A Critical Analysis Of The Sunlight On The Garden, By Louis Macneice

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A Critical Analysis of The Sunlight on the Garden, by Louis MacNeice The Sunlight on the Garden is a very interesting poem because firstly it talks about freedom from a position that knows freedom is not limitless, even freedom has an end. The opposite of freedom is captivity, restraint or confinement. And secondly, the poem is interesting because of the way it’s written. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, freedom is the state or fact of being free from servitude, constraint, inhibition, etc.; liberty. And the state or fact of not being subject to despotic or autocratic control, or to a foreign power; civil liberty; independence. Sunlight in this poem is an image of freedom. The sun rises and casts its warm rays onto the earth, and then slowly as the sun sets, it gets cold and dark. But the sun will still rise again the next day and repeat this cycle, as it is the law of nature. Freedom likewise moves in this cycle, it is achieved or won in battle but it also starts to slowly withering away until there is none left and then the cycle repeats itself. The line “the earth compels” supports this cycle as something that is unavoidable, it has to happen because it is part of nature. The poem was written in 1938, it was a period when the Spanish civil war was raging on and the Second World War was about to begin with Germany’s invasion of Poland. The poem could have been written as a reflection of these events. There are references used in the poem that points towards a military theme. In line 7 of the second stanza, the word “lances” is used with the word “advances” in line 8. A lance according to the Oxford English Dictionary is “a weapon, a long shaft with a pointed steel head at one end. Used in joisting during the medieval age.” And the word “advances” is often used in
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