Over the Christmas break I tried, and failed, to learn more about the room where Louis MacNeice allegedly wrote his short masterpiece ‘Snow’ (which was also, allegedly, the room where Paul Muldoon once had sex). It’s a ground floor room with a large bay window at 77 Malone Road in Belfast; the building was once the residence of MacNeice’s father, before it became student accommodation, and then the HQ of the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and finally—I discovered—was sold to the Chinese state, who have taken to installing illegal security walls in open defiance of a court order. This last development made it quite clear that wandering in and asking, ‘hey, can I have a poke about in one of your rooms, and maybe rifle through your files?’ was not an option.

But a colleague who previously worked for the NI Arts Council alerted me to the fact that, whatever Belfast urban legends say, the room where Louis MacNeice allegedly wrote ‘Snow’ was not the actual room in which Louis MacNeice wrote ‘Snow’. The poem was in fact written in Birmingham, not Belfast, where MacNeice lived in the mid-1930s; in particular, it was conceived (if not actually composed) in the Edgbaston house of his friend and fellow Northern Irish intellectual, E. R. Dodds, who was one of the greatest classical scholars of the twentieth century.1 From Dodds’ oddly captivating autobiography:

‘Snow’ was conceived on a winter evening at Sir Harry’s Road. Out of doors it was snowing, but in the study window [E. R. Dodds’ wife] Bet had placed a big bowl of roses from our heated greenhouse, ‘soundlessly collateral and incompatible’, while we sat around the fire eating tangerines. [Dodds, Missing Persons, p. 117.]

This certainly gives a lot of credence to MacNeice’s own recommendations for interpreting the poem:

I have never understood why people should think this is a difficult poem; it is probably because they approach it from a primarily symbolical angle and so do not realise that it is almost a piece of factual reporting. [MacNeice, letter.]2

A few of these poems are perhaps obscure, but others will only be found obscure by people who try to be too clever; my poem ‘Snow,’ for instance, means exactly what it says. [MacNeice, foreword to Poems 1925–1940.]

This is a good key to reading ‘Snow’. While the poem certainly has a quasi-Metaphysical conceit, with the snow and roses in the Doddses’ house standing for pluralism and plurality, nonetheless the conceit is served by the literal details of the event, and symbols are secondary to facts in the construction of the poem. Without wanting to be accused of philistine literalism, or of being presumptuous in trying to say something new about a poem about which so much has been said already, I think there is a lot of value in following MacNeice’s advice: breaking the poem down in the most prosaic and factual way, asking questions that are almost unpoetic in their literal-mindedness, before returning to the poetic and symbolic level with the new understanding in hand.

So, here’s a question. MacNeice describes the roses inside and the snow outside as ‘incompatible’ with each other, and concludes that ‘[t]here is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.’ Why?

Now, ‘Snow’ is a poem about which much has been said. But my impression (which I believe to be accurate) is that, by and large, critics have answered this question in primarily symbolic terms:3 for example, the contrast between the beautiful and the sublime, the tended-to roses versus the raw naturality of the snow.

A few critics give an answer that is a bit closer to the ‘factual’: it is not just that the roses are symbolically fragile while the snow is symbolically powerful; they are actually fragile and powerful (respectively), such that the two could not exist together without a protective layer. John Kerrigan puts this view in his LRB review of MacNeice’s collected: ‘Without the glass that separates and joins them the warmth of the room would melt the snow that would destroy the roses.’

But even this does not go far enough to satisfy MacNeice’s instruction to read the poem as ‘factual reporting’. Kerrigan continues:

Snow and roses are not just temporary, but literary clichés of temporality, and, like windows elsewhere in MacNeice, the glass flecked with snow is a medium of representation, which is why it makes the roses huge. Perhaps, come to that, the roses are already imagined, in curtain fabric or wallpaper.

Notwithstanding that this is simply false as a matter of biography (no, the roses were real!), or that it gets the function of the glass the wrong way around—the roses are on the same side of the glass as MacNeice is, he is not seeing them through the glass, and so the glass cannot make the roses ‘huge’ even symbolically—there is still a strong sense here that Kerrigan starting with the presumed symbolic meaning of the glass (viz., representation) and the snow and roses (viz., temporality), and then working out their relationship in light of this. MacNeice instead advises that we start by working out the relationships between these elements on a factual level, before then considering the symbolic importance of the whole. We should consider MacNeice’s approach not only because he wrote the poem (!) but because, again, the alternative approach leads to the wrong answers. Kerrigan’s reading has the consequence of turning the glass into the only thing standing between these two symbols of temporality, the only thing stopping them from snubbing each other out. But the poem says exactly the opposite, clear as day: ‘There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.’

No, let’s get really literal-minded. Pretend you’ve never read a poem in your life. Why are snow and roses incompatible? Obvious answer: because roses are a summer flower! They bloom from late spring to early autumn at best.

Most of us are aware of this, including (presumably) many MacNeice scholars, who nonetheless do not discuss it in much detail. Perhaps this is because they have considered, and rejected, the idea that this could be relevant to what MacNeice meant. But I worry that it is more likely that it is undiscussed because we don’t know it to be true on a deep enough level, because everybody in the West today see roses in winter all the time—particularly in mid-Feburary,4 when those of us in relationships rush out to by flowers at the last possible second. We don’t come to a poem about roses in winter expecting it to be about incompatibility at a simple, factual level. But until very recently in history, this was exactly the nature of the incompatibility between snow and roses: you could not have one with the other, unless you were facing a truly freak weather event.

In MacNeice’s case, the incompatibility could only be resolved because the Doddses had a heated greenhouse. Domestic greenhouses were themselves a relatively new innovation—only coming to the middle classes in the Victorian era, though they were widespread by the middle of the twentieth century. And specifically heated greenhouses were rarer and more expensive still, though increasingly common into the 1930s. The development of such climate control technologies was what allowed the roses and the snow—and, indeed, the tangerines MacNeice and the Doddses were eating, presumably either greenhouse-grown or imported—to coexist in 1935. (And further developments in these technologies, and the linked expansion of the system of international trade, are what allow for the immense proliferation of winter roses today.)

Likewise, the roses were presumably ‘huge’ not because the glass stands for a ‘medium of representation’ (as Kerrigan suggests), but because they were literally huge: big healthy roses, blooming immensely, because they were given protection and nourishment in a greenhouse. And indeed, it is noteworthy that MacNeice uses the word ‘glass’ in the last line of the poem. To be sure, ‘the window’ would not scan, and would have robbed the line of its compressed beauty. But it also points us towards the fact that glass does not just protect the roses now, but allowed them to exist in the first place: not just the glass of the window, but the glass of the greenhouse. And in both the room with the window and in the greenhouse, there is more than glass between the outside and the inside: there is also heat! Heat from the fuel that warms the greenhouse, and from the fuel that burns in the Doddses’ fire.

Our modern, Valentine’s-day familiarity with winter roses means we don’t even notice that we are overlooking this basic, literal, factual-level opposition between snow and roses. We see the poem, notice that MacNeice opposes the snow against the roses, and immediately begin to hunt for symbols, because our brains have forgotten the more basic contrast between the two. In my case, I had known ‘Snow’ by heart, yet it was only the other week that I hit myself on the head like Hank Scorpio saying ‘hammocks!’ and began to consider that, perhaps, the incompatibility and ‘variousness’ in the poem is simply that MacNeice was experiencing a phenomenon that could not have existed until very recently (in historical terms). The greenhouse is absent from the poem (or, more pretentiously and tendentiously, ‘conspicuous by its absence’), yet the greenhouse makes ‘Snow’ and its systems of oppositions possible.

Now, I have spoken to experts in the history of flowers and greenhouses in Britain,5 who have told me that MacNeice likely would not have been literally shocked by the winter roses. By the 1930s, there would have been plenty of heated greenhouses in middle-class homes, and indeed roses would likely have been available commercially in winter. As a matter of biography, then, MacNeice would have been used to winter roses, though not so used as we are; his perception of ‘snow and roses juxtaposed’ may have been a ‘sudden violent perception’,6 but the violence of his perception would have been due to his poetic sensibility, not (just) unfamiliarity.

But, again, I am not trying to ignore the fact that ‘Snow’ is a poem; merely suggesting that we might break ‘Snow’ down to factual elements first in order to subsequently build back up to an understanding of the poem that is hopefully improved, or at least less cluttered by unspoken assumptions. If you find that thinking about the relationship between snow and roses at this literal level illuminates the overall scheme of the poem, then alongside with MacNeice’s own instructions quoted above, that will (hopefully!) be vindication enough for my approach.

How might it do that? Let’s start with the observation that the governing theme of ‘Snow’ is plurality (which MacNeice made explicit, for example, at a different point in the letter quoted above). As MacNeice described it himself, this is ‘the realisation of a very obvious fact, that one thing is different from another’;7 this is indeed ‘obvious’ and perhaps even risks being a tautology, but for the point that it suggests a deeper attitude towards philosophy and life—scepticism to reductionism, belief in the fundamental reality of differences, and (as a result) openness to the possibility and ineliminability of conflicts and ‘incompatibilities’.

MacNeice was not the only person in the first half of the twentieth century interested in this idea; I might name the literary critic Lionel Trilling, the philosophers Karl Popper and Isaiah Berlin, the economist and political theorist Friedrich Hayek, the intellectual historian Jacob Talmon, etc. These figures are often grouped under the heading ‘Cold War liberals’, a description which is at best tendentious and at worst simply incorrect, not least because it distracts us from the deep roots of these ideas in the interwar period.8

Nonetheless, the ‘liberalism’ part is not a bad place to start, because MacNeice explicitly considered himself a ‘liberal poet’. And while ‘Snow’ is not a particularly political poem, that doesn’t matter so much—plurality is not itself a political theme, but rather a metaphysical and ethical one. What matters is that this theme became so prominent in the twentieth century because people came to believe that plurality was in some sense a consequence of modern life, one which might be held to have political consequences.

This thought is there in a fully-developed form in the late writings of Max Weber, who deeply influenced the thought of the ‘Cold War liberals’ (and not just them.)9 Weber believed that, although pluralism was at some level a philosophical fact that has been true in some form across all eras, the decline of monotheism and the rise of ‘disenchantment’ had made it more apparent, and (more importantly) had also intensified many of the incompatibilities in experience and value that had been imperfectly ‘smoothed out’ when they were interpreted in a theological light. Rather than seeing the path to modernity as a straightforward linear one, from barbaric polytheism to rationalising monotheism to triumphant modernity, Weber thought that modernity was in some ways more akin to the polytheistic ancient world than the anti-pluralist monotheism of Christianity:

[T]he different value systems of the world are caught up in an insoluble conflict with one another… It is as it was in antiquity before the world had been divested of the magic of its gods and demons, only in a different sense. [Weber, ‘Science as a Vocation’, trans. Livingstone.]

Mid-century liberals developed this thought while retaining its fundamental core. They differed about which feature of modernity gave rise to these kinds of pluralistic consequences: some focussed on economic organisation and the price system (Hayek),10 others on the success of science with its fallibilist and piecemeal ethic (Popper), others still on the rise of liberalism itself (Trilling, at least in some moods). But all agreed that, for one reason or another, plurality was both a more widespread and a more salient feature of life in modernity than in the immediately pre-modern era; and all agreed that, for one reason or another, liberal politics is well-suited to plural modernity.

‘Snow’, not being a political poem, does not concern itself with the latter thesis (not that MacNeice had nothing relevant to say about it elsewhere). But it is all about the former. The poem’s core theme is organised around a contrast, a plurality, that simply could not have existed before the development of early climate-control technologies, the expansion of international trade, and the level of industrial and post-industrial economic growth that could make it possible for people like MacNeice and the Doddses to access the luxuries made possible by these developments. Only in this era of history could anyone ‘feel | The drunkenness of things being various’ in quite the way MacNeice did, because only in this era could they actually experience the variousness that MacNeice experienced, actually be confronted with snow and pink roses together.

This experience shocked MacNeice (or at least, shocked the narrator of the poem)—it revealed that the world is more plural than we ‘fancy’, ‘think’, or ‘suppose’. Our comfortable assumptions are confounded the unprecedented, ‘incompatible’ experiences that modernity sometimes confronts us with—in ways both exciting and worrying, ‘for world | Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes’. This is what the symbolic scheme of the poem is supposed to convey.

If we start by analysing the symbolic or Metaphysical importance of the various elements of the poem, we miss this whole dimension. We see the snow and the roses as incompatible elements merely on the level of metaphor or value—a kind of incompatibility that has no special relationship to modernity. But if we instead begin by being as stupid and literal-minded about the poem as possible, we end up asking exactly the right questions to notice this dimension, and to relate MacNeice’s poem to a wider intellectual milieu, a milieu where it was believed that

intense consciousness of the plurality of values and of their conflict is itself a historical phenomenon, a feature of some ages (for instance, ours) rather than others.

The description is of the ideas of ‘Cold War liberal’ Isaiah Berlin, but the words are those of the late twentieth-century philosopher Bernard Williams,11 who—and here we circle back around—was a student of none other than E. R. Dodds. Indeed, Williams hoped that his magnum opus Shame and Necessity, a mixture of pluralistic philosophy and classical scholarship, ‘might count as a homage to’ Dodds, who he praised for being not just a great classicist but also a ‘poet and a friend of poets’, most notably (not named by Williams, but implicit) Louis MacNeice.

I want to end with Williams because one of his arguments can help bring out an incredibly important virtue of ‘Snow’ as a poem. Notably, as I suggested above, today we are less aware of plurality (or at least, certain kinds of plurality) than MacNeice was. My explanation for why many readers don’t notice the most obvious kind of incompatibility between snow and roses (snow is a winter phenomenon, roses are a summer flower) is overfamiliarity—we all see roses so often during winter, and thus don’t see anything unusual about it. It is right that ‘intense consciousness of the plurality of values and of their conflict is itself a historical phenomenon’, but it is wrong to associate it with the entire history of an age called ‘modernity’. MacNeice’s place in history helps to explain why he was confronted with the fact of plurality when he looked upon roses in winter; but our place in history also explains why we don’t.

Today, we have in a sense transcended the ‘incompatibility’ between snow and roses through an efficient system of international trade powered by modern climate control. But this does not mean that MacNeice’s poem has lost any of its relevance—especially not when we consider that winter roses were already becoming familiar in the 1930s. Williams helps us understand why when he observes that even the most successful utopian political schemes would necessarily involve the loss of something of value:

You might perhaps bring about a society whose values were less conflicting, more clearly articulated, more efficient, and people, once arrived in this state, might have no sense of loss. But that would not mean there was no loss. It would mean that there was another loss, the loss of the sense of loss. [Williams, ‘Conflicts of values’, in Moral Luck, p. 80.]

Plurality is itself of value, and when we lose the sense of plurality, we lose something valuable. If we read ‘Snow’ as capturing a moment of recognition that is dulled in many of us by overfamiliarity, then this ‘sense of loss’—the loss of wonder and fear—is one of the many things that the poem brings forth in the reader so wonderfully. And, in turn, MacNeice helps us undo or overcome that loss, by bringing us back to the sense of plurality and its importance; he reminds us, in no uncertain terms, that

World is crazier and more of it than we think,
Incorrigibly plural.