Snow

I like the poem so much, I found a way to quote from it in my novel "Finding Home". 

I used to believe MacNeice wrote it, or conceived it, in a large drawing-room with a bay window on the ground floor of 77 Malone Road, Belfast,  which had been his father's residence as Church of Ireland Bishop of Down, Connor and Dromore. It later became, and was, when I was there, a hall of residence for Catholic female students of Queen's University. Now it's the home of the  N.I. Arts Council.
 

But it's not where MacNeice wrote "Snow".

A footnote in Letters of Louis MacNeice (selected and edited by Jonathan Allison) quotes E.R. Dodds - MacNeice's lifelong friend, onetime colleague and literary executor: "Snow" was conceived on a winter evening at Sir Harry's Road (Birmingham). Out of doors it was snowing, but in the study window Bet (Dodd's wife) had placed a big bowl of roses from our heated greenhouse, 'soundlessly collateral and incompatible', while we sat around the fire eating tangerines."

I have been reading, and loving dipping in and out of, the Letters of Louis MacNeice. Replying to a reader, he wrote about "Snow":  "I have never understood why people should think this a difficult poem; it is probably because they approach it from a primarily symbolical angle and so do not realise that it is almost a piece of factual reporting. In metaphysical language the theme is plurality - theme which is present for all of us every moment of every day but which does not usually strike us with a sudden emotional impact. In this case it did! I was in fact on the day which occasioned the poem sitting in my room beside an open fire eating tangerines and there were roses in the window and outside it did begin to snow (though I perhaps should confess that the window was not a bow window). "

It reminded me of a remark by the poet Paul Muldoon on Saturday Review (BBC Radio 4) recently. "In general we (poets) are trying to say what we mean."