New Year in Spain (1938)

Submitted by dalcassian on 25 January, 2017 - 6:45 Author: Louis MacNeice

The road ran downhill into Spain,
The wind blew fresh on bamboo grasses,
The white plane trees were bone naked
and the Issues plain:
We have come to a place in space where
shortly
All of us may be forced to camp in time:
The slender searchlights climb,
Our sins will find us out, even our sins of
omission.

When I reached the town it was dark,
No lights in the streets but two and a half
millions of people
Of people in circulation
Condemned like the beasts in the ark
With nothing but water around them:
Will there ever be a green tree or a rock that
is dry?

The shops are empty and in Barceloneta the
eye
Sockets of the houses are empty.
But still they manage to laugh
Though they have no eggs, no milk, no fish,
no fruit, no tobacco, no butter
Though they live upon lentils and sleep in the
Metro,
Though the old order is gone and the
golden calf
Of Catalan industry shattered;
The human values remain purged in the fire
And it appears that every' man's desire
Is life rather than victuals.

Life being more, it seems, than merely the
bare
Permission to keep alive and receive orders,
Humanity being more than a mechanism
To be oiled and greased and for ever unaware
Of the work it is turning out, of why the
wheels keep turning;
Here at last the soul has found its voice
Though not indeed by choice;
The cost was heavy.

They breathe the air of war and yet the
tension
Admits, beside the slogans it evokes,
An interest in philately or pelota
Or private jokes.
And the sirens cry in the dark morning
And the lights go out and the town is still
And the sky is pregnant with ill will
And the bombs come foxing the fated victim.
As pretty as a Guy Fawkes show-
Silver sprays and tracer bullets
And in the pauses of destruction
The cocks in the centre of the town crow.
The cocks crow in Barcelona
Where clocks are few to strike the hour
Is it heart's reveille or the sour
Reproach of Simon Peter?

The year has come to an end,
Time for resolutions, for stock taking;
Felice Nuevo Ano!
May God, if there is one, send
As much courage again and greater vision
And resolve the antinomies in which we live
Where a man must be either safe because he
is negative
Or free on the edge of a razor.
Give those who are gentle strength,
Give those who are strong a generous
imagination.
And make their half-truth true and let the
crooked
Footpath find its parent road at length.

Louis MacNeice, 1938

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