Becoming artists of ourselves: Louis MacNeice's 'Snow'

This is a poem that forces us to accept the instability and unavoidable tensions in everyday experiences

In ‘Snow,’ Louis MacNeice forces us to apprehend a revelation of unbounded, creative forces between the articulate images through which we perceive the world. Photo from ‘leftofcentre’

Louis MacNeice’s poem ‘Snow’ teaches us to recognise and accept the instability, change and unavoidable differences built in to our everyday experiences. In doing so, MacNeice helps us to accept life as it is, in all its discordant messiness, and to actually celebrate the sudden, the unresolvable and the unfamiliar. 

The opening line is sprawling and full of stretching vowels that give a sense of spaciousness and normality, the very normality that will be subverted when the poet narrows in on particular images. ‘The room was suddenly rich’ is vague, imprecise, but so much so that we know exactly what he means. MacNeice is provoking us into our own memories of our own rooms, our own habitual contexts that have also shocked us with their foreignness. We all know this scene of snow, ‘the great bay-window’, the pink roses on the ledge. These are things that are part of the usual harmony of domestic life, but now they have become ‘soundlessly collateral’ as the snow bombards the glass and the roses quiver in the onslaught of silence and whiteness. We live in a world of disharmony and simultaneity. Within the ordinary there is incongruity and busy tension, a fresh and renewing instability. We are in the midst of a revelation in this poem but it is a revelation that is full of movement and creative dislocation. As MacNeice says, ‘World is suddener than we fancy it.’ This little line is deceptively simple and conversational. For instance he uses ‘World’ without the article, thus giving the sense not of a world out there, but something more Heideggerian, the ‘life world’ of both subject and object conjoined and entwined. Also that adjective ‘suddener’ is wonderfully colloquial, the kind of utterance we invent on the spur of the moment when we want to give order to the chaos in front of us, and the jarring ‘dd’ sounds capture the thud of realisation. As the memesters on social media like to say, ‘life comes at you fast.’ It is also worth noting the use of the word ‘fancy’—a word that could just indicate the hum-drum of the ordinary through its chatty tone, but which also has within it a Romantic subtext meaning our imagination, the active mind that creates its own reality. 

In these opening lines we also find a pattern established for the whole poem, between conceptual reflection and the particular image. We have the ‘snow and pink roses’ raging in incongruous tension together, and then we get MacNeice’s own comment about the image, attempting to impose a conceptual understanding on the raw messiness of this baffling moment. That sense of bafflement is teased about by the vagueness of the latinate words used to try and interpret the immediacy of the experience. The scene, he says, is ‘Soundlessly collateral and incompatible’. There is a sense in which MacNeice is violating the sacred ideal of modern poetic technique here, resorting to abstractions and academic sounding words at the expense of Eliot’s ‘objective correlate’, the concision of the image which demonstrates the truth rather than spoon-feeds it to the reader. But MacNeice’s use of the specific and the concrete in this poem is stark, so we cannot dismiss him as merely taking the easy route. 

This dynamic between conceptual reflection and articulate image becomes more pronounced and ingenious in the second stanza. Again ‘World’ is referred to here without the article, this time we are told that it ‘is crazier and more of it than we think.’ The word ‘crazier’ seems so bland and mundane, and yet the buzzing drawl and the drawn vowel sound give it a sort of onomatopoeia, an impressionistic figuration to the conceptual abstraction MacNeice is trying to put across. It is an onomatopoeia not of the sound of the snow or the rustling of the roses, but rather the effect of this destabilising moment on our everyday consciousness, its unsettling but at the same time thrilling disorientation. Then of course we get that dangling last phrase, the defining and much-quoted ‘incorrigibly plural.’ The adjective here is rich and layered, just as the experience it is trying to convey is. At first glance we might be tempted to assume that MacNeice is cutting corners by lapsing into such loose, latinate phrases again, rather than give us the crisp image on its own terms. However, the very the nuance of ‘incorrigible’ helps to convey the sense of the poet’s helplessness and almost joyful defeat in the face of the ineffable. The word can mean ‘ineradicable’, ‘unreformable’ or ‘impossible to control.’ All these meanings convey the sense that the world’s plurality is built-in, irreversible, but each has its own connotation as to our relationship with this fact of being. We may try to eradicate plurality, we may try to control it, we may try to reform it. In all senses we are fighting a losing battle in our perceptual efforts to domesticate reality, and most especially when we resort conceptual explanations.  Then MacNeice returns sharply to the particular, to the concrete:

      ‘I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.’ 

This is straight iambic pentameter (if we take ‘being’ as one syllable, as it would be in MacNeice’s clipped, RP tones), and it is sensuous and definite in its use of alliterative ‘ps’ and echoing ‘ee’ sounds, as well as driving home the concreteness of the image with terse, monosyllable rhythms. The diction is Eliotesque—the detached delicacy of a savoured, pristine image which conveys a whole chaotic cosmos. And that ‘drunkenness of things being various’ is nothing other than a re-statement of ‘incorrigibly plural’, but now the poet has found more definite and common sense words to convey it, and thus the destabilisation becomes all the more graspable and recognisable to us as readers. It is normality which is drunken, the familiar which intoxicates and knocks us off balance. 

The third stanza should be quoted in full, as it is here that MacNeice captures his meaning in the minute and the real, without any further recourse to abstraction. The verse runs:

‘And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes—

On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s

Hands—

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.’

Though this is again a further restatement of the experience of infinity in the domestic moment, the language here is so crisp and particular that the poet achieves the impossible. He has managed to convey the surge of ineffable boundlessness behind our ordinary ‘fancies’ and ‘suppositions’, behind the nuggets of consciousness that seem so self-contained and fixed, but which are in fact packed with the rush of the planets and the stars. The images are fixed and tangible. We see the ‘fire flames’ and we get the full texture of the moment ‘On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s/Hands’, but the syntax has a running-on effect, a mild breathlessness which conveys the feeling of words reaching out for a meaning that still escapes the poet. And with that last line MacNeice merely needs to point to an absence in the sense of words, an absence which indicates that unspeakable vastness that in the previous stanzas could only be talked about in conceptual abstractions. 

Through this progression of stanzas, going from reaching, conceptual reflection to finite particulars, and through the spacious open vowel sounds and stretching lines that buff against the contained, four-line stanza form, MacNeice forces us to apprehend a revelation of unbounded, creative forces between the articulate images through which we perceive the world. The domestic becomes the spiritual and the ordinary becomes the universal, all without any recourse to metaphysics, religion or philosophy. 

Louis MacNeice was my Granny Anne’s favourite poet. She wrote poetry in a similar vein herself and was a keen and brilliant critic of literature. I think she liked the accessibility of MacNeice, his ability to take on difficult topics in a way the common reader can participate in. I dedicate these imperfect ramblings to my granny who I miss very dearly.