Finding Louis MacNeice: a reading of ‘Entirely’

Louis MacNeice’s
best pieces
have a philosophical cast and an untidy metre 
that only makes them neater.

https://poems-for-you.com/poems/mru8-entirely/

In this poem, as usual, MacNeice is counting beats, or stresses, rather than syllables. Every stanza has eight lines, which alternate between 5 and 3 beats, but syllable counts vary widely. A couple of the line-breaks seem odd to me (e.g., “great / presences”, “no / road”) in service of the metre and the rhyme. The rhyme scheme is bespoke: ABXBCACA.  The first and last line of each stanza end with the title word, “Entirely”, a version of a bracketing technique which MacNeice uses in several other poems to achieve a sense of closure or completeness. MacNeice manages all this while developing an interesting argument by combining everyday talk with some gorgeous lyrical flourishes. As writers, we may never “get the hang of it”, but we would surely be delighted if “the splash of words in passing” or “falling twigs of song” that we conjured were as striking as  “a mad weir of tigerish waters”.

The force of the argument and its tripartite rhetorical structure have something in common with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Both Sides Now’.  In Mitchell’s song, she ponders, in turn, clouds, love and life itself and finds them all paradoxical and unknowable. In MacNeice’s poem he begins with writing (I’ll say writing, but perhaps poetry, or language is the focus of the first stanza), before turning to love, then life-as-journey, and similarly concludes that none can be mastered entirely. Life might be more boring, MacNeice suggests (in a typically stoic gesture), if things were otherwise.

MacNeice’s poem came first, of course. In ‘Collected Poems’ it’s dated March 1940. Mitchell wrote her song in 1966 or 1967, and was apparently inspired, not by MacNeice, but by a line in Saul Bellow’s 1959 novel, ‘Henderson the Rain King’. Mitchell’s song has a gorgeous melody, but MacNeice’s poem is also a pleasure to speak out loud. The iambics might be loose (like Frost’s), but they work, and in particular, they allow the rhymes to have their full effect. We hear the rhymes, and they make the poem consolingly whole, even as it argues that our understanding remains incomplete.