What is it we want really? For what end and how?

Louis MacNeice in Autumn Journal (1939) answers:

If it is something feasible, obtainable,
.....Let us dream it now,
And pray for a possible land
.....Not of sleepwalkers, not of angry puppets,
But where both hand and brain can understand
.....The movements of our fellows;
Where life is an instrument and none
.....Is debarred his natural music,
Where the waters of life are free of the ice-blockade of hunger
.....And thought is as free as the sun,
Where the altars of sheer power and mere profit
.....Have fallen to disuse,
Where nobody sees the use
.....Of buying money and blood at the cost of blood and money,
Where the individual, no longer squandered
.....In self-assertion, works with the rest, endowed
With the split vision of a juggler and the quick lock of a taxi,
.....Where the people are more than a crowd.


—from Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal, xxiv (pp. 81-82)

"broken jars / That once held wine or perfume"

And the word 'love' makes no sense, this history is almost
Ripe for the mind's museum — broken jars
That once held wine or perfume.
Yet looking at their elegance on the stands
I feel a certain pride that only lately
(And yet so long ago) I held them in my hands
While they were full and fragrant.
So on this busy morning I hope, my dear,
That you are also busy
With another vintage of another year;
I wish you luck and I thank you for the party —
A good party though at the end my thirst
Was worse than the beginning
But never to have drunk no doubt would be the worst;
Pain, they say, is always twin to pleasure.
Better to have these twins
Than no children at all, very much better
To act for good and bad than have no sins
And take no action either.
You were my blizzard who had been my bed.
But taking the whole series of blight and blossom
I would not choose a simpler crop instead;
Thank you, my dear — dear against my judgement.

—from Louis MacNeice's Autumn Journal, xix (p. 65)

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