Autumn Journal by Louis MacNiece

Author:Louis MacNiece
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Autobiography, Poetry
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 1938-12-31T18:30:00+00:00

xiv

The next day I drove by night

Among red and amber and green, spears and candles,

Corkscrews and slivers of reflected light

In the mirror of the rainy asphalt

Along the North Circular and the Great West roads

Running the gauntlet of impoverished fancy

Where housewives bolster up their jerry-built abodes

With amour propre and the habit of Hire Purchase.

The wheels whished in the wet, the flashy strings

Of neon lights unravelled, the windscreen-wiper

Kept at its job like a tiger in a cage or a cricket that sings

All night through for nothing.

Factory, a site for a factory, rubbish dumps,

Bungalows in lath and plaster, in brick, in concrete,

And shining semi-circles of petrol pumps

Like intransigent gangs of idols.

And the road swings round my head like a lassoo

Looping wider and wider tracts of darkness

And the country succeeds the town and the country too

Is damp and dark and evil.

And coming over the Chilterns the dead leaves leap

Charging the windscreen like a barrage of angry

Birds as I take the steep

Plunge to Henley or Hades.

And at the curves of the road the telephone wires

Shine like strands of silk and the hedge solicits

My irresponsible tyres

To an accident, to a bed in the wet grasses.

And in quiet crooked streets only the village pub

Spills a golden puddle

Over the pavement and trees bend down and rub

Unopened dormer windows with their knuckles.

Nettlebed, Shillingford, Dorchester - each unrolls

The road to Oxford; Qu'allais-je faire to-morrow

Driving voters to the polls

In that home of lost illusions?

And what am I doing it for?

Mainly for fun, partly for a half-believed-in

Principle, a core

Of fact in a pulp of verbiage,

Remembering that this crude and so-called obsolete

Top-heavy tedious parliamentary system

Is our only ready weapon to defeat

The legions' eagles and the lictors' axes;

And remembering that those who by their habit hate

Politics can no longer keep their private

Values unless they open the public gate

To a better political system.

That Rome was not built in a day is no excuse

For laissez-faire, for bowing to the odds against us;

What is the use

Of asking what is the use of one brick only?

The perfectionist stands for ever in a fog

Waiting for the fog to clear; better to be vulgar

And use your legs and leave a blank for Hogg

And put a cross for Lindsay.

There are only too many who say 'What difference does it make

One way or the other?

To turn the stream of history will take

More than a by-election.'

So Thursday came and Oxford went to the polls

And made its coward vote and the streets resounded

To the triumphant cheers of the lost souls -

The profiteers, the dunderheads, the smarties.

And I drove back to London in the dark of the morning, the trees

Standing out in the headlights cut from cardboard;

Wondering which disease

Is worse - the Status Quo or the Mere Utopia.

For from now on

Each occasion must be used, however trivial,

To rally the ranks of those whose chance will soon be gone

For even guerrilla warfare.

The nicest people in England have always been the least

Apt to solidarity or alignment

But all of them must now align against the beast

That prowls at every door and barks in every headline.

Dawn and London and

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