A Poem for a Thursday #135

Louis MacNeice was an Irish poet and playwright who lived from 1907 to 1963. He attended Oxford and went on to lecture at the University of Birmingham and then taught Greek at the University of London. After that, he joined the BBC as a staff writer and producer. His poetry “is characterized by its familiar, sometimes humorous tone and its integration of contemporary ideas and images.” He died young at only fifty-five.

The Junes were free and full, driving
through tiny
Roads, the mudguards brushing the 
cowparsley,
Through fields of mustard and under 
boldly embattled 
Mays and chestnuts

Or between beeches verdurous and 
voluptuous
Or where broom and gorse beflagged 
the chalkland--
All the flare and gusto of the 
unenduring 
Joys of the season

Now returned but I note as more
appropriate
To the maturer mood impending
thunder
With an indigo sky and the garden 
hushed except for
The treetops moving.

Then the curtains in my room blow
suddenly inward,
The shrubbery rustles, birds fly heavily
homeward,
The white flowers fade to nothing on 
the trees and rain comes
Down like a dropscene.

Now there comes catharsis, the 
cleansing downpour
Breaking the blossoms of our
overdated fancies
Our old sentimentality and
whimsicality
Loves of the morning.

Blackness at half-past eight, the night's 
precursor,
Clouds like falling masonry and
lightening's lavish
Annunciation, the sword of the mad
archangel
Flashed from the scabbard.

If only you would come and dare the 
crystal 
Rampart of the rain and the bottomless
moat of thunder,
If only you would come I should
be happy
Now if now only.

June Thunder
Louis MacNeice

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