Autumn Journal

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The “elastic” and self–contained quatrain rhymed either abac and abcb with irregular lines and repetition of motifs can be said to sustain coherence and cohesiveness. He remembers Ireland, “like a ship or a car,” a “female” who equips her people with “a gesture and a brogue / And a faggot of useless memories” (XVI). Bringing things together, the collector needs to make things stay together, for a collection is always threatened with disintegration (214). For the one who says, “I not only have many different selves but I am often, as they say, not myself at all” ( Poetry 146), the diary presents psychological and aesthetic possibilities of coordination, communication, and possible transformation of selves.I was aware of it but I haven't read any Louis MacNeice at all, even though I've had a copy of his Collected Poems gathering dust on my shelf for a while. It is a record of the author's emotional and intellectual experience during those months, the trivia of everyday living set against the events of the world outside, Ireland, the Oxford byelection, the settlement in Munich and slow defeat in Spain. Etsy’s 100% renewable electricity commitment includes the electricity used by the data centres that host Etsy.

This form (a) gives the whole poem a formal unity but (b) saves it from monotony by allowing it a great range of appropriate variations".

Intermixed with these more or less public and political events are more personal themes: memories of his schooldays (section X); of teaching in Birmingham (section VIII); of his broken marriage and subsequent love affair with Nancy Coldstream; denunciation of both sides of divided Ireland (section XVI); the poetry and philosophy of his academic subject, Ancient Greece. As a counterweight MacNeice concludes with admiration for the unbroken spirit of the people of besieged Barcelona, bombed daily and in a state of almost total deprivation, which reproaches his own and the national complacency and self-indulgence. This is a deliberate and directional effect allowing the poet to highlight some instances while deemphasizing others, also to include juxtaposition of series of viewpoints. In the poetry of the 1930s, Martin Dodsworth notices, “addition” is a multifaceted characteristic of the time. A long poem of twenty four cantos, it vividly captures the last autumn of peace before the outbreak of the Second World War.