Nathan Hobby’s blog

Me trying to make friends with MacNeice and Yeats

MacNeice’s book on Yeats: it matters.
To him, I mean.
I’d been casually picking books from the shelves
Mere tools, anonymous text books -
Until this one made me stop and ponder:
An attempt by a young poet
to understand and clarify (in his own mind)
an older, greater poet, freshly dead.
A beginning, you might think.
But for MacNeice and me,
it is the end.
He himself is now long dead
Neither young nor particularly great.
This is (as far as I will ever know)
as far as he got.

I am talking about the tyranny of the years.
How to hold onto them?
How to make them last?
How to be remembered?
For they won’t leave us alone:
They scar us, transform us
In twenty years
we will not be young! How can
we even sleep with this knowledge?
How can we be happy,
let alone sad?

I fear this is my pinnacle
my vitalest moments
to slip away in this library
learning about others long gone.
Where is the world?
Is it here among the books? Or
through the window, in the sunshine?

- 5/5/2000
In Memory of WH Auden

(d Oct 1973)

I.

Eight years after you died, I lived.
Your death was a given. You didn’t
Disappear: you just never were. You
Have always lived in the books on
South Wing Level Two.
What does death bring the Poet?
Rilke was guessing: we do not know.
But in the end what did
Your smartness come to?
Are you pleased to know a
Lonely undergrad who writes bad verse
Recites your poems as he rides to uni?
Is it the glorious remembering
You hoped and longed for?
To live only in a dulled mind
Judged, alone, by a shipwrecked
Immigrant in the land of Poetry
Who knows little and professes much?
The men, the sex, the hypocrisy… I
Forgive it all; I refuse to let it spoil
Even the love poems, translating them
Into my hetero world – `Lay your head,
My love, human on my faithless arm…’
Rubbish! Would you forgive me?
- That is the question.

II

You are buried with Yeats etched on your tombstone
And if you couldn’t even escape him dead
What hope have I running from you?

You, Auden, you who are Major, but not Major enough
To rate a mention in H328 Poetry;
It came to that. The Nearly Major Auden;

A highly regarded Lieutenant, perhaps, in the army ruled
By that fascist they call the General Consensus
`Poetry makes nothing happen’

Oh do stop lying; you were a bard
A bard to the bone
No doubt you and Yeats

Have your own corner of purgatory
Where, for a start,
You can begin telling the truth

III

Not passionately dead
Like Kalckreuth,
You are instead the
Merely, the tiredly gone
Drop to the bottom
Stone in History’s pond,
We hold your ripples
As long we can;
But Language marches on -
Now Chaucer’s left behind
And one day, you, Wystan,
Just like we all must die
Are, then, we meant to give
This life prolonging yours?
Or do you from so high
Care for different things?

- 5/6/2000