0:04:32It was Louis MacNeice's father, the Reverend John MacNeice, who dominated his upbringing.
0:04:32 > 0:04:36John MacNeice came from a family of clergymen, not from Ulster in
0:04:36 > 0:04:41the north but from the remote islands off County Mayo in the west.
0:04:41 > 0:04:47In a sectarian confrontation when he was a boy, John's family were driven away from their home.
0:04:47 > 0:04:53Louis's father grew up with a strong sense of living in exile and both this sense of
0:04:53 > 0:04:59not belonging, and this passion for the wilds of Ireland, were inherited by his son, Louis.
0:05:01 > 0:05:09Louis mother, Lily, was ill through much of his early childhood and when he was seven, she died.
0:05:09 > 0:05:13'While in a way my childhood was rather lonely
0:05:13 > 0:05:17'and incidentally at one period I had a lot of nightmares and all that
0:05:17 > 0:05:21'and there were various unhappy things in the background.
0:05:21 > 0:05:28'On the other hand, this loneliness did encourage one to read a lot.'
0:05:28 > 0:05:33Then, at the age of nine, Louis left the shuttered world of the rectory behind him.
0:05:35 > 0:05:38'I went to school in Dorset.
0:05:38 > 0:05:40'The world of parents
0:05:40 > 0:05:45'compacted into a puppet world of sons, far from the mill girls,
0:05:45 > 0:05:54'the smell of porter, the salt mines and the soldiers with their guns.'
0:05:54 > 0:06:01In 1917, at the height of the First World War, MacNeice was sent to England to Sherborne Prep in Dorset.
0:06:01 > 0:06:06The journey from Ireland to England would take him into a very different world,
0:06:06 > 0:06:12an institutional environment that was far from his nursery upbringing in the rectory at Carrick Fergus.
0:06:12 > 0:06:17For Louis, this departure from Ireland was a defining moment in his life.
0:06:19 > 0:06:24'The Headmaster's voice filled the room like a bell and his smile filled the room,
0:06:24 > 0:06:30he was ebullient with health, smelling of tweed and high up under the ceiling from between the perfect
0:06:30 > 0:06:37'teeth in his classic squirearchic face, courteous phrases flowed out, rolled to the walls.
0:06:37 > 0:06:40'Assurance that all was well.
0:06:40 > 0:06:48'With great strides rocking the house, he led my parents and me to my dormitory.'
0:06:48 > 0:06:51Far from home, in the aftermath of his mother's death, this might have
0:06:51 > 0:06:56been a traumatic experience, but MacNeice fell into English prep school life with ease.
0:06:56 > 0:07:02In fact he soon preferred school to home.
0:07:02 > 0:07:05After his quiet upbringing in the rectory, he suddenly found
0:07:05 > 0:07:11himself surrounded by other boys, playing rugby, climbing trees, reading, learning and generally
0:07:11 > 0:07:18caught up in the enthusiasms of a charismatic and inspirational headmaster, Littleton Powis.
0:07:18 > 0:07:23Littleton was an old Prepper himself so he'd been at the school and he loved the way that his schooling had
0:07:23 > 0:07:30been and he was one who enjoyed the freedom that Prep school gave him.
0:07:30 > 0:07:34So brought to the school this philosophy and, I think, it summed
0:07:34 > 0:07:40up in his autobiography, the joy of it, he just had this wonderful zest for life and joy for life.
0:07:40 > 0:07:43So he would take the boys out
0:07:43 > 0:07:46into the grounds, he would train them into identifying
0:07:46 > 0:07:49birds, identifying plants, but then he would let them go.
0:07:49 > 0:07:55I think that, like all good teachers, he enthused them and then let them really find their own feet.
0:07:55 > 0:08:00I mean, this idea that there were only two places out of bounds in this area,
0:08:00 > 0:08:04one was the Trent Barrow Woods because there was a bog hole there that children could
0:08:04 > 0:08:09slip in and drown which is not good for a school to lose children into bog holes!
0:08:09 > 0:08:15- Not ideal.- And the railway line and that was it. Otherwise they were free to go unaccompanied.
0:08:15 > 0:08:19'And I led them up from the courtyard and into the great hall of the castle...'
0:08:19 > 0:08:21MacNeice wasn't only inspired by Powis's passion
0:08:21 > 0:08:27for flowers and birds and trees, the headmaster would readily read poetry and stories to the boys
0:08:27 > 0:08:31in the evenings and the authors and poets MacNeice heard at Sherborne
0:08:31 > 0:08:33filtered deep into his consciousness.
0:08:34 > 0:08:37'And do not imagine these Knights of the Round Table...'
0:08:37 > 0:08:42At the time, the book that made the greatest impression, was the epic Morte D'Arthur, Sir Thomas Malory's
0:08:42 > 0:08:48medieval tale of heroic knights, courtly ladies and terrible battles.
0:08:48 > 0:08:52Fired up by Malory, MacNeice and his friends would play out
0:08:52 > 0:08:54scenes from the book in the woods close to the school.
0:08:56 > 0:09:01This brand of literature, this kind of school, and above all
0:09:01 > 0:09:09this English landscape was a world away from the remote Atlantic island upbringing of his father.
0:09:09 > 0:09:13'My father who found the English landscape tame
0:09:13 > 0:09:15'Had hardly in his life walked in a wood,
0:09:15 > 0:09:18'Too old when first he met one; Malory's knights,
0:09:18 > 0:09:21'Keats's nymphs or the Midsummer Night's Dream
0:09:21 > 0:09:26'Could never arras the room where he spelled out True and Good
0:09:26 > 0:09:30'With their interleaving of half-truths and not-quites.
0:09:30 > 0:09:36'While for me from the age of ten the socketed wooden gate
0:09:36 > 0:09:38'Into a Dorset planting, into a dark
0:09:38 > 0:09:41'But gentle ambush was an alluring eye;
0:09:41 > 0:09:44'Within was a kingdom free from time and sky,
0:09:44 > 0:09:48'Caterpillar webs on the forehead, danger under the feet,
0:09:48 > 0:09:52'And the mind adrift in a floating and rustling ark.
0:09:53 > 0:09:56'Packed with birds and ghosts, two of every race,
0:09:56 > 0:10:00'Trills of love from the picture-book -
0:10:00 > 0:10:04'Oh, might I never land
0:10:04 > 0:10:08'But here, grown six foot tall, find me also a love,
0:10:08 > 0:10:11'Also out of the picture-book; whose hand
0:10:11 > 0:10:15'Would be soft as the webs of the wood, and on her face
0:10:15 > 0:10:19'The the wood-pigeon's voice would shaft a chrism from above.
0:10:22 > 0:10:26'So in a grassy ride a rain-filled hoof-mark coined
0:10:26 > 0:10:29'By a finger of sun from the mint of Long Ago
0:10:29 > 0:10:34'Was the last of Lancelot's glitter. Make-believe dies hard;
0:10:35 > 0:10:39'That the rider passed here lately and is a man we know
0:10:39 > 0:10:43'Is still untrue, the gate to Legend remains unbarred,
0:10:43 > 0:10:51'the grown-up hates to divorce what the child joined.'
0:10:51 > 0:10:56Paul Farley, one of the best British poets writing today, claims Louis MacNeice is a powerful influence
0:10:56 > 0:11:02and, like me, he thinks of Woods as one of MacNeice's richest poems.
0:11:02 > 0:11:05It's got so much stuff in there, hasn't it? Because, I mean,
0:11:05 > 0:11:08it is quite simply on this first level just about
0:11:08 > 0:11:11entering a wood and that experience that we all have, but then also
0:11:11 > 0:11:17it's backlit by all of his personal experience, this association of this landscape with his time in Dorset.
0:11:17 > 0:11:20This mythic idea of the West of Ireland as well.
0:11:20 > 0:11:23Yeah. It's almost a great...
0:11:23 > 0:11:25It's a piece that really shows how important
0:11:25 > 0:11:27the landscape of childhood is.
0:11:27 > 0:11:32It's nested, it's beautifully nested so you get layer upon layer upon layer of meaning
0:11:32 > 0:11:35and that's what gives the poem endless resonance, I think.
0:11:35 > 0:11:39He was, you know, famously
0:11:39 > 0:11:43incredibly inventive with his rhyme schemes and his forms
0:11:43 > 0:11:45and this is a fascinating rhyme scheme.
0:11:45 > 0:11:49How important do you think that kind of technique is for that
0:11:49 > 0:11:54onward movement for the poem, which is also a poem that is looking back?
0:11:54 > 0:11:58It's really difficult at first to read MacNeice in some ways because
0:11:58 > 0:12:01say you've just been reading somebody like,
0:12:01 > 0:12:05Wordsworth or Edward Thomas or someone who you're more or less going to get your
0:12:05 > 0:12:09meat and two veg, five beats line from and you kind of know where you're on,
0:12:09 > 0:12:10there's a comfort in that.
0:12:10 > 0:12:17MacNeice's line, more often than not, isn't like that, it's a more complicated and knottier thing
0:12:17 > 0:12:23and in a poem like Woods, yeah it is like entering a thicket of words, each six line stanza is
0:12:23 > 0:12:28doing something slightly different so it's got like that stanza definition from standard stanza
0:12:28 > 0:12:33and it starts out, "My father who found the English landscape tame"
0:12:33 > 0:12:36sounds like five beats to my ear, but then there are other lines
0:12:36 > 0:12:40where you can read them as almost having six beats in it.
0:12:40 > 0:12:46So his line is very elastic and he pushes and pulls metrically at the line, you know.
0:12:46 > 0:12:51It's difficult at first but once you tune into it there's no other voice like it.
0:12:56 > 0:13:03At the heart of the poem, MacNeice exclaims, "Oh, might I never land But here, grown six foot tall."
0:13:04 > 0:13:08Woods is a poem about memories of childhood but it's told very much
0:13:08 > 0:13:14from the wistful unillusioned perspective of a grown-up and it's a poem that I think powerfully
0:13:14 > 0:13:19reveals the contradictions, the dilemmas and disappointments of the adult, Louis MacNeice.
0:13:22 > 0:13:27After Sherborne, MacNeice followed a very English route, Public school, then Oxford.
0:13:29 > 0:13:35He left Oxford with a wife, Mary, and went to teach classics at Birmingham University.
0:13:35 > 0:13:40After three years in the Midlands, shortly after the publication of his first collection of poems,
0:13:40 > 0:13:47Mary ran off with an American friend of Louis's leaving him with their young son, Dan.
0:13:47 > 0:13:52Louis and Dan moved into a flat on the edge of Hampstead Heath in north London.
0:13:54 > 0:13:58'..Find me also a love Also out of the picture-book;
0:13:58 > 0:14:02'Whose hand would be soft as the webs of the wood
0:14:02 > 0:14:03'And on her face
0:14:03 > 0:14:07'The wood-pigeon's voice would shaft a chrism from above.'
0:14:09 > 0:14:13These lines from Woods, this yearning for an idealised romance,
0:14:13 > 0:14:17are especially poignant in the context of Louis' love life in the '30s.
0:14:17 > 0:14:22Over his years in Hampstead, Louis seems to have lurched from one affair to another.
0:14:22 > 0:14:26In his unfinished autobiography, he bemoans the unsatisfying
0:14:26 > 0:14:30and unresolved state of his life at this time.
0:14:30 > 0:14:34'In respect of sex, I see England in the '30s as a chaos
0:14:34 > 0:14:39of unhappy or dreary marriages, of banal or agonised affairs.'
0:14:39 > 0:14:44'The pattern of every night shot through with the pounding and jingling of bedsteads,
0:14:44 > 0:14:47'but somewhere in the hearts of the couples on the beds
0:14:47 > 0:14:50'is a really little voice of query. Is this enough?
0:14:50 > 0:14:53'Or is this what I really want?
0:14:53 > 0:14:55'Or can this possibly go on?
0:14:55 > 0:14:57'When will it end?
0:14:57 > 0:14:59'When will it begin?'
0:15:06 > 0:15:11If it was a turbulent emotional period for Louis, creatively it was highly successful.
0:15:11 > 0:15:15Commissions from publishers soon enabled him to give up teaching
0:15:15 > 0:15:19and as the terrible threat of war loomed on the horizon he was writing
0:15:19 > 0:15:27some of the best poetry of his life, like this, the poignantly elegiac Sunlight On The Garden.
0:15:27 > 0:15:31'The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold,
0:15:31 > 0:15:37'We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold,
0:15:37 > 0:15:40'When all is told We cannot beg for pardon.
0:15:40 > 0:15:46'Our freedom as free lances Advances towards the end;
0:15:46 > 0:15:51'The earth compels, upon it Sonnets and birds descend;
0:15:51 > 0:15:57'And soon, my friend, We shall have no time for dances.
0:15:57 > 0:16:02'The day was good for flying, Defying the church bells
0:16:02 > 0:16:07'And every evil iron siren And what it tells:
0:16:07 > 0:16:09'The earth compels,
0:16:09 > 0:16:12'We are dying, Egypt, dying.
0:16:12 > 0:16:18'And not expecting pardon, Hardened in heart anew,
0:16:18 > 0:16:24'But glad to have sat under Thunder and rain with you
0:16:24 > 0:16:31'And grateful too For sunlight on the garden.'
0:16:32 > 0:16:35Jill Balcon was a young actress who knew and worked
0:16:35 > 0:16:41with Louis during the '40s, by which time he was producing radio programmes at the BBC.
0:16:41 > 0:16:46What do you remember of the first time you met Louis MacNeice?
0:16:47 > 0:16:50I remember being
0:16:50 > 0:16:58shy and he was very shy as I'm sure you know and he didn't smile readily,
0:16:58 > 0:17:08but one of the things that was so marvellous about him as a director of actors
0:17:08 > 0:17:12were the manners, he had the most beautiful manners in the studio
0:17:12 > 0:17:18with everybody and that was quite surprising that somebody who looked formidable was
0:17:18 > 0:17:21in fact so courteous.
0:17:24 > 0:17:26How much of the work happened in the pub?
0:17:26 > 0:17:29Well, you said it. I don't know!
0:17:29 > 0:17:35But there was also a place called the ML and it was a drinking club down into a dark place where people
0:17:35 > 0:17:40did a lot of drinking and, I'm sure, I know Louis was a member and various other people.
0:17:40 > 0:17:44So there was a lot of drinking and conviviality of that kind.
0:17:44 > 0:17:47He was different in a very striking way, wasn't he?
0:17:47 > 0:17:49Louis had a certain grace.
0:17:51 > 0:17:56Louis was, in a sense, an outsider, yes, he was.
0:17:56 > 0:18:01This sense of being an outsider, Louis's feeling of being neither here nor there and his desire
0:18:01 > 0:18:08to make sense of his identity, all this really begins to come into the fore in his writing in 1945.
0:18:09 > 0:18:14By that time he was married again to a singer, Hedli Anderson, and they had a young daughter, Corinna.
0:18:14 > 0:18:21That summer of 1945 Louis took his young family back to the Carrickfergus of his childhood.
0:18:23 > 0:18:28'Back to Carrick, the Castle as plum assured as 30 years ago
0:18:28 > 0:18:30'Which wall was which?
0:18:30 > 0:18:33'But here are new villas Here is a sizzling grid
0:18:33 > 0:18:38'But the green banks are as rich and the lochs as hazily lazy
0:18:38 > 0:18:42'And the child's astonishment not yet cured.'
0:18:43 > 0:18:47This was the summer before Louis wrote Woods and you can see vividly
0:18:47 > 0:18:52in his work at this time how the themes and concerns of Woods are beginning to emerge.
0:18:54 > 0:18:56'Who was, and am,
0:18:56 > 0:19:01'Dumbfounded to find myself in a topographical frame here,
0:19:01 > 0:19:02'Not there.
0:19:02 > 0:19:09'The channels of my dreams determined largely by random chemistry of soil and air,
0:19:09 > 0:19:14'Memories I had shelved peer at me from the shelf.'
0:19:16 > 0:19:21From Carrick Fergus the MacNeice family took a trip that summer to the west coast of Ireland,
0:19:21 > 0:19:27his father's home turf in the wilds of Mayo as he would later refer to it in Woods.
0:19:27 > 0:19:31Inevitably this trip brought back powerful memories of his father.
0:19:32 > 0:19:40'It was 16 years ago he walked this shore and a mirror caught his shape which catches mine,
0:19:40 > 0:19:45'but then, as now, the floor mop of the foam bloated the bright
0:19:45 > 0:19:49'reflections and no sign remains of face or feet
0:19:49 > 0:19:54'when visitors have gone home.'
0:20:01 > 0:20:05While MacNeice was in Ireland that summer, as well as writing poetry,
0:20:05 > 0:20:09he began work on a major new drama for the radio.
0:20:09 > 0:20:14- ARCHIVE:- 'The tower, the dark tower!
0:20:14 > 0:20:17'Quick now, my man...
0:20:17 > 0:20:20'Go in, my son, waste no time...'
0:20:20 > 0:20:24The Dark Tower is a radio play inspired by the kind
0:20:24 > 0:20:29of Arthurian legend that so fed MacNeice's imagination as a boy.
0:20:29 > 0:20:33The play combines the parable of a Knight's quest with a more
0:20:33 > 0:20:38contemporary existentialist search for meaning and purpose.
0:20:38 > 0:20:46It's a quest in which the certainties of the heroic tales that MacNeice so loved as a child are challenged
0:20:46 > 0:20:50by the uncertainties of the post-war world in which he was now writing.
0:20:50 > 0:20:55- ARCHIVE:- 'I, Roland, the black sheep, the unbeliever,
0:20:55 > 0:20:58'who never did anything of his own free will,
0:20:58 > 0:21:03'will do this now to bequeath free will unto others.
0:21:03 > 0:21:08'Ahoy there tower, dark tower!'
0:21:13 > 0:21:16The Dark Tower has something else in common with Woods.
0:21:16 > 0:21:19The central character, the knight, Roland, is on a mission following in
0:21:19 > 0:21:26the footsteps of his father, but unsure of what his mission is, what path to take.
0:21:26 > 0:21:29In the middle of the poem, Woods, in the middle of the wood,
0:21:29 > 0:21:34MacNeice attempts to sum up the two different paths he could take.
0:21:35 > 0:21:40'Thus from a city when my father would frame an escape
0:21:40 > 0:21:42'He thought as I do of bog or rock.
0:21:42 > 0:21:47'But I have also this other, this English choice,
0:21:47 > 0:21:50'Into what yet is foreign; Whatever its name
0:21:50 > 0:21:53'Each wood is the mystery and the recurring shock
0:21:53 > 0:21:56'Of its dark coolness is a foreign voice.'
0:21:56 > 0:22:02In the summer of 1945, after the end of the Second World War, Louis MacNeice wrote,
0:22:02 > 0:22:08"I wish one could either live in Ireland or feel oneself in England."
0:22:08 > 0:22:13In early 1946, it seems that MacNeice and his family attempted to find
0:22:13 > 0:22:18a compromise between these two conflicting landscapes in his life when they moved here
0:22:18 > 0:22:23to this beautiful 16th century farmhouse in Tilty in rural Essex.
0:22:23 > 0:22:27When MacNeice and his wife first came to have a look at the house they were particularly struck
0:22:27 > 0:22:34as well, as with the house itself, with its views which looked out over fields and woods.
0:22:36 > 0:22:42MacNeice wrote his poem, Woods, during the period he lived here out in Essex and you can see vividly
0:22:42 > 0:22:49how this well farmed domesticated landscape begins to colour the poem as it moves towards its conclusion.
0:22:50 > 0:22:54'Yet in using the word tame my father was maybe right,
0:22:54 > 0:22:57'These woods are not the Forest;
0:22:57 > 0:22:58'Each is moored
0:22:58 > 0:23:02'To a village somewhere near. If not of today
0:23:02 > 0:23:07'They're not like the wilds of Mayo, they are assured
0:23:07 > 0:23:10'Of their place by men; reprieved from the Neolithic night
0:23:10 > 0:23:14'By gamekeepers or by Herrick's girls at play.'
0:23:16 > 0:23:22There's one line in this poem which, for me, is really the entire poem encapsulated just in a few words
0:23:22 > 0:23:25and that's when MacNeice says, "These woods are not the Forest"
0:23:25 > 0:23:29and he gives the word forest a capital F.
0:23:29 > 0:23:31What's that all about, Paul?
0:23:31 > 0:23:35Well, he's saying that the woods are linked very,
0:23:35 > 0:23:38very intimately to human activity.
0:23:38 > 0:23:43They're linked to agriculture and good husbandry.
0:23:43 > 0:23:48They're not the Neolithic forest, they're not the, you know, the primeval forest,
0:23:48 > 0:23:52they're not the place where, anything can happen.
0:23:52 > 0:23:57They're a smaller, tamer, scaled-down version and human activity's never very far away.
0:23:57 > 0:24:00I mean we're here now and we can hear cars reverse
0:24:00 > 0:24:03and horns going off, aircraft and all the rest of it.
0:24:03 > 0:24:05I mean, this is a small Island, you know.
0:24:05 > 0:24:09You can't find anywhere very wild really, despite what people will have you think.
0:24:09 > 0:24:13There's just lots of these tamed spaces.
0:24:19 > 0:24:21'The 60 miles per hour plants,
0:24:21 > 0:24:25'The growth that lines the summer corridors of sight
0:24:25 > 0:24:27'Along our major roads,
0:24:27 > 0:24:31'The overlooked backdrop to Preston, 37 miles.
0:24:31 > 0:24:33'Speed camera foliage,
0:24:33 > 0:24:38'The white flowers of Mays and Junes, scarlet fruits of autumn
0:24:38 > 0:24:41'Lay wasted in the getting from A to B.
0:24:41 > 0:24:44'Hymn to forward-thinking planting schemes.
0:24:44 > 0:24:46'Though some seem in two minds,
0:24:46 > 0:24:49'The greenwood leaves are white furred,
0:24:49 > 0:24:51'Have a downy underside,
0:24:51 > 0:24:54'As if the heartwood knew in its heart of hearts
0:24:54 > 0:25:00'The days among beech and oak would lead to these single file times,
0:25:00 > 0:25:02'These hard postings
0:25:02 > 0:25:05'And civilised itself with handkerchiefs.'
0:25:12 > 0:25:16MacNeice's poem is about so many things.
0:25:16 > 0:25:19It's a poem about walking in a wood and a poem about childhood memory
0:25:19 > 0:25:21and a poem about the tame and the wild.
0:25:21 > 0:25:26But I think ultimately it becomes even more than this.
0:25:26 > 0:25:29It's a subtle and moving ode of reconciliation,
0:25:29 > 0:25:33with where MacNeice finds himself at this stage of his life.
0:25:33 > 0:25:40Not in the wilds of County Mayo or in Malory's forests, but in the gentle woodland of rural England.
0:25:40 > 0:25:47This note of restrained melancholy plays on through the closing verse and suddenly becomes universal.
0:25:47 > 0:25:52Suddenly we are walking alongside Louis.
0:25:52 > 0:25:54'And always we walk out again. The patch
0:25:54 > 0:25:58'Of sky at the end of the path grows and discloses
0:25:58 > 0:26:02'An ordered open air long ruled by dyke and fence,
0:26:02 > 0:26:06'With geese whose form and gait proclaim their consequence,
0:26:06 > 0:26:10'Pargeted outposts, windows browed with thatch
0:26:10 > 0:26:15'And cow pats - and inconsequent wild roses.'
0:26:15 > 0:26:22Those beautifully understated last lines are subtly weighted
0:26:22 > 0:26:28with the restrained sadness that appears in much of the best of MacNeice's writing.
0:26:28 > 0:26:31I talked about this quality of sadness with the poet Danny Abse
0:26:31 > 0:26:34who knew MacNeice towards the end of his life.
0:26:34 > 0:26:40When you spend some time with his voice you do get this,
0:26:40 > 0:26:41a quality of sadness really.
0:26:41 > 0:26:45Well, I think you do in all good poetry, most poetry don't you?
0:26:45 > 0:26:49I think in all good poetry there's a note of lamentation sometimes,
0:26:49 > 0:26:53as sometimes there's the note of celebration as well.
0:26:53 > 0:26:56In some poets you don't get any celebration, only melancholy!
0:26:56 > 0:27:02But I think you get joy as well with some of those lyrical poems of Louis.
0:27:02 > 0:27:08They sometimes seem contradicting the man himself.
0:27:08 > 0:27:12There's such a difference between the man and the poetry it seems to me.
0:27:12 > 0:27:14There's a wonderful
0:27:14 > 0:27:18photograph of somebody who looks like a film star
0:27:18 > 0:27:25but he didn't look like a film star when I met him at all and there's so much contradiction, I think.
0:27:25 > 0:27:29There's obviously a lot of inner chaos in his life and out of chaos
0:27:29 > 0:27:35comes forth to quote nature, "Comes forth sometimes a dancing star."
0:27:47 > 0:27:54For me Woods is a fantastic landscape poem, not just because it evokes a wood so well, but also because
0:27:54 > 0:28:02it's a poem of identity that touches upon the way the places in our lives can resonate within us.
0:28:02 > 0:28:08Something else that I really love about this poem is the strong sense of resolve or learning at the close,
0:28:08 > 0:28:16as if through spending some time back in his childhood landscapes both MacNeice and us walk out of this wood
0:28:16 > 0:28:19a little bit wiser than when we walked into it.
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