we cannot cage the minute
a poem to start your week
Frederick Louis MacNeice CBE (12 September 1907 – 3 September 1963) was an Irish poet and member of the Auden Group. He left Ireland to attend Merton College, Oxford and later settled in Hampstead, London.
MacNeice was celebrated during his lifetime but is less well known today than most of his counterparts (W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender/ Cecil Day Lewis). His work has an intimacy and openness, the images are crisp, the intensity of feeling apparent yet restrained in a way that keeps it from straying into sentiment. The poem below is one of MacNeice’s best known works, a masterpiece a subtlety and emotional acuity.
He wrote it in November 1936, just as his divorce was being finalised, a rupture that initially left him devastated for months. In it, he manages to convey a dramatic interior shift occurring in an outward moment of stillness. To me, the poem serves as a gentle reminder that healing can and often will take place when you are least aware of it and that surrender and forgiveness are, more often than not, the handmaidens of hope.
More than anything though, it’s a poem about acceptance, specifically the bitter-sweet relief of letting go after a long and painful sadness. I love the speaker’s appreciation of the garden’s quotidian beauty — the stab of surprise that comes after the torpor has passed and you look up, exhausted, only to realise that life will go on, and the world is remarkable, there are pleasures to be had, even (perhaps especially) in the details.
Sunlight on the Garden
by Louis MacNeice
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.
Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.
The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying
And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.
Thank you