a great love poem, by Louis MacNeice

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A Louis MacNeice masterpiece, which uses natural imagery in a fascinating way; from the late 1930s—

MEETING POINT

Time was away and somewhere else,

There were two glasses and two chairs

And two people with the one pulse

(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):

Time was away and somewhere else.

And they were neither up nor down;

The stream's music did not stop

Flowing through heather, limpid brown,

Although they sat in a coffee shop

And they were neither up nor down.

The bell was silent in the air

Holding its inverted poise—

Between the clang and clang a flower,

A brazen calyx of no noise:

The bell was silent in the air.

The camels crossed the miles of sand

That stretched around the cups and plates;

The desert was their own, they planned

To portion out the stars and dates:

The camels crossed the miles of sand.

Time was away and somewhere else.

The waiter did not come, the clock

Forgot them and the radio waltz

Came out like water from a rock:

Time was away and somewhere else.

Her fingers flicked away the ash

That bloomed again in tropic trees:

Not caring if the markets crash

When they had forests such as these,

Her fingers flicked away the ash.

God or whatever means the Good

Be praised that time can stop like this,

That what the heart has understood

Can verify in the body's peace

God or whatever means the Good.

Time was away and she was here

And life no longer what it was,

The bell was silent in the air

And all the room one glow because

Time was away and she was here.

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The contrast/conflict of static and mobile imagery throughout the poem is prefigured in its title. 

The cyclical repetons enclose each stanza with endstopped emphasis. 

But the scene itself keeps shifting, from table to stairs to stream to coffee shop to bell-tower to desert to tropics to the body's peace (peace: rest, stillness, stasis). . .

The first stanza's refrain-line reoccurs at the mid-point of the eight stanzas, which is surprising: but by repeating it just there rather than as the last, concluding line, MacNeice skillfully evades the danger of tying the poem off too neatly, resolving it with a formulaic flashback: 

and yet perhaps it needs some such echo for its climax— 

The reader might anticipate as much, and our expectations are met with a brilliant variant: "Time was away and she was here" . . .

Here?  Where's here?  The coffeeshop is permeated, riddled as it were, by nature: stream, heather, flower, calyx, camels, sand, desert, stars, water, rock, ashen blooms of tropic trees, forests. . . . 

In the first stanza, time was away, but the "one pulse" ticked on.  And the bell that tolls the time "was silent in the air." 

—And then, in the final stanza, the bell is still silent, but the "one pulse" is transmuted/transfigured into "one glow."

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