''June Thunder'' is a 28-line poem by Louis MacNeice. It was first published in book form in MacNeice's poetry collection

The Earth Compels ''The Earth Compels'' was the second poetry collection by Louis MacNeice. It was published by Faber and Faber on 28 April 1938, and was one of four books by Louis MacNeice to appear in 1938, along with ''I Crossed the Minch'', ''Modern Poetry: A P ...

(1938). The poem begins with memories of idyllic summer days in the countryside - "the unenduring / Joys of a season" - before returning to the present and "impending thunder". ''June Thunder'' is written in a loose form of the

sapphic stanza The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form of four lines. Originally composed in quantitative verse and unrhymed, since the Middle Ages imitations of the form typically feature rhyme and accentual prosody. It is "the longes ...

, with three lines set in falling rhythm followed by a shorter fourth line. The poem was anthologised in ''A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920-1940'' (1941), edited by Cecil Day-Lewis and L.A.G. Strong, and ''Penguin New Writing'' No. 2 (January 1941).

Themes

Jon Stallworthy, in his biography of Louis MacNeice, links ''June Thunder'' to The Sunlight on the Garden, the poem that immediately follows ''June Thunder'' in MacNeice's 1938 poetry collection

. The two poems show MacNeice thinking along much the same lines and using the same imagery, with "birds", "sky", "garden", "thunder" and "rain" as shared words. ''June Thunder'' begins with memories of earlier, idyllic summer days. The opening stanza, which describes "driving through tiny / Roads, the mudguards brushing the cowparsley", is similar in tone to section viii of Autumn Journal (1939), in which MacNeice recalls how he "drove around Shropshire in a bijou car" together with his first wife Mary Ezra. The second stanza, describing chalkland in summer, with beech trees and gorse, suggests the countryside close to Marlborough College, where MacNeice was a pupil. (As a schoolboy, MacNeice had indulged in "long bicycle rides into the Wiltshire countryside" with his close friend

Graham Shepard Graham Howard Shepard (1907–20 September 1943) was an English illustrator and cartoonist. He was the son of Ernest H. Shepard, the illustrator of ''Winnie-the-Pooh'' and ''The Wind in the Willows''. He was educated at Marlborough College and ...

.) In the third stanza the tone changes as the poem returns to the present and "impending thunder". Rain "comes / Down like a dropscene", and is followed by thunder - "clouds like falling masonry" - and lightning. The final stanza sees the poet alone and yearning for his lover's presence: "If only you would come..."

Structure

''June Thunder'' is a poem of seven stanzas, each of four lines. The poem does not make use of a

rhyme scheme A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other. An example of the ABAB r ...

. The poem is written in a loose form of the

, and is included by Grace Schulman in a list of English poems that are "sapphics-inspired". The short fourth line of each stanza is an

Adonic An adonic (Latin: ''adoneus'') is a unit of Aeolic verse, a five-syllable metrical foot consisting of a dactyl followed by a trochee. The last line of a Sapphic stanza is an adonic. The pattern (with "-" a long and "u" a short syllable) is: "- u ...

, as in a sapphic stanza: "Joys of a season". However, the long lines vary from ten to fourteen syllables, and "make no pretence at exact adherence to the paradigm." According to Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell, "MacNeice infuses his sapphics with those qualities of yearning and wonder that characterize the great examples of the form."Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell: ''Sound and Form in Modern Poetry'', p. 249.

References

* Louis MacNeice,

. Faber and Faber, 1938. * Louis MacNeice, Autumn Journal. Faber and Faber, 1939. * ''A New Anthology of Modern Verse 1920-1940'', edited by C. Day-Lewis and L.A.G. Strong. London, Methuen & Co., 1941. * Jon Stallworthy, ''Louis MacNeice''. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. * Harvey Gross and Robert McDowell, ''Sound and Form in Modern Poetry''. University of Michigan Press, 1996. * ''An Exaltation of Forms: Contemporary Poets Celebrate the Diversity of Their Art'', edited by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes. University of Michigan Press, 2002.

Notes

{{reflist June Thunder