The British Museum Reading Room by Louis MacNeice
"The British Museum Reading Room" is a poem by Louis MacNeice that explores the complex relationship between knowledge, social isolation, and the pursuit of intellectualism. Composed of three seven-line stanzas, the poem employs a loose metrical pattern and a distinctive rhyme scheme, with particular emphasis on the contrasting imagery of the bustling reading room and the solitary pursuits of its occupants. MacNeice likens the domed space to a beehive, where readers are depicted as "stooping" over their work, driven by an often burdensome desire for knowledge.
The poem presents a diverse cast of characters, described as outcasts and eccentrics, who engage with knowledge for various reasons—some to achieve financial gain, others for personal enrichment, and some as an escape from life's challenges. This exploration raises questions about the nature of intellectual engagement and its relation to social alienation. As the poem transitions to the external world, it contrasts the vibrant life of common pigeons with the somber existence of those seeking refuge in knowledge, prompting reflections on whether true intellectual pursuit is only accessible to those disenchanted with everyday life. Through its rich imagery and provocative themes, MacNeice's work invites readers to contemplate the costs and motivations behind the quest for knowledge.
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The British Museum Reading Room by Louis MacNeice
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1939 (collected in Poems, 1925-1940, 1940)
Type of work: Poem
The Work
This poem is made up of three seven-line stanzas with a loosely organized metrical pattern and a rhyme scheme in which only lines 3 and 7 rhyme. Lines 3 and 7 are shorter than the other lines, which vary rhythmically from five to six beats, while the short lines are three or four beats long.
Stanza 1 opens with the image of the domed reading room compared to a beehive with its busy occupants moving up and down the aisles, which contain “the cells of knowledge.” The readers, however, are described as “stooping” over their work and “haunted” by their desire for knowledge.
The conceit continues in line 3, calling knowledge honey and wax; the phrase “the accumulation of years” gives a slightly negative connotation: Why are these bees hoarding all this knowledge? Is the accumulating wax like wax in the ears, which impairs one’s hearing?
Lines 4 through 7 give the reasons for these people’s being here: some to make money, some because they like learning, and some to escape an unidentified “demon” “drumming . . . in their ears.” Is the only use for knowledge for some people to escape a life that is otherwise unbearable?
Stanza 2 further describes the denizens of the place. They are all strange. The poet calls them cranks, hacks, poverty-stricken scholars, all in some way outcasts from the social order. “In pince-nez, period hats or romantic beards,” they are all out of fashion. In line 10, he describes their work as a hobby (therefore unimportant) or a doom (an obsession). The stanza concludes with other negatives. They are too alive or too asleep; they are like bats “in a world of inverted values.” This last is a fine ambiguous phrase. Is it the values of the reading room that are inverted or do they appear upside-down because the larger world is the world of inverted values?
Stanza 3 takes the reader outside, where the pigeons are doing what pigeons do: court, walk about “puffing their ruffs,” and sunbathe. The last four lines are obscure, but they seem to take the reader into the museum itself, where the sculptures and artifacts are kept. There is, it seems, an ancient terror under the totem poles. Out from under these poles and “between the enormous fluted Ionic columns” of the Greek temples comes something alien: “The guttural sorrow of the refugees.”
The intellectual life has become a refuge from living. Living is the puffing, the courting, and the sunbathing of the common English pigeon, and, by extension, of the common person. Is learning itself open only to the exiles from life? Are the only people who become intellectuals those for whom everyday life is intolerable? Such are the questions generated by the poem.
Bibliography
Brown, Terence. Louis MacNeice: Skeptical Vision. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 1975.
Brown, Terence, and Alec Reid, eds. Time Was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice. Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974.
Devine, Kathleen, and Alan J. Peacock, eds. Louis MacNeice and His Influence. Gerrards Cross, Buckinghamshire, England: C. Smythe, 1998.
Kiberd, Declan. Irish Classics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001.
McDonald, Peter. “Louis MacNeice: Irony and Responsibility.” In The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary Irish Poetry, edited by Matthew Campbell. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003.
McDonald, Peter. Louis MacNeice: The Poet in His Contexts. Oxford English Monographs. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1991.
McKinnon, William T. Apollo’s Blended Dream: A Study of the Poetry of Louis MacNeice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.
Marsack, Robyn. The Cave of Making: The Poetry of Louis MacNeice. New York: Oxford University Press, 1982.
Moore, Donald B. The Poetry of Louis MacNeice. Leicester, England: Leicester University Press, 1972.
Smith, Stan. Irish Poetry and the Construction of Modern Identity: Ireland Between Fantasy and History. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2005.