Tag: Louis Macneice

Restaurant Car by Louis Macneice

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Fondling only to throttle the nuzzling moment
Smuggled under the table, hungry or not
We roughride over the sleepers, finger the menu,
Avoid our neighbours’ eyes and wonder what

Mad country moves beyond the steamed-up window
So fast into the past we could not keep
Our feet on it one instant. Soup or grapefruit?
We had better eat to pass the time, then sleep

To pass the time. The water in the carafe
Shakes its hips, both glass and soup plate spill,
The tomtom beats in the skull, the waiters totter
Along their invisible tightrope.

For good or ill, For fish or meat, with single tickets only,
Our journey still in the nature of a surprise,
Could we, before we stop where all must change,
Take one first risk and catch our neighbours’ eyes?

If air travel is going to be affected by current events, and “staycations” are the thing for now, then this poem is rather appropriate.

Louis Macneice (1907–1963) turns an indolent, pleasurable holiday journey by train into a metaphor for life itself, rather as Walter de la Mare did in The Railway Junction.

We are rushing into the future, intent only on idle pleasures. The waiters on their “invisible tightrope” remind us that the pleasant life requires an army of servants.  And life is not a rehearsal because the journey is “still in the nature of a surprise” and we have “single tickets only”.

This poem has something of the atmosphere of the 1930s about it, although I think it is actually a later poem, from around 1960.

Apple Blossom by Louis Macneice

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Louis Macneice is closely associated with the nineteen thirties group of poets that included W H Auden. Many of his best-known poems date from that period. This one though is from much later, 1957.

I don’t want to say too much about it, because I feel that different readers may interpret it slightly differently. There may be an autobiographical element here. Perhaps Macneice had to be older to write it to convey the sense that life is still worth living after idyllic early years and that the present is connected to the past.

I suppose apple blossoms are more associated with the spring, but there is a powerful sense of optimism and renewal here that makes it appropriate for this first week of the new year.

Apple Blossom by Louis Macneice

The first blossom was the best blossom
For the child who never had seen an orchard;
For the youth whom whisky had led astray
The morning after was the first day.

The first apple was the best apple
For Adam before he heard the sentence;
When the flaming sword endorsed the Fall
The trees were his to plant for all.

The first ocean was the best ocean
For the child from streets of doubt and litter;
For the youth for whom the skies unfurled
His first love was his first world.

But the first verdict seemed the worst verdict
When Adam and Ever were expelled from Eden;
Yet when the bitter gates clanged to
The sky beyond was just as blue.

For the next ocean is the first ocean
And the last ocean is the first ocean
And, however often the sun may rise,
A new thing dawns upon our eyes.

For the last blossom is the first blossom
And the first blossom is the best blossom
And when from Eden we take our way
The morning after is the first day.