Louis MacNeice

Zoo

Michael Joseph, 1938.

Lectured in classics at Bedford College for Women (now Regent's College) in the late 1930's. In May 1938 went to live at 16A Primrose Hill Road, and in 1952 took over Elizabeth Bowen's house at 2 Clarence Terrace.

The magnificent terraces of houses around Regent's Park insulate it from hustle. People play cricket here, sit in deckchairs, feed ducks. And though Mozart and Shakespeare are performed here in the summer, and on the south side the rich babies ride in their prams, it is really the lower classes who make use of its great green levels. Little boys kick footballs in all directions and hoot without respect of persons. I heard an elderly park-keeper complain that it was not so in the old days

The book is mostly about Regent's Park Zoo, which he visited frequently. On the evening of 1st June 1938, after one such outing:

I sat in my flat and looked out at a couple on Primrose Hill. They lay facing each other, caressing, she with her hand on his hair, he with his hand in her bosom – for a long time lay there entranced and I could not see their faces. Then both sat up like puppets pulled by strings, their faces unflushed, perfectly matter-of-fact. He took out a cigarette, lit it, threw away the match like a man perfectly in control; she patted her hair, looked silently away into space. Spirals of blue smoke, ash tapped off into grass, then Bang – both flopped down on the grass and resumed their loving. And all within earshot of the lion

Primrose Hill

From The Last Ditch. 1939. The Cuala Press, Dublin, 1940. Reprinted for the Irish University Press, 1971.

...The top of the hill is bare
But the trees beneath it stretch
Through Regent's Park and reach
A rim of jewelled lights -
The music of the fair.

And the wind gets up and blows
The lamps between the trees
And all the leaves are waves
And the top of Primrose Hill
A raft on stormy seas.

Some day the raft will lift
Upon a larger swell
And the evil sirens call
And the searchlights quest and shift
And out of the Milky Way
The impartial bombs will fall.

June, 1939.

The Strings Are False

Faber, 1965.

During the Munich crisis in 1938, 'I found the Territorials hastily, inefficiently, cutting down the grove on the top of Primrose Hill...The next day Primrose Hill looked so forlorn that I took the train to Birmingham...'

After the Munich Agreement, 'back in London Primrose Hill was embarrassingly naked, as if one's grandfather had shaved his beard off. Propped on tree trunks on the top of it were two or three little museum-piece guns, ingenuously gaping at the sky'

Although he must have walked through the park every day when teaching at Bedford College there is no mention of it in this autobiography.

Collected Poems

Faber, 1966.

In a number of poems over a period of twenty years the park is depicted in a variety of moods and seasons. The first reference seems to be in Trilogy For X, written in the summer of 1938 and reflecting concerns about the approach of war. (In March that year Hitler had annexed Austria.) Part 3 begins:

March gave clear days,
Gave unaccustomed sunshine,
Prelude to who knows
What dead end or downfall...
Regent's Park was
Gay with ducks and deck-chairs,
Omens were absent...

In Autumn Journal, also 1938, in Canto V:

...a rustle
Of leaves in Regent's Park
And suddenly from the Zoo I hear a sea-lion
Confidently bark.
And so to my flat with the trees outside the window
And the dahlia shapes of the lights on Primrose Hill
...The bloody frontier
Converges on our beds...

And in Canto VII:

...I hear dull blows on wood outside my window;
They are cutting down the trees on Primrose Hill.
The wood is white like the roast flesh of chicken,
Each tree falling like a closing fan;
No more looking at the view from seats beneath its branches,
Everything is going to plan;
They want the crest of this hill for anti-aircraft...

In Autumn Sequel (1953), Canto III:

The whistles begin: from Clarence Gate to the Zoo
The lights go up on the road and down in the lake,
The deckchairs empty and the shades accrue,

The lovers untwine and rise, intertwine again and take
Their long abstracted exit, terriers bark
Hustled away on their leads while, like a sudden ache,

A harsh voice cries All Out – all out of Regent's Park...

There are other passages in Canto 1, Canto VI, Canto XVII, Canto XIX, and Canto XXIII.

On an empty morning a small clerk
Who thinks no-one will ever love him
Sculls on the lake in the park while bosomy
Trees indifferently droop above him...

In 1957-60 a sequence of four poems: The park, The lake in the park, Dogs in the park and Sunday in the park. Difficult to pick out a representative piece from the later work; this is from The lake in the park: