Wednesday, December 07, 2005

I found Louis MacNeice

...in the The Poetry Archive. I heard his voice, his "Prayer Before Birth," more than 40 years after his death. What an incredible experience after years of feeling his words vibrate in my mouth. I recite "The Sunlight on the Garden" quite often. H can recite it as well. I'm sure my cat knows it by heart. I have no idea what triggers the recitation, but now and then out it comes. It's never in the presence of anyone else, so it's not some weird attempt to impress or freak out the guests. Perhaps those moments just call for attention, an infusion of beauty. Of meaning. Of course there's a part of me that likes to think the ghost of MacNeice is always floating around, stringing his lines through unsuspecting mouths.

4 comments:

Tracy Hamon said...

Can you audio blog the cat reciting this? That would be cool.

Brenda Schmidt said...

Ha! Ok, my wording is a tad haywire. It would be pretty cool if my cat could recite the poem. Better yet, in MacNeice's voice.

Anita Daher said...

Prayor Before Birth is quite stunning, isn't it? Interesting...I tried to print it to share it with my daughter, but it appears poetryarchive.org has some sort of coding that doesn't allow this. Instead I get "We're sorry, but for copyright reasons you cannot print poem texts from this site." How fabulous! I wish I knew what this coding is. If we all used it our work would be much more protected than it is.

Brenda Schmidt said...

Yes, it's an amazing poem. Wow, I didn't know those kind of copyright measures exist.