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".
Blackness at half-past eight, the night's precursor, Clouds like falling masonry and lightning's lavish Annunciation, the sword of the mad archangel Flashed from the scabbard.
[2] 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.
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.
[3] The second stanza, describing chalkland in summer, with beech trees and gorse, suggests the countryside close to Marlborough College, where MacNeice was a pupil.