‘Soundlessly collateral and incompatible’

‘The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
Spawning snow and pink roses against it
Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
World is suddener than we fancy it.’

In a recent piece of detective work in Poetry Nation Review, John Clegg identifies the location of Louis MacNeice’s 1935 poem ’Snow’. The roses were brought from the heated greenhouse to the study bay-window in the Edgbaston house of Bet and Eric Dodds (Professor E.R.Dodds had appointed MacNeice as Assistant Lecturer in Classics at Birmingham University). I’m not sure if this is too-much or just-enough information; ’Snow’ is so well-known and so much commented-upon that it feels like a poem about which nothing further could be said. But one more thought occurs to me from reading Christopher Neve’s ’Unquiet Landscape – Places and Ideas in 20th-Century British Painting’.

In a section on the painter Winifred Nicholson, Neve writes that ’The open window, the world simultaneously inside the room and outside, is an old Seven and Five subject..’. The Seven and Five were a group of artists, active in the interwar period, which included at various times Winifred and Ben Nicholson, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and John Piper. But the idea was common to others, too, beyond that group. Eric Ravilious painted interiors of glasshouses in 1938 near Wittersham, in Kent.

‘…light poured into them on to white-painted woodwork and on to the formal greyish foliage of carnations, lightly touching their pink and white serrated blooms. It is not difficult to see why, on wet days when he could not work outside, he would sit drawing in here with the rain thrumming on the glass…’

David Jones painted from the windows of Eric Gill’s ’monastery’ in Capel-y-ffin, then stayed with his parents at Portslade, near Brighton in the summer of 1927. Here he worked on the balcony, behind glass doors in bad weather, painting the view out to sea. ’The Terrace’ (1929) depicts flowers against balcony architecture with the blue horizon behind.

I think also of Paul Nash’s surreal paintings of rooms opening on to a landscape, the fourth wall missing; Harbour and Room (1931), Opening (1930-1) or Empty Room (1935). MacNeice may not have known these paintings; it’s not a case of direct influence, but the sense that an idea was in the air at the time, along with big picture windows in modernist buildings. I begin to wonder when heated greenhouses first became widely available, but to get too exact on that would be a step too far.