Meeting Point
Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with the one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs)
Time was away and somewhere else.
And they were neither up nor down;
The stream's music did not stop
Flowing through heather, limpid brown,
Although they sat in a coffee shop
And they were neither up nor down.
The bell was silent in the air
Holding its inverted poise -
Between the clang and clang a flower,
A brazen calyx of no noise:
The bell was silent in the air.
The camels crossed the miles of sand
That stretched around the cups and plates;
The desert was their own, they planned
To portion out the stars and dates:
The camels crossed the miles of sand.
Time was away and somewhere else.
The waiter did not come, the clock
Forgot them and the radio waltz
Came out like water from a rock:
Time was away and somewhere else.
Her fingers flicked away the ash
That bloomed again in tropic trees:
Not caring if the markets crash
When they had forests such as these,
Her fingers flicked away the ash.
God or whatever means the Good
Be praised that time can stop like this,
That what the heart has understood
Can verify in the body's peace
God or whatever means the Good.
Time was away and she was here
And life no longer what it was,
The bell was silent in the air
And all the room one glow because
Time was away and she was here.
Commentary
MacNeice in this poem tries to capture the suspension of time that seems to occur when one is in the company of a loved one. Three images in particular stand out for me: the stalled escalator (escalators being the embodiment of perpetual motion – the infinite loop, as it were), the inverted bell (pendulums at their extrema always seem to slow down more than they should) and the empty desert (the high desert, like the Siberian tundra and the antarctic plateau, has a profoundly hypnotic sameness to it).
Sadly, the rest of the poem (beguiling rhyme scheme apart) doesn’t quite do the trick. I found the sixth stanza somewhat pointless, and the scansion of the second stanza is decidedly uneven. (That said, I’m not sure if more exact prosody would have helped the poem or reduced it to sing-song triteness). And finally, the ambiguity that gives poems like “The Sunlight on the Garden” or “House on a Cliff” or “Snow” their power, here seems to betoken a lack of confidence, a thinning of the blood.
Methinks I cavil too much. All criticism aside, this remains a very accomplished poem, if not MacNeice’s finest. I really must read more of his work.
— Thomas
Show 5 commentsHide comments
From the Wondering Minstrels mailing list, 1999–2008.
Ian Baillieu · 16 July 2003
When does a poem know it’s finished? Paul Valery said “A poem is never finished, only abandoned”. It appears to me that Louis MacNeice, having hit on a striking format and assembled some great images in ‘Meeting Point’, abandoned it too soon.
The problem is not one of inexact prosody. The metric irregularities are minor and easily absorbed in skilled recitation, which uses subtle changes of rhythm and syllabic weight to make a poem more meaningful aloud than on the printed page, the only justification for recitation. Too sing-song a scansion can frustrate that.
IMO the main problem with ‘Meeting Point’ is the use of the third person viewpoint when the theme is the profoundly subjective one of time suspended in the presence of a lover. That detachment seriously thins this poem’s emotional blood.
Suppose that MacNeice, before abandoning it, had revised it thus. In the 2nd stanza, change ‘they’ to ‘we’ (thrice). In the 4th stanza, change ‘the cups’ to ‘our cups’. In the 5th stanza, change ‘them’ to ‘us’. In the 6th stanza, change ‘Her’ to ‘Your’ (twice). In the last stanza, change ‘she was’ to ‘you were’ (twice). The general structure and appearance would have been identical, but would not the poem have had more power and been more involving?
I agree the sixth stanza could be discarded without much loss. It has become dated. The image of crashing markets as the symbol of troubles put out of mind was probably always too contemporary to endure. Yet MacNeice could hardly have foreseen the stigma now attaching to tobacco smoke. In his day it was thought stylish. The curlicues from a lighted cigarette could be seen romantically as imitating the shapes of ‘tropic trees’.
His lovers are in a coffee shop by a stream, so the exotic image of camels crossing a desert may need to be explained as something depicted on the walls, or on the table linen. It is harder to understand how a swinging bell can also feature. Was there a belfry visible nearby? I don’t rate these puzzles as faults however. A poem, like a woman, can attract by being a little mysterious.
It is interesting to compare ‘Meeting Point’ with another poem tackling a similar theme and setting but in a very different style: ‘On The Road’, by MacNeice’s friend and schoolfellow, Bernard Spencer (1909-1963), whose collected poems OUP published in 1981. I think Spencer’s free verse poem of only 19 lines succeeds where MacNeice’s fails. His lovers, referred to as ‘We two’ are in ‘harvest France’ drinking in an ‘arbour’
…built on a valley side where time,
if time any more existed, was that river
of so profound a current, it at once
both flowed and stayed.
I won’t quote all of it here because it is too beautiful to be relegated to quotation in a comment on someone else’s poem. It deserves Minstrels selection in its own right.
Steve Campbell · 17 July 2003
It was actually:
Love is like
a pineapple,
sweet and
undefinable.
which is a bit diferent.
Steve
KOFMAN GALINA (SBCSI) · 27 February 2004
I am not an expert in English poetry, and English is my second language. I do like poetry a lot - Russian and English. This is one of my favorite poems, in terms of emotional impact. I wonder if there are other people who feel this way. If you one of them, l would like to know what other poems make you feel the same way.
Galina Kofman
Wad2314 · 8 September 2004
i feel exactly the same way, another poem that gives me similar feelings is “To His Coy Mistress” by Andrew Marvell, the feeling of time in both poems is very strong. although it is courtly poetry i feel the tone can at times be similar to “Meeting Point”, however, passing time in “To His Coy Mistress” is more like an enemy as the speaker feels it is being wasted.
Pleas write back with your thoughts.
Polly · 17 March 2008
I was interested in a comment on here about changing the language to ‘our’ and ‘we’ rather than ‘their’ and ‘they’. I think you may be right in terms of making the poem more involved and immediate however I personally prefer the original form.
This poem is one of my favourites and it makes me think of my own past relationship. The couple in my mind therefore are not together in the present but frozen in a memory and time cannot affect them. The use of third person works very well in this respect as I am observing two people which no longet exist as they once did.