Frederick Louis MacNeice:
(12 September 1907 – 3 September 1963).
Irish poet, playwright and producer for the BBC. His poetry, which frequently explores themes of introspection, empiricism, and belonging, is considered to be among the greatest of twentieth century literature.
September has come, it is hers. Whose vitality leaps in the autumn, whose nature prefers trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace.
– “September has come, it is hers”
— September belongs to the woman he loves, because the season suits her temperament.
– “Whose vitality leaps in the autumn”
— unlike people who fade as summer ends, she comes alive as things turn colder and darker; autumn energizes her rather than saddens her.
– “Whose nature prefers / Trees without leaves and a fire in the fireplace”
— she’s drawn to starkness and interiority: bare branches instead of lush greenery, hearth-warmth instead of open summer light. It suggests someone who finds beauty in austerity and turns inward as the year turns inward.
More broadly, the lines work on two levels at once — intensely personal (an ode to a particular woman’s temperament) and quietly symbolic of the poem’s larger mood: 1938 Europe, too, was a world of “trees without leaves,” bracing for something colder.
Origin:
The lines open a section of “Autumn Journal”, a book-length poem MacNeice wrote in real time through the autumn of 1938, against the backdrop of the Munich Crisis and the build-up to WWII. It weaves personal life (a love affair, memories, everyday London) together with public events (the Spanish Civil War, the looming threat of war in Europe). The passage was written about the painter Nancy Coldstream, whom MacNeice had met earlier in the 1930s and was involved with as the affair was, in fact, breaking up that same autumn.
The passage continues just after the lines you quoted:
> “So I give her this month and the next / Though the whole of my year should be hers who has rendered already / So many of its days intolerable or perplexed / But so many more so happy. Who has left a scent on my life, and left my walls / Dancing over and over with her shadow / Whose hair is twined in all my waterfalls / And all of London littered with remembered kisses.”
Author:
Louis MacNeice (1907–1963), Irish poet, from *Autumn Journal* (1938).
