NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

As is only proper, we go on forever hearing about W.H. Auden. But we never hear enough about his friend Louis MacNeice, although there were things MacNeice could do that even the prodigiously facile Auden could not. One of them was Autumn Journal, my favourite long poem of the 1930s, an intoxicating cocktail of classical metres, conversational rhythms and reportorial detail. There is no long poem like it for its concentration of the pre-war atmosphere. But there are short poems that give the same flavour of threatened tranquillity, and most of those, too, are by MacNeice. The pick of the bunch is ‘Meeting Point’, which the poet included in the 1936-1938 section of his Collected Poems 1925-1948. (It’s the ‘collected’ to have, ( I have it, I have it!) if you can find it second-hand: the later, posthumously edited one weighs like a tomb-stone.)

‘Meeting Point’ is the poem that every young man should learn to recite by heart if he wants to pull classy girls, and every classy girl should have on the tip of her tongue when she bumps into a scruffy poetic type that she feels the urge to civilize. ‘Time was away and somewhere else’ runs the refrain. The two lovers are alone together in a public place. It’s a coffee shop, expensive enough to have a waiter, but fortunately he does not show up to interrupt them. (‘The waiter did not come, the clock/Forgot them and the radio waltz/Came out like water from a rock.’) By the power of their combined imaginations, the little table in between them becomes all the world. (‘The camels crossed the miles of sand/That stretched around the cups and plates…’)