'The Pale Panther' is one of the 'thumbnail nightmares', as MacNeice called them, in his last collection, The Burning Perch. It is not only one of the most terrible of the nightmares, but also one in which the mood of bleak despair is not balanced by any of his old sardonic optimism (though there is bitter wit), or any of the stoical determination of, say, his last-published poem, 'Thalassa', with its courageous message:

            Our end is Life. Put out to sea.

Our end is anything but Life in 'The Pale Panther'. Worse, it is not even Death.

MacNeice confessed he was 'taken aback by the high proportion of sombre pieces' in this collection, but could only say that 'they happened'…. If he was the spokesman for the '30's in ['An Eclogue for Christmas'], he was no less the spokesman for the '60's in 'The Pale Panther' and similar poems. (pp. 388-89)

I should like to glance at a useful comment of MacNeice's about what he called the 'properties' and the 'images' in a poem, especially in relation to their symbolic role, since the word 'image' has been upsetting some people almost as much as the word 'symbol'. In his chapter on imagery in Modern Poetry he wrote:

The properties are the objects which enter a poem by their own right, as flowers enter a poem about a garden, whereas the images enter a poem by right of analogy, as flowers entered Plato's descriptions of his mystical and abstract Heaven. But, conversely, the properties themselves may be, in the ultimate analysis, only symbols. Was, for example, Wordsworth's celandine really all celandine and nothing but celandine?

Now, in 'Experiences with Images' MacNeice warned that in some of his poems the images 'carry the weight of dream or of too direct an experience', and so 'will require from the reader something more—or less—than reason'. As 'The Pale Panther' is obviously very much a poem of this kind, where property and image merge into each other, and celandine is anything but just celandine, I hope I may use expressions like 'image', 'symbol' or 'emblem' without arousing hostility.

There is no image in this poem that is not pulling its load of double meaning. Several of these are favourite emblems of MacNeice's in contexts where he is dealing with similar themes. The poem is dominated, for instance, not by the pale panther and its death-spring so much as by the sun, that Heraclitean emblem of renewal, so dear to MacNeice from the start. (One must of course assume, though in emblematic rather than strictly visual terms, that the sun is the pale panther.) Above the elaborate interplay of images hangs the sun—pale and lifeless in the first stanza, the morning sun of a 'late and lamented / Spring', too weak and too late to renew the present dying cycle of creation; blazing at noon in the second stanza, but in a blaze of death, stirring to life only the death-dealing microbes; low on the horizon in the third, casting the long shadows of evening, not giving enough light to continue play. Thus it binds the poem, in terms both of structure and theme.

The sun not only dominates the poem, but is integrally connected with almost all the other images…. The untamable black panther had already represented elsewhere 'the brute Other', uncontrollable destiny, as he explained in 'Experiences with Images'. In 'Coal and Fire', in his first collection, Blind Fireworks, it was a 'coal-black sphinx', identified both with the blazing flames and with riddling, inscrutable destiny; and in 'Homage to Clichés' it was dreaded as the irresistible, impending movement of fate. MacNeice's mood in these poems was, in the first, excited acceptance of destiny and its puzzle, and, in the second, awe and dread, mingled with a thrill of apprehension. Now that the panther has made its threatened spring, it seems to have become, like the sun, old and weak…. The prevailing mood in the first stanza is 'too late': destiny should have struck sooner, when we were fit for death, before we had declined to the bleak, dim end of our generative cycle. This is the sense in which, in 'After the Crash', it was 'too late to die', and in which, in 'Charon', the ferryman said coldly, 'If you want to die you will have to pay for it'. (pp. 389-91)

This first landscape has the wavering physical aspect of a modern zoo, but its property/images, the ribs (of the cages), the giraffe-necked lamp posts, the (animal) excrement, the discarded newspapers, the tiny tractor, the fence (electrified or not), might just as well be the features of any unspecific industrial conurbation, or, more specifically, airport, or defence installation. They are the endlessly adaptable, because undifferentiated and colourless (even if, in the case of the electric fence, restrictive and forbidding) features of the landscape in which modern man, and the animal creation he dominates and corrupts, have their being. (pp. 391-92)

The cause of the slow-down, and then the full-stop, in our cycle of creation that MacNeice tirelessly emphasized was the familiar one that we have sought knowledge without understanding. There is no wisdom behind our technological skill, which is, moreover, quite unreliable as a skill: the stalled engine, caused by incompetent or absent-minded manipulation, is also used in other poems—for instance 'Hold-Up'—to symbolize the involuntary full-stop. It is, for MacNeice, the end of a process that goes back at least as far as an uncollected poem 'Utopia'…. The spark is now extinguished. Nor is there any wisdom to be found in the newsprint over which we bend blindly or myopically. Linked here, in syllepsis, with excrement, it is one of MacNeice's routine symbols for the merely phenomenal, as, for example, in 'The Stygian Banks', where 'the end of the news' is 'the beginning of wisdom'. Our spiritual myopia is the very cause of our spiritual death. Nor, as he constantly stressed in the later poems, is there any more hope for animal instinct than for human will. Elsewhere, however, it is generally the confinement (here symbolized by the electric fence) or the perversion of animal instinct that is the evil; but now the animal is struck down along with the man. The full-stop is complete.

The rapid cut to the image of the milkman and the empties develops, with appropriate switch in tone, the theme of the first stanza, on a new note of bitterness. The milkman appears to be a savagely banal version of MacNeice's dreaded Charon figure, and we are the empties to be collected…. While I agree [with Auden] that judgement—not necessarily the last—is an important part of the theme, I still think the overall theme [of 'The Stygian Banks'] is failed renewal; as in the whole group of poems in The Burning Perch to which it belongs. The implied cry is surely the one he makes in 'Spring Cleaning': 'Let someone soon make all things new'.) A relevant gloss on the empties jiving in the sun is provided by MacNeice himself in the early 'Ode', where he says that 'bottled time turns sour upon the sill' (which in the holograph draft was even closer to the later image as: 'bottled time left out in the sun on the step is…'). The whole image, indeed, seems to be a deliberate contradiction of his extravagant optimism at the end of Canto XXV of Autumn Sequel, where 'a new sun is rising' as 'the pails // Ring with the new day's milk'. There follows an abrupt, but quite congruous, cut to the airport, with its 'Runways in rut, control / Towers out of touch', which thematically continues the warning to milkman, now airman, Charon of the consequences of delay. This theme, too, has been recurrent in the later poems, with many emblematic variations suggestive of lost control. There is also powerful ambiguity in 'rut', which personifies as stags grown savage in rut the rutted runways of a waterlogged airport, such as he may have seen in West Africa. It is on a level of Düreresque macabre with the empties jiving on the steps…. As we are the empties jiving on the steps, whose bottled time has turned sour, so we are also the 'broken test tubes', whose search for knowledge without understanding has led away from life. We are also 'shards / Of caddis', the discarded remains of the mayfly that has already flown and enjoyed, in the words of the early 'Mayfly', 'One only day of May alive beneath the sun'. The mayfly, which 'Goes up and down in the lift so many times for fun', was a favourite Heraclitean emblem of MacNeice's for the constant upwards and downwards movement, for glad acceptance of the life of the moment in the endless cycles of creation. (pp. 392-94)

The final landscape of the golf course green in shadow is connected with the opening one by the tiny tractor that stalled when failing light stopped play. The tiny tractor pulling the mower is a familiar feature of the golf course landscape, which he uses elsewhere as an emblem for the merely temporal…. Life played in terms of a game was one of his recurrent delusions, which he latterly rejected…. And the stalled engine, as we noted, symbolizes incompetent, involuntary stoppage, caused by removing foot pressure when the engine is still in gear—upward and downward gear changing being another of his emblems for Heraclitean upwards and downwards movement. (p. 394)

[The warning that it is 'too soon / To order replacements' for the empties] is in fact the crux both of the poem and of our metaphysical predicament, the culminating agony. The new cycle of creation does not begin immediately the deathblow is struck. There must be an interval of decay and disintegration before the empties are finally disposed of, and the replacements may then be ordered, the new cycle begin. It is in this interval we are now living. Hence the despairing appeal, both in this poem and in several of the other best and most moving in the collection, to 'someone' finally to sweep away the broken vestiges of the old and 'make all things new'. Hence, too, the stoical encouragement of 'Thalassa', in whose timeless perspective 'late' and 'soon' are One.

Although MacNeice considered that the successful lyric is 'above all, symbolic', he certainly did not neglect the other two features, the dramatic and ironic. By these he meant that the lyric should be a monodrama, with the lyric poet alone on the stage, deliberately choosing his tone of voice, but indicating by appropriate changes of mood, diction, imagery the presence of a latent content. It is clear that MacNeice is alone on the stage here, speaking a dramatic-descriptive prelude in the first stanza, and directly addressing two symbolic figures in the second and third. (p. 395)

MacNeice noted that in many of the poems in The Burning Perch there was 'a conscious attempt to suggest Horatian rhythms', as the formal counterpart of his mood of 'Horatian resignation', and an effort to 'get out of the "iambic" groove which we were all born into'. Thus his natural tones, suitably dramatized and varied, are superimposed on the formal metric of the poem in a well-modulated counterpoint. (p. 396)

Although there is no system of end-rhyme, there is some near rhyme, ghost rhyme, half-rhyme and assonance, both end and internal (bent/print, sun/burns, soon/green, runways/rut, shards/caddis), and an elaborate pattern of alliteration. Repetition is also used, both as a binding and an emphasizing device ('your empties', 'tractor stalled', 'play'). He uses enjambment to the same end, notably in the 'lamented/Spring' at the beginning, and the 'tractor/Stalled' at the end. The relevance of all this sound effect to the theme is obvious, suggesting as it does a very tenuous and sporadic order of unity and the menacing finality of another and a different order.

MacNeice's own description of the relation between form and content in these poems could not be bettered:

When I say that these poems 'happened', I mean among other things that they found their own form. By this I do not, of course, mean that the form was uncontrolled: some poems chose fairly rigid patterns and some poems loose ones but, once a poem had chosen its form, I naturally worked to mould it to it.

He 'naturally worked'. Indeed he did, with a force of imaginative insight and a shaping command over it that have been undervalued for quite long enough. Yet, when all is said, MacNeice did well to stress the importance of the symbolic aspect. It was, we remember, Aristotle's axiom that command of metaphor is the real mark of poetic genius, as it was Coleridge's that one of the basic qualities of the creative imagination is its power of dissociating the normal image connections, subordinating them to cohere in a new and startling unity. This is the power that mainly characterizes the best of MacNeice's late poems, such as 'The Pale Panther', and it is the power that will probably have to be decisive in slowly raising his reputation from the dreary flats of taken-for-granted where it still seems incredibly to languish. (pp. 396-97)