“explosions in the sky / i see colors fly / it’s like the fourth of july in your eyes”

[larryhammer]

For Poetry Monday, one more MacNeice? One more MacNeice:

Snow, Louis MacNeice

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.


First published in his third collection, Poems (1935).

---L.

Subject quote from Young and in Love, Ingrid Michaelson.

Comments

[cmcmck]

So good but so often forgotten these days!

[larryhammer]

Really? It's one of the handful of poems that seem to permanently represent him in anthologies.

[cmcmck]

But only ever the same handful, it seems.

[larryhammer]

Unfortunately, yes. Even Auden gets over a dozen Usual Suspects.

[puddleshark]

Ah. A favourite - thank you!

[larryhammer]

De nada!

[conuly]

Oh, I like this.

[larryhammer]

There are Reasons he was one of the Hot Young Poets of the 1930s.