The Poetry of MacNEICE

By Prof. P. S. SASTRI, M.A., Ph. D.
(University of Saugor)

Artistic individualism can be said to be the chief characteristic of the poetry of Louis MacNeice, which seems to have its spiritual roots in the neo-Dryden cult of the century. It is from Dryden that Eliot and MacNeice have learnt the value of balance and of the elimination of all superfluity. Yet he is not a successor of Dryden in the larger sense of the term. He started his career as a merciless Critic of the modern Society. He analyses the modern ailment in a variety of ways; and one such is:

“It is better we should go quickly, go into Asia
Or any other tunnel where the world recedes,
Or turn blind wantons like the gulls who scream
And rip the edge off any ideal or dream.”

It is the last line that constitutes the method of this new school which has an implicit faith in common sense. He is afraid of being a dupe. He has no faith in the Utopias of Communism and the like. Before you proclaim the millennium, he ask us to consult the barometer which evidently is the social conscience. He has no party affiliations. Yet he was intensely conscious of a destruction that is to overtake us:

“Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards the end;
The Earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.”

There is no time for dances and this is characteristic of one who is in earnest with life and its problems; and it reappears in the Autumn Journal. He looks at the worker with contempt and pity in his eyes; and slowly proceeds to contemplate on the ‘isms. This leads him to a faith in concrete living individuals. He has no sympathy for the individual that exists in the various theories. Most people take things as they come while there are others who will gradually find the body of their doctrine

“in men’s bodies,
Its law and order in their hearts’ accord”,

and who will discover the futility of competition and graft. But he is unwilling to retain such a faith since all faith in a grand future is only derived from our habituated existences. But he has an instinctive faith in the equalities of man. And he sticks to this intellectual honesty; when he is carried away by the contemplation of a Utopia, he recoils and comes , to assert his instinctive faith. He is plain and blunt whenever he speaks on the problems of the day. Thus on the Munich Pact we find him saying:

“And at this hour of the day it is no good saying
‘Take away this cup’;
Having helped to fill it ourselves, it is only logic
That now we should drink it up.”

He satirises unsparingly:

“The crisis is put off and things look better
And we feel negotiation is not in vain...
Save my skin and damn my conscience...
...And stocks go up and wrecks
Are salved and politicians’ reputations
Go up like Jack on the Beanstalk; only the Czechs
Go down without fighting.”

This is merciless and yet too true. And MacNeice, succeeds in evoking poetic responses from these reactions of common sense. He evokes this effect through a peculiar lifting rhythm like the one we find in the lines:

“But
Now I am left in the fire-blaze
The peacefulness of the fire-blaze
Will not erase
“My debts to God for his mind strays
Over and under and all ways
All days and always.”

This is something in the spirit of Donne and Hopkins, but it has a unique poetic charm of its own. And the complex problems of the age have made it difficult for MacNeice to have a sustained lyrical effort. He becomes flat after a little time. But this flatness in his hands has always a subdued lyrical note.

The sense of frustration that is common in his poetry embraces all the subjects that he can think of, and it arises from sense of certain underlying values that have baffled the age into a serene despair. He has contempt for the Americanised Britain and this is given in his Eclogue for Christmas. He wants to paganise Christianity; but he fails to feel at home even in the Greek world. He cannot imagine himself among the Greeks, for “it was all so unimaginably different and all so long ago.” Plato does not satisfy his rationalism. And he is absolutely at home only in the mists and the grey solitudes of Iceland and the Hebrides. He cannot even think of going to Ireland. This is a new and most interesting phase of romanticism. As a fine example let us consider these lines on the relation of life to time found in his poem, ‘Plurality’:

“No, perfection means
Something but must fall unless there intervenes
Between the meaning and the matter it should fill
Time’s revolving hand that never can be still.
Which being so and life a ferment, you and I
Can only live by strife in that the living die,
And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim
Only to what a bird can find within the frame
Of momentary flight (the value will persist,
But as event the night sweeps it away in mist).”

Perfection has a meaning and it is already in the process guiding the whole process. It informs matter. Time intervenes between the meaning of perfection and the matter it should fill. Perfection, to be realised consciously, needs a striving, a conscious endeavour. That perfection which is immanent in matter must needs be brought to the level of consciousness. But the meaning is not so simple as this in these lines. There is something still deeper which he attempts at laying bare and it is a something that is vividly felt in the sounds and in the experience proper.
Perfection is sustained only by time and it is not a static state; for the static Eternal is too cold an idea. This recoiling from the state of repose, this weird restlessness seems to take MacNeice away from the plain common sense school to the romantics who are always trying to fathom the mystery of time. Like time he moves swiftly from one thought to another, from one image to another.

MacNeice insists on a return to artistic individualism and to an intellectual and emotional honesty that is of great value. He is exact and highly illuminating in his short studies. He tells us too often that we cannot afford to ignore the harsh realities of life which are always coming in our way. But we can have only an armed neutrality with reference to these harsh realities. It is a shrewd fatalism that speaks in two voices, both of which are interlinked. He means to escape from life and also into life:

“The tide comes in and goes out again; I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or a philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.”

This might appear to be opportunism; but it is the normal faith of the man-in-the-street and of the romantic of the modern times. It is a faith that comes to the conclusion that “nothing is more proud than humbly to accept.” This is not a defeatist outlook arising from the fluctuations of the markets. It puts us on the alert and it warns us from the all-too-facile robust faith of the revolutionary poets of the day. He is therefore a curious combination of the pure poet and the self-conscious critic of values. These two aspects are rolled up in his poetry.

The poet, according to MacNeice, is a gentleman-scholar whose duty it is to attempt “an impressionist survey of the contemporary world.” But it is a world which forces itself on us and which no one can satisfactorily deal with. A world which is greater and wider than the practical world is the arena where the poet is to move. MacNeice accordingly had to fall way from the company of Auden, Spender, Lewis and others. He retained his individuality both in his thought and in his technique. He has a very fine sense of colour and a keen observant eye. He has that essential quality of sympathy which we miss in the revolutionary poets. And in ‘The Kingdom’ we find him defending the individual as being “the safest repository of human values.” And in the ‘Prayer before Birth,’ we find a passionate cry,

“Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.” And in ‘Leaving Barra’ we find the significant lines:

“For fretful even in leisure
I fidget for different values,
Restless as a gull and haunted
By hankering after Atlantis.”

This is the value of the poetry of MacNeice. In an age of despair when poetry was invaded by the politico-economic cults, he has tried himself to be aloof from the dangerous ’isms of poetry. He brings the freshness and vitality of a new romanticism which is intensely aware of the need to preserve and cherish the essential human values:

“But I would cherish existence,
Loving the beast and the bubble,
Loving the rain and the rainbow,
Considering philosophy alien.”