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