"Soap Suds"

[If you’re wondering where all these posts are coming from, all in a row like this, well, it’s like this: I wrote them yesterday and today, and just neglected to post them until now. This is the one I just finished, and I hope it makes sense, because I am quite sleepy.]

"Soap Suds"

This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open
To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop
To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;
Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;
A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;
A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

To which he has now returned. The day of course is fine
And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,
Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball
Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn
And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!
But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands
Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.

 —Louis MacNeice

I seriously love this poem. I love the immediacy of it. When I’m reading, it’s like I’m right there, seeing exactly what’s being described. I like how MacNeice frames it with the same image of hand-washing at the beginning and the end. I also like how he kind of blurs the lines between reality and memory in the first stanza and the last. It’s not like a jarring flashback moment, but rather it’s a casual and seamless transition in memory, just like how memory happens to real people. And I like the way this memory progresses, starting at one experience at this house, and then moving on to this collection of associated memories, and then back to the specific experience. Except that this good memory can’t be appreciated for what it is anymore, because it’s tainted by knowledge of the present, and so it turns angry and sad and dark.

I think this poem is about the passage of time. I look at it as a combination of nostalgia for childhood and a subtle criticism of our tendency to create that nostalgia. It’s like when we talked in class about how romanticism created the idea of childhood as this special, different time of one’s life that was worthy of nostalgia. The grown-up voice in MacNeice’s poem strikes me as that stereotypical adult who tells children to enjoy their childhood now because it’s never coming back—and who is also envious of the children, being no longer a child themselves. The voice orders the child to play, to make the best of youth, and then starts to grow angry as time passes, which in turn disturbs the child. It’s like a vicious cycle. The adults around you are jealous of you and hassle you to enjoy your childhood, so as a child you’re overcome with nervousness about growing up, and you put pressure on yourself, and you start to idealize your childhood before it’s even gone. Then, once you grow up, you do the same thing to the children around you.

It makes me think that, the more you struggle against the natural passage of time, the more you will be acutely aware of its passage, and the more unhappy you will make yourself.

But I don’t think that this poem is solely about the negative aspects of memory and nostalgia. I think there’s also something to be said for the power of memory that MacNeice conveys. I think it’s about how one simple thing can take you immediately back to this rich, vivid memory from years and years before. It reminds me of something that happened to me recently. My hands have been exceptionally dry this past winter, so I got some calendula ointment for them. When my little brother was a baby/toddler, he used to get really bad eczema, and we’d put calendula on it, so he always smelled like this cream. As time passed, I’d totally forgotten about it. But the second I opened the new calendula, over ten years later, instantly I was seven years old again and cuddling with my baby brother. It was such a powerful reaction that I had to sit down.

That might be one of the reasons this poem resonated so much with me the first time I read it; because I could totally relate to the experience of being pulled back in time by such a small thing as a scent.