MacNeice's interest in allegory and dream is most developed in his series of Clark lectures which comprise Varieties of Parable. This work is a broad survey of allegorical writing in English. A sensitive book, perhaps its most interesting aspect is its treatment of modern allegory, since this throws light on some of the poet's own experiments in the form…. MacNeice sees allegory as the exploration of an image, the creation of a 'special world' with a relationship of meaning to the real. Traditionally this relationship was fairly simple—image embodied concepts familiar to most readers, while the image was comprehensible to them since it received its significance from cultural authority, as, for instance, Bunyan's imaginative world in Pilgrim's Progress depends for its meaning upon the received cultural and doctrinal traditions of Puritan religion. With cultural pluralism the situation, as MacNeice sees it, becomes much more complex. Allegory and parable become much less didactically clear, since the poet has no accepted tradition of concepts and related imagery within which he can work…. By comparison with traditional allegory the modern parable is ambiguous, obscure. Its relationship with reality is conceptually vague…. The meaning of modern parable, the structuring and ordering of the work is, according to [MacNeice's] view, implicit within the work itself, not imposed upon it from beyond itself. The meaning is not imposed from without, by a necessarily ordered, meaningful reality, or by an intellectual system. The writer of a modern parable explores an image, creates a special world, self-consistent, yet tantalizingly without simple conceptual meaning. His 'conceit' is indeed a 'dark' one.

Throughout MacNeice's poetic career and particularly since about 1940, poems appear which have to be understood [as MacNeice suggests we understand the modern parable]…. They explore an image that ambiguously suggests a relationship of meaning to our world, but they do not make it explicit…. [In 'Order to View', for example, there is] a peculiarly unreal atmosphere. There is a strange fusion between subjective and objective experience as there is in a trance or delirium…. It is a special landscape, an image explored, a new disturbing world which we must attempt to interpret. Another poem of this semi-allegorical nature is 'The rest house'. This also opens in a haunting, dreamlike landscape: 'The thick night fell, the folding table unfolded …' The scene is nightmarishly alive, objects have an unpleasant, spontaneous life of their own. The description which follows: 'The hissing lamp had hypnotised the lizards / That splayed their baby hands on the wired window.' is particularly suggestive of nightmare experience. This seems to be no natural landscape, but an inner imaginative world. (pp. 18-20)

In MacNeice's later poems, such interior, mental landscapes and dream experiences become more frequent—perhaps as his interest in parable became greater. One of the best of these poems is 'After the crash'. The first stanza of this perplexing poem moves with the assured illogic of a dream:

         When he came to he knew
         Time must have passed because
         The asphalt was high with hemlock …

But in the dreamworld we accept such logic without quibble. The last stanza suggests an allegorical vision of judgement, but its meaning remains unstated and ambiguous…. Yet the poem, although conceptually inexplicable in any fully satisfying way, has a haunting, memorable power. Oblique and ambiguous, the irreducible image fixes gruesomely in the mind…. [In] 'After the crash' … we feel that the nightmare world tells us something of our own. We live after a crash, after some cosmic catastrophe…. Overhead are the gigantic scales of judgement, ominous in the dead calm. We live after the fall, and for this we are to be judged and found wanting. But we must not overinterpret. The poem may be an allegory of original sin and judgement, or it may not. The image is explored by the poet in the hope that it will by an indirect means reveal some truth which no simpler approach could discover. Yet the poem in its ambiguity resists all rational explanation. It is a modern parable of the variety MacNeice identified in his lectures at Cambridge.

Yet MacNeice, in areas where cultural concensus still exists, was perfectly capable of writing convincing traditional allegories. Some of the best of his late poems are of this kind [although some of these attempts must be adjudged failures]. The discovery of Romantic love is a theme MacNeice treats allegorically with some success. 'The Burnt Bridge' is an assured, economical and convincing allegory of a traditional kind. The hero, in a dream landscape, journeys to find a 'shining lady' (surely suggested by the Shining Ones of Pilgrim's Progress)…. Not every image in the poem of course has a conceptual correlative. Much of the detail, as in Bunyan, provides imaginative flesh to the allegorical skeleton. The hero moves through a mysterious landscape where the feared dragon dwells in a creaking wood until he, against all odds, meets his shining lady and they walk hand in hand by the side 'Of the sea that leads to nowhere …'. Love in our world must be striven for against great odds, but once discovered our life achieves its spiritual dimension, partakes of mystery. (pp. 20-3)

MacNeice in his late poetry also demonstrates his ability to write convincing short semi-allegorical poems, when he organizes them round a central motif or ikon…. The effect of these poems is related to the fact that he uses traditional imagery and iconography deeply engrained even in our fragmented culture. The poems communicate without explanation. 'The tree of guilt' is an allegorical presentation of the well-known fact that we pay for our weaknesses. At times of self-indulgence the tree of guilt (obviously suggestive of the tree in Eden which wrought our fall) seems lush and green, utterly without danger; but time passes for the hero:

        Till he finds later, waking cold
        The leaves fallen, himself old
        And his carved heart, though vastly grown,
        Not recognisably his own.

Another poem which is very similar in technique is 'The habits'. This uses the motif of the ages of man. In each stanza enervating habits enter like allegorical personifications of the vices in a medieval morality play; they tempt and destroy the hero…. Each stanza is a dramatic representation of temptations appropriate to particular stages of life—games, bonhomie, woman, and alcohol—until in the last stanza 'Everyman' (for this is what the simple 'he' suggests) is left with nothing but death. The poem is extraordinarily effective, with its dark, sombre tone and trenchant honesty. A traditional allegory in technique, it proves the genre to be a living form in modern verse. MacNeice, when he died, was perfecting this kind of poem, and from a passage in Varieties of Parable we know that this was the realm he wished to continue to explore…. (pp. 23-4)