Autumn Journal

Northern Irish poet and playwright MacNeice wrote Autumn Journal during 1938 as his affair with Nancy Coldstream (a friend and collaborator) ended. It is widely regarded as his masterpiece and I have certainly read nothing like it.

A journal in poem form, this superb book records his feelings on the end of a relationship, the UK at large as the spectre of war looms over the country and his views on the Spanish Civil War, during which he had visited Barcelona. It is full of melancholy, befitting both the season and the time period, and is, in my humble opinion, some of the finest modern poetry of the 20th Century.

The passage on his former lover is particularly striking:

“September has come, it is hers
Whose vitality leaps in the autumn,
Whose nature prefers
Trees without leaves and a fire in the fire-place
So I give her this month and the next
Though the whole of my year should be hers who has
rendered already
So many of its days intolerable or perplexed
But so many more so happy;
Who has left a scent on my life and left my walls
Dancing over and over with her shadow,
Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls
And all of London littered with remembered kisses.”

It's a brilliant, warmly human poem that stands repeated readings. Some poetry I find obtuse and impenetrable, but this is immensely readable. Highly recommended.