In his indispensable biography of MacNeice, Jon Stallworthy points out that “Within weeks of their divorce, he had written a love-song—it was entitled ‘Song’ at its first appearance in print—for the girl who had been ‘the best dancer in Oxford.’” Read in the light of this knowledge, “Sunlight” is primarily a love poem, a poem of regret and of foreboding, a lament for how the passage of time may destroy all one holds dear. At the same time, the poem is a technical tour de force, imaginatively and aurally teeming. In a mere twenty-four tightly structured yet subtly varied lines, MacNeice moves between hope and heartache, the memory of a paradisal state and the knowledge of its loss. Regret and self-reproach (“not expecting pardon, / Hardened in heart anew”) ultimately yield to acceptance (“glad to have sat under / Thunder and rain with you, / And grateful too / For sunlight on the garden.”) 

Although it is a self-contained, stand-alone work of art, “The Sunlight in the Garden” is by no means an isolated expression of MacNeice’s concerns. He seems to have been working toward the poem even as he was writing other poems, thinking other thoughts, undergoing other experiences. Images and themes that run through other poems of the time work their way into this poem. 

At the beginning of chapter twenty-four of his unfinished autobiography, The Strings Are False, MacNeice remarks that “marriage to Mariette promised a life where the clocks had been put back or even replaced by sundials.” (And where are sundials found but in gardens?) A similar tone is struck in the poem “The Brandy Glass,” with its opening lines an invocation: “Only let it form within his hands once more— / The moment cradled like a brandy glass.” 

In “Postscript to Iceland” MacNeice speaks of “the litany of doubt” and “the fear of loneliness / And uncommunicableness.” A similar melancholy foreboding and obsession with time informs “The Hebrides”:

On those islands

Where no trains run on rails and the tyrant time

                        Has no clock-towers to signal people to doom

                        With semaphore ultimatums tick by tick,

                        There is still peace though not for me and not

                        Perhaps for long . . . 

The inevitability of time passing, and the futile attempt to seize the moment in the face of the passage of time—to “cage the minute / Within its nets of gold,” as he so memorably phrased it in “The Sunlight in the Garden”—was to preoccupy MacNeice throughout his life. (See, for example, “The Slow Starter,” written some twenty years later, which might be read almost as “Sunlight Redux.”) 

“June Thunder,” which MacNeice placed immediately adjacent to “Sunlight” in The Earth Compels (1938) and in Collected Poems, 1925-1948, shows the poet thinking along much the same lines and using the same imagery as in “Sunlight.” He describes a scene of “impending thunder / With an indigo sky and the garden hushed,” and in the final stanza begs for his lover’s presence if not for her pardon: 

                        If only you would come and dare the crystal

                        Rampart of rain and the bottomless moat of thunder,

                        If only now you would come I should be happy

                                    Now if now only. 

All these anxieties, along with the images of hope, are present in “The Sunlight on the Garden” in an astonishingly compact and concentrated form, and expressed with a quicksilver verbal dexterity that would make the poem seem the product of a moment’s thought. 

*        *         * 

 

Peter Green has noted that “Sunlight in the Garden” achieves its greatness “in a structure as complex and minutely regulated as the movement of a fine watch.” For Green, 

The variations of rhythm (trochaic, iambic, choriambic; stressed or syncopated); the final and internal rhymes and assonances; the verbal echoes, alliterations and repetitions: all these elements, not forced or artificial but natural and inevitable, combine in a perfect artifact to leave (as Eliot put it) “the whole consort dancing together.” 

For anyone at all inclined to the exercise of diagramming the structure of a poem, “Sunlight in the Garden” presents an immense opportunity for enjoyment. First, there is the rhyme scheme. Taking any one stanza as a discrete unit, the scheme is ABCBBA. But mapping the rhyme scheme of the poem as a whole shows a slightly more complex pattern: ABCBBA // DEFEED // GHIHHG // AKLKKA. The two words comprising the A rhyme, garden and pardon, are reversed on their reappearance in the final stanza. 

This, however, is not the whole story, for MacNeice’s use of partial serpentine rhyme allows us to extend the rhyme scheme and to view each stanza as containing six rhymes (i.e., one rhymed word at the end of each line) but eight (i.e., with the two serpentine-rhymed words at the beginning of lines two and four of each stanza. The serpentine rhymes here are underscored: AABCCBBA // DDEFFEED // GGHIIHHG // AAKLLKKA. 

Thus, the simple rhyming of the first and last lines of each stanza, by the addition of a serpentine rhyme for each first line, creates a trio of A rhymes within each stanza: garden / {Hardens} / pardon; / free lances / {Advances} / dances; flying / {Defying} / dying; pardon / {Hardened} / garden. Moreover, the apparently unrhymed third line of each stanza now can be read as, in effect, part of a couplet: minute / Within its; upon it / Sonnets; iron / Siren; under / Thunder. The first two of these couples are not exact rhymes, and the third is an eye rhyme (i-urn / Si-ren). Moreover—and here I know I am stretching a point, but never mind that—minute almost is mirrored sonically by upon it, while Within its has a similar relationship to Sonnets. 

MacNeice’s aural effects extend in other ways too. The first line of the third stanza contains a basic internal rhyme, sky and flying. As I have noted, the strict constructionist might consider this too much of a good thing, but MacNeice has already determined to throw all caution to the winds. In the poem’s third line we have the alliteration of cannot cage, and in the fourth line from the end of the poem there is the assonance of glad . . . have sat. The phrase every evil iron siren is a marvel of both assonance and consonance. The word soon in line eleven echoes the Sonnets of line ten. (Notice, by the way, the predominance of n sounds in the majority of the rhymed words and indeed throughout the poem.) 

I must admit to having a curious theory concerning the word told at the end of line five: “When all is told / We cannot beg for pardon.” Perhaps I am reading too much into this or hearing something that isn’t there, but to my ear the word told suggests tolled. That is, “When all is tolled” (i.e., when the church bells—which might well be the passing bell; cf. Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” a poem whose complex and intricate music I must believe would have fascinated MacNeice—of line fourteen have rung) it will be too late to beg for pardon. This is, I reiterate, a willful misreading on my part, based only on a tenuous aural suggestion; but to my mind it is not without its appeal. (More likely is that MacNeice is thinking of his Protestant clergyman father’s opposition to MacNeice’s marriage to a Jewish girl.) 

As Green and others have pointed out, and as a line-by-line syllable count (never mind scansion) will quickly confirm, the poem is metrically irregular. Only the first lines and fifth lines of each stanza show a consistent metrical pattern throughout the poem. Indeed, certain lines seem to defy scansion. One might hold MacNeice’s fascination with nursery rhymes responsible. And one might think that the result would be an awkward, thumping kind of verse. But in fact, against all expectations, the poem flows naturally in the voice and in the ear. In the poem’s structure, as in its meaning, beauty triumphs over confusion. 

I have touched on the New Criticism’s warning of the dangers of reading a poem with regard to the poet’s biographical details, the admonition that the reader must be wary of conflating the poet’s life with his art or of reading what one “knows” into the poem. That said, I would like to finish by drawing attention to the following passage from The Strings Are False. This passage might not be a key to understanding “The Sunlight on the Garden,” but nonetheless it is not without interest. 

“I continued dreaming about bombs and the fascists, was worried over women, was mortifying my aesthetic sense by trying to write as Wystan did, without bothering too much with finesse,” MacNeice writes, speaking of a period during 1936 or 1937, roughly contemporaneous with the time of “The Sunlight on the Garden.” He continues: 

Shortly after seeing the film of Dr. Mabuse I had the following dream. I had been invited to a houseparty. The party was given on a little peninsula in a marshy lagoon at the end of nowhere . . . . The peninsula consisted of a long neglected garden in the center of which was a knoll on top of which was a house [of which] remained only the structural beams and the staircase. There were many people—everyone I knew—being social in the garden . . . . [Then] . . . it happened. The alarm. Like sirens or bells but you could not hear it, it was more like the shiver on a pond when a breeze comes on it out of nothing. At once the people in the garden began flooding down towards the entrance in the narrow neck of the peninsula . . . . For They were coming. I . . . ran after my friends . . . . The sky was getting darker and the air itself denser . . . . I found myself walking along an overgrown path and in the flower borders on either side there was growing, instead of flowers, a regular row of swords planted with the point up as regularly as tulips, curving shining swords.

The dreamer finds his way blocked by “a soldier in khaki with a fixed bayonet.” When he turns to see the “cackling and leering” figure of Dr. Mabuse standing behind him, he awakes.

          MacNeice’s dream, as he reported it here, has as much dissimilarity from the poem as it has similarities. But MacNeice, who a few years later would write the first full-length study of Yeats’s poetry, would have recognized that in dreams begins responsibility, and that dreams can sometimes be the stuff that poems are made of.