'For Whom They Were Framed in Words'

Louis MacNeice is startlingly prescient in “To Posterity,” originally published in Visitations (1957): 

“When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards

And reading and even speaking have been replaced

By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you

Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste

They held for us for whom they were framed in words,

And will your grass be green, your sky blue,

Or will your birds be always wingless birds?”

 

He speaks to us in our age of “other, less difficult, media.” MacNeice may have been thinking most immediately of such passive media as radio. For twenty-two years he wrote and produced programs for the BBC. In August 1963, while caving in Yorkshire to collect sound effects for broadcast, MacNeice became sick with bronchitis and viral pneumonia. He died on September 3 at age fifty-five.

 

MacNeice’s poem is one long question. He suggests that the absence of books, reading and speaking drains the world of vividness and meaning. When no longer “framed in words,” existence grows drab. Language is the human capacity that animates our understanding of the world. When mute, life becomes a very dull place. Go back to that first line, to “books in graveyards,” those unreadable stone ornaments shaped like books, the “Book of Life.”      

 

More than a century before MacNeice addressed posterity, Charles Lamb proposed a mirror-image reversal of the Irishman’s conceit. When an editor rejects one of his sonnets, Lamb declares to Bryan Waller Procter in an 1829 letter: “Damn the age; I will write for Antiquity!” Lamb habitually looked to the past for what was good and interesting while simultaneously making fun of himself for doing so, just as he poked fun at his oh-so-earnest friend Hazlitt for lionizing Napoleon and dabbling in radical chic. In the Elia essay “Oxford in the Vacation,” Lamb writes:

 

 “Antiquity! thou wondrous charm, what art thou? that being nothing art everything? When thou wert, thou wert not antiquity - then thou wert nothing, but hadst a remoter antiquity, as thou calledst it, to look back to with blind veneration; thou thyself being to thyself flat, jejune, modern! What mystery lurks in this retroversion? or what half Januses are we, that cannot look forward with the same idolatry with which we for ever revert! The mighty future is as nothing, being everything! the past is everything, being nothing!”