The years immediately following his coming to London were for MacNeice ones of crowded literary activity. Besides translating the Agamemnon and collaborating with Auden on the Iceland travel book he wrote a humorous play for the Group Theatre company, Out of the Picture (1937), a travel book about the Hebrides with the spoof title I Crossed the Minch (1938)—the Minch being the small stretch of sea between the islands and the mainland of Scotland—and the same year a chatty book about the London Zoo, the last two illustrated with drawings by Nancy Sharp. These were pot-boilers he was not proud of, the result (as he wrote in his autobiography) of “mortifying my aesthetic sense by trying to write as Wystan [Auden] did, without bothering too much with finesse”. His poetry, on the other hand, he took very seriously indeed.

His second collection The Earth Compels, dedicated to Nancy, also appeared in 1938, but the earliest poem it contains “Homage to Clichés” was written as early as December 1935, soon after his wife's departure, to which it may owe its origin. The title of the poem refers not only to verbal clichés, but also to the routine, everyday activities by which man regulates his life, thereby keeping at bay the sense of the void opening under his feet. Its technique is a reversion to the manner of his juvenilia with its “blend of rational allegory and dream suggestiveness”. The trouble with what he elsewhere called “dream logic” is that it is not logical at all, but a starting of random hares to be followed wherever they lead. Here the images of a man in a bar calling for another round of drinks and of a cat licking its fur do contribute directly to the theme, being themselves routine clichés of everyday life; but to mix them up with the arbitrary images of fish coming into a net and of the Egyptian king Rameses serves only to confuse.

To be distinguished from the structural images in this poem are the decorative ones with which his early poetry abounds—the rooks that bicker and heckle, the notes of a piano like little fishes vanishing with a wink of tails—whose success depends on the accuracy and freshness of the observation, pleasing the reader with a shock of surprised recognition. The images of snow and roses in the poem “Snow” discussed in an earlier section are at the same time structural and decorative, this fusion of functions accounting in part for the poem's special quality.

The point being made in “Homage to Clichés” is that life's routines shield us from the sudden ambush that lies in wait for us, ready “to destroy / This whole delightful world of cliché and refrain”, which leads back to the poem's origin in the abrupt termination of MacNeice's five-year-long marriage. The same event lies behind several other poems in the volume, such as “Hidden Ice” (January 1936) and the last of the eclogues, “Eclogue Between the Motherless”, though the domestic scenes envisaged in the latter are largely fictitious. As originally printed in The Earth Compels the speeches of the two men were differentiated by line indentations only, whereas in the collected editions the two speakers—with some loss of elegance, but a gain in clarity—are designated A and B. It is one of MacNeice's more enigmatic poems, even the relevance of the title being elusive, because the speakers are wifeless rather than motherless. Its subject is marriage, the conversation it records taking place after the speakers' return from spending holidays in their respective childhood homes. B—whose father has taken as his second wife a horse-riding thirty-year-old with whom he is unhappy—has accepted the lesser loneliness of the single state, glad to have been divorced from a childless wife who, despite the false heaven of early married days, had remained a stranger to him. A, who had found his father dependent on the whisky decanter in his rundown house, remembers his nagging mother, his childhood nightmares and, with vivid particularity, his mistresses. He daydreams of marrying the “perfect stranger”, a tiger-woman of exciting sexuality, but has written proposing marriage to a girl in India he hardly knows who has only a year to live. A bald outline of the “plot” of this Sweeneyesque dialogue has been given, partly to show how little it has to do with MacNeice's own circumstances, and partly to emphasize its distinct oddity, its irrelevance suggesting that it may have originally been written as part of an abandoned dramatic work, here wrenched out of context.

Apart from the autobiographical “Carrickfergus” with which The Earth Compels opens and a journalistic piece, never reprinted, “Rugby Football Excursion” about travelling to a match played on the Lansdown Road ground outside Dublin, MacNeice's preoccupation with his uneasy relationship with Ireland does not feature in these poems. Two of his best known lyrics belong to this period: “The Sunlight on the Garden”, a metrically neat poem that somehow manages to assimilate its not-very-relevant quotation from Antony and Cleopatra; and “June Thunder”, a love poem which, with its interweaving of past and present, recalls such meditative poems of Coleridge as ‘Frost at Midnight’ and ‘This Lime-tree Bower my Prison’. It is evening in his room where he is staying somewhere in the country, remembering earlier Junes when he and Mary would motor through Shropshire; but now a thunderstorm impends, then breaks, awakening fear and a sudden, overwhelming desire for her return: a fragment of consciousness, perfectly realized.

For the collected editions eight poems have been salvaged from MacNeice's play Out of the Picture, only one of which is of a quality to rank with his best work. The others are in the nature of self-parody or a forging of his own signature, a practice at which he would become adept in future periods when inspiration flagged. Some are given the Yeatsian prop of a refrain—“Where shall we find truth in an oracle?”; “Pindar is dead and that's no matter”; “The trimmed wick burns clear … Here ends our hoarded oil”—but the stanzas they are designed to support are too ramshackle to benefit from the process. ‘The jingles of the morning’ runs through a familiar catalogue of sensuous images, but only in a perfunctory way. The exception is “Riding in cars” which alone stands firmly on its own feet—

Forgotten now
          The early days,
Youth's idyllic
          And dawdling ways;
Cruising along
          On the long road
We do not notice
          The limping god—

releasing a recurrent motif in MacNeice's work; though if the limping god is Vulcan, his relevance to the poem is not clear.

In April and again in July 1937 he visited some of the islands in the Hebrides to acquire copy for the travel book he had contracted to write, trips that gave rise to the thumbnail “The Heated Minutes” written on the boat carrying him from Harris to Stornaway, and “Leaving Barra” also written on shipboard, both of them love poems; and “On These Islands” (retitled “The Hebrides” in the collected editions) that does for them what “Valediction” had done for Ireland in his earlier collection. A patchwork of sharply etched landscapes and social observation with a sprinkling of dialect words (smoor, pooks, ceilidh) thrown in, it holds up for scrutiny an ancient, now doomed, way of life on the north-western fringe of Britain, at a moment when economic depression and the vulgarizing effect of the tourist trade was about to destroy it for ever.

The anthology piece, “Bagpipe Music”, which covers the same ground in a sputter of fireworks is not easy to get into focus. Spoken by a disgruntled islander, it presents a cross-section of the inhabitants at a time of economic decay in a mixture of realism and surrealism. Tidiness of interpretation is not to be looked for in what, after all, is in essence a nonsense poem. Not till the last stanza is it revealed that the poem is addressed to the speaker's girl (“my honey love”, “my poppet”), and the “they” whose affluent life-style is contrasted with the poverty in the islands drop out of the picture altogether after the first stanza, unless they are to be identified with those whose maidenheads and culture are dismissed with a “no go” in the fourth stanza. The benefits listed following the reiterated “All we want …” range from a limousine to a packet of fags, a bank balance to a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby; while the panaceas and emollients dismissed in the refrain “It's no go …” are even more variegated: fairground amusements—but why a “rickshaw”, an oriental mode of conveyance? or could this be a perpetuated misprint for kickshaw?—Hindu asceticism and theosophy, gossip column and ceilidh, Herring Board and Bible, cinema and stadium, country cottage, Government grants, elections, pensions, the lot. The moral—Why work, since the winds will blow the profit?—is entirely negative, and MacNeice surely overstated the case when, towards the end of his life, he described¹ the poem as “a satirical elegy for the Gaelic districts of Scotland and indeed for all traditional culture”. Rather it is a theatrical tour-de-force, some of whose effects are got a little cheaply, but enlivened by sparkle and dash and an offbeat rhythm that does in some way, as MacNeice claimed, mimic the drone of the bagpipes.

Worth mentioning in conclusion is “Christmas Shopping”, one of several poems MacNeice wrote on the meaning of Christmas in the modern world, which has affinities with “Birmingham” already discussed. Its theme is the familiar one of lost significance.

.....

1.

I consider that the poet is a blend of the entertainer and the critic or informer; he is not a legislator however unacknowledged, nor yet, essentially, a prophet.

I would have a poet able-bodied, fond of talking, a reader of the newspapers, capable of pity and laughter, informed in economics, appreciative of women, actively interested in politics, susceptible to physical impressions.

It was only human of MacNeice to have drawn up his specification for the ideal poet very much in his own image. Of the other three poets we are concerned with not only does Spender fail to measure up to his requirements, but Auden would certainly have been ploughed on at least two counts; only Day Lewis (besides MacNeice himself) would have passed with honours.

At the end of an earlier chapter MacNeice was on a motoring holiday in Ireland with Ernst Stahl, having just heard the news that war had been declared. He spent the rest of 1939 in Cushenden in a worried state of mind, then early in 1940 returned to America on a lecture tour and renewed his “timelessly happy” relationship with Eleanor Clark. Convalescing from appendicitis, he stayed in the house on Brooklyn Heights in New York he described² as

a warren of the arts, Auden writing in one room, a girl novelist [Carson McCullers] writing—with a china cup of sherry—in another, a composer [Britten] composing and a singer [Pears] hitting a high note and holding it and Gipsy Rose Lee, the striptease queen, coming round for meals like a whirlwind of laughter and sex.

Auden tried to persuade him to remain in America for the duration, but he refused, feeling (as he wrote to his father) that he was “missing History”; he had surprised himself by discovering a “new attitude, the basic principle of which is that freedom means Getting Into things and not Getting Out of them”. So he returned to England where, the lull of the phoney war coming to an end, the Luftwaffe was about to unloose the blitz on London and other cities. Turned down for the Navy, in which his friend Shepard was now serving, in May 1941 he joined the Features Department of the BBC whose employee he was to remain for the rest of his life.

The poems he had written immediately before the outbreak of war including the diary-sequence “The Coming of War” had been published in March 1940 under the title The Last Ditch by the Cuala Press, Dublin, in a limited edition dedicated to Eleanor. It is his most satisfying collection containing as it does “Three Poems Apart” (later “Trilogy for X”), his love poems of the summer of 1938; the two lyrics of the following year he had written for Eleanor, “Meeting Point” and “A Toast”; “Prognosis”, “London Rain”, “The British Museum Reading Room” and, besides other equally accomplished London poems, the first five of the “Novelettes” series, among them the exquisite “Les Sylphides”. Never again would he know a period of such sustained, apparently effortless creativity. While MacNeice was staying in America he had made the deliberate decision to alter course: as he wrote to Dodds³ in February 1940, “I am going to write (at least I hope so) quite new kinds of poetry. After which, no doubt, the deluge, but I can't think about that now.” The principal respect in which the poems he wrote in America between February and October 1940 differ from the ones he had written in pre-war days is that they have their immediate source in the imagination rather than in the real world. They employ patterns of images in order to re-create in words aspirations, anxieties, insights and other states of mind and at best to arrive at the end of the poem at some “inkling”—a favourite word of his at the time—about the nature of reality. Recurring themes are those of divination and resurrection. He continued to take the classical and biblical worlds as frames of reference, but though he had now largely discarded the concrete in favour of the abstract, the images he coined in order to achieve his effects were as colourful and eye-catching as before. Early examples are “The Return” (February) which looks for rebirth, not to Bethlehem, but to the classical Underworld from which earth's returning daughter is expected to emerge, in a riot of rejoicing pictured variously as a “harlequinade of water through a sluice” and a “fusillade of sunlight on the water”. Similarly in “Entirely” (March) the poet, recognizing that man is precluded from entire knowledge and entire happiness, acquiesces in the world's delight and pain imaged as “a mad weir of tigerish waters”. The poem written in September 1940 that gives its title to MacNeice's next collection, Plant and Phantom (1941), in which these new-style poems were printed along with most of those from the Cuala Press volume, consists entirely of a montage of images designed to suggest man's complexity, courageously building stepping stones across the void, rebelling against the physical laws that would limit his nature,

Smuggling over the frontier
Of fact a sense of value,

and, not content with inklings only, striving always

to find in the end the Word itself—

the Word in the sense of Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity.

Two poems also written during that September follow the same course. “Evening in Connecticut” has as its central image the shadows lengthening as evening draws on, suggesting both the indifference of nature and the inevitability of death, the poem's undertone of menace being reinforced by its dream-logic: autumn—fall—fall of dynasties—sleeping kings emerging from caves. “The Dowser” is full of even vaguer inklings, and when “they” dig where the water-diviner had indicated there gushes forth, not water, but a veritable firework display of imagery. All these poems use a dream-logic that operates through the associative faculty in order to illustrate man's eternal quest for enlightenment; whereas “Order to View” is merely dreamlike, though with the mysterious actuality of a dream.

In America MacNeice did not altogether give up writing poems grounded in the real world. Reading in a newspaper in May 1940 that the overweight music hall artiste Florrie Forde had died after entertaining troops in a military hospital, he wrote “Death of an Actress” betraying something of the nostalgia he felt living in exile from England, which may have been a major ingredient in the “History” he felt was pulling him back. It is a lament for the “Old England” George Orwell was also concerned with in certain essays he was writing about this time, sentimental daydreams that had lost much of their potency during the first world war and would not survive another. For some reason MacNeice dropped “Picture Galleries” from his 1948 Collected Poems, though it sits well with his other poems about paintings. Its theme is similar to that of “Nature Morte” considered in an earlier chapter, how behind the sealed world enclosed in picture frames can be sensed the violent emotions of the painters, so that on leaving the gallery, “a sheaf of inklings fluttering in their minds”, the visitors re-enter a world grown suddenly unsafe. In “Provence” (September), one of the unillusioned “Novelettes”, in which he recalls the holiday in St. Tropez he had spent with Mary shortly before they were married, he reverts to his old shock tactics: having evoked the Mediterranean holiday in sensuous detail, he confronts the reader with a harsh reminder that not all marriages have happy endings. Another poem in this realistic series also written in September 1940, “Refugees”, on the same subject as Auden's ‘Refugee Blues’ and recalling his own “The British Museum Reading Room” (“There seeps from heavily jowled or hawk-like foreign faces / The guttural sorrow of the refugees”) describes them in close-up arriving by ship at New York harbour, conscious that the city's abundance may not be for them and that they can only wait, like Lazarus, hoping for another chance that may be denied them.

A few later lyrics find a place in the volume among these more substantial pieces. The snappy “Bar-room Matins” riddled with biblical references which satirizes the trivialization of disaster by the news media, and “Flight of the Heart” which, as some of his earliest poems had done, puts forward the escapist's point of view, are not among his most memorable. And in “Cradle Song for Eleanor” with which the volume concludes he produced a companion-piece to “The Sunlight on the Garden”, even to the extent of working in a Shakespearean quotation, in this case Othello's “O Iago, the pity of it, Iago”, which gives an added resonance to this movingly ominous lullaby.

Drawing together the various “inklings” adumbrated in these shorter poems, he tried in “Plurality”, a poem consisting of 80 lines of rhymed hexameters having internal as well as end rhymes, to expound the view of life that sustained him in this first year of war. It begins with a rejection of the proposition of the Greek philosopher Parmenides, who had deduced the characteristics of “what is”, as “ungenerated and imperishable, indivisible, self-identical, unique, motionless, determinate, perfect and in perfect equilibrium like a solid sphere” [Oxford Classical Dictionary]. MacNeice also rejected the views of such modern monists (i.e. those who hold in some form the doctrine that only one ultimate principle of being exists) as Spinoza and Hegel with their dead ideal of the universal which refuses to allow division or dispersal. As a humanist, MacNeice replies:

No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear
That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year;

that each entity including man exists in its own right, not to be merged in any Absolute. For the world is flux and movement, change and decay, error and choice. Perfection requires that between the meaning and the fact time should intervene; life being a ferment, man must live and die in strife. Man is man, neither a beast nor a god, because he would transcend the human span. Knowing things are wrong, he tries to patch them up. Discontented, subject to lovely hopes and bad dreams, he tries to raise a scaffold in never-ending flux. Conscious of all the disabilities that flesh is heir to, he is

          conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power
Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour,
Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death's inveigling touch,
Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.

2.

The inscription at the front of Springboard under the dedication “To Hedli”, the singer for whom Auden had written some cabaret songs and whom MacNeice married in the summer of 1942, gave warning of another change of direction in his poetry:

Because the velvet image,
Because the lilting measure,
No more convey my meaning
I am compelled to use
Such words as disabuse
My mind of casual pleasure
And turn it towards a centre—

and, reading these later wartime poems, the reader is at once aware of a new spareness and austerity. Several poems, such as “Explorations” and “Mutations”, employ structural images for purely cerebral purposes; and there are no love poems in the collection. The book's epigraph is from George Herbert—“Even poisons praise thee”—and throughout them the God/no God debate continues, never reaching a positive conclusion. They are the poems of someone whose mind has been sharpened and concentrated by the experience of war, who has put aside luxuries and frivolities. Their keynote is seriousness, without froth or frill, and there is a new chill in the air.

“The Streets of Laredo” is a war poem that parodies a well-known cowboy ballad, written by MacNeice to be sung by his wife. Set in London during the blitz, it is by no means as simple as it may at first appear. In the first place, it is full of wartime jargon that later readers may find puzzling. The fireman's “‘We won't never master this joker today’” is a jocular reference to an uncontrollable conflagration; his “‘O hold the branch tightly’” refers to the nozzle on the end of the hose; to “‘drive home on the bell’” means to drive the fire appliance (or engine) at speed with its bell clanging; and for a police station to be “pancaked” was to be flattened by a high-explosive bomb. The biblical allusions are numerous and complex, of which two may be singled out. The line “‘Laredo the golden is fallen, is fallen’” telescopes two references, the first to the hymn ‘Jerusalem the Golden’; the second to Isaiah 21.9, “Babylon is fallen, is fallen”. The subtlest allusion is in the first line, “O early one morning I walked out like Agag” (the name being echoed, perhaps unconsciously, in the last stanza's “put a gag on your breath”). Agag was the king of the Amalekites whose people smote and discomfited the Israelites on their way from captivity to the Promised Land (Numbers 14.45), whom Samuel had captured alive when he destroyed the Amalekites with the edge of the sword. Summoning him to his presence, Samuel upbraids him for having by slaughtering the Israelites made women childless and in revenge hews him to pieces before the Lord in Gilgal (1 Samuel 15.30-35). Which doesn't seem to have much to do with MacNeice's ballad, until it is remembered that the ‘I’ of the poem who walked out like Agag had to dodge “the pythons [the lengths of firehose] that leaked on the pavement”, so that he had to walk with care; and that when summoned by Samuel Agag “came unto him delicately”, a brilliantly impressionist touch calculated to stay in MacNeice's mind. The reader who lets his eye slide over such references without running them to earth misses a great deal that the poem has to offer.

Not that his three poems referring specifically to the blitz rank with the best of the genre—those of Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, Day Lewis—though interesting as historical documents, giving an understandable reaction to being confined in a cellar and subjected to prolonged bombing. But to mock those who carried out the air attacks as “Trolls” and to dismiss them as mere oafs begged too many questions. More effective as war poems are those pitched in a lower key such as “Convoy” which, after describing the convoy escorted by vessels of the Royal Navy that brought MacNeice home from America, makes use of the convoy system as a metaphor for human life. “Whit Monday” pictures in twelve deft lines a Bank Holiday crowd sauntering from street to street in London, anxiously aware that the sky above them is only temporarily empty of bombers, and interweaves lines from the twenty-third Psalm with cynical asides on the war situation, summed up in the final, crammed line:

The quiet (Thames, or Don's, or Salween's) waters by,

which embraces as well as the dockland blitz both the Russian and Burma campaigns. The references are first to Spenser's “Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my Song”; then to Mikhail Sholokhov's four-volume novel (1928-1940) And Quiet Flows the Don; finally to an unidentified quotation about the river in eastern Burma, the scene of fierce fighting during the war, referred to in the title of Ellen Thorp's memoir of her life in that country Quiet Skies on Salween (Cape, 1945). A war poem of a kind is the ambiguous “Neutrality”, the only poem in the collection about MacNeice's native Ireland, which he equates with “the neutral island in the heart of man”. Clearly the poem is addressed to others besides those Irish who chose to stand aloof from the war, and the reference to the offshore mackerel which are “fat with the flesh of your kin” is meant as a reproach; but why the continent of Europe should be “close, dark, as archetypal sin” is not clear, and the whole poem suffers from what appears to be divided thinking. There is, too, a true flavour of wartime in the cabaret song, perhaps written for Hedli to sing, put into the mouth of a factory girl, with its refrain borrowed from the jargon of bomber pilots:

K for Kitty calling P for Prue …
Bomb Doors Open …
Over to you.

More than ever before in these new poems MacNeice distanced himself from their subject matter, even when it clearly had an autobiographical reference. In “Epitaph for Liberal Poets” he ruefully acknowledges that the technological age to come will have no time for poetry, but expresses a residual hope that their words may, perhaps, some time, “for a moment or two, accentuate a thirst”. And the ruthlessly perceptive “Alcohol” could only have been written by someone with first-hand experience of its deceptive solace. The genre that began with the “Novelettes” series he now exploited to the full in the first of many poems that constitute portraits of individuals who do service as types. As he explained in a note prefixed to the collection, he was not offering the reader “a set of Theophrastian characters”, for each of the individuals described had for him “an absolute quality”. Among them are “The Conscript”, a poem that should be compared with Day Lewis's ‘The Misfit’ on the same theme; “Bottleneck”; “The Mixer”; “Schizophrene” (to be compared with Day Lewis's self-referring ‘The Neurotic’); “The Libertine”; and “The Satirist”. A more extended portrait is attempted in “The Casualty” about his friend Shepard who had been lost at sea, but perhaps due to the strong personal emotion the subject aroused in him it has an uncertainty of tone that mars its impact.

The long poem placed at the end of the collection, “The Kingdom”, is of particular interest as evidence of how precarious MacNeice's commitment to humanism had become. In eight parts, it contains portraits of six individuals-as-types buttressed by a prologue and a coda. The chosen individuals—“Equal in difference, interchangeably sovereign”—are distinguished from people who drift or force, or who support some partisan order or an egotistical anarchy, or who follow too easy a religion. They are respectively an old man attuned to the English countryside; a working-class mother on whom the whole family depends; a hard-drinking ex-soldier deprived of the comradeship of army life; a Junoesque girl, cold yet life-enhancing; a scientist devoting his life to one small discovery (cf. Day Lewis's much later ‘After an Encaenia’); and a clergyman whose life had been shaped by his beliefs. Although described as incurably human, inheritors of the Kingdom of Earth, these portraits are permeated, as it were accidentally, by Christian as well as classical imagery. The countryman, whose voice has the cadence of Christmas bells (in this poem no longer menacing), walks like a fallen angel. Over the dying mother the clock stretches its hands like a rising Cross. The statuesque girl may even be a saint, before whose remains holy candles are lit. The scientist is “a sort of messiah”. It is as if MacNeice could only get his chosen individuals into focus by placing them in a Christian context; as if his humanism were constantly being elbowed out by the beliefs he had imbibed as a child.

These beliefs played no part in the song-cycle The Revenant he wrote for Hedli shortly after their marriage, when they were staying in County Down during a walking-tour in Northern Ireland. Only one of the twelve songs it comprises, ‘The nearness of remoteness like a lion's eye’, appeared in print during MacNeice's lifetime (in his Collected Poems, 1949 and in Eighty-Five Poems, 1959), but the whole cycle was published in 1975, twelve years after his death, by the Cuala Press, Dublin, in a limited edition uniform with The Last Ditch they had brought out in 1940. There are altogether twelve songs alternating with eleven “Interludes” or bridge passages, all put into the mouth of a girl whose lover seven years before had gone off to the wars, promising to return. As Housman, de la Mare and Auden (in ‘O what is that sound’) had, each in his own way, done before, MacNeice here adapts a folk-ballad theme for his purposes. Each song has a different stanza form, the Interludes a measured, four-stressed line divided by a caesura. The songs mark successive stages in the simple story they tell, from the soldier's departure, the girl's years of waiting when she passes the time playing such children's games as ‘Tinker, tailor’ and ‘He loves me, he loves me not’, to the soldier's eventual return when, instead of coming in, he calls her away to some destination they never reach—

Where are you leading me through the night?
          Honeysuckle and jasmine.
To a land where all the flowers are white.
          White bones in the valley—

and it becomes clear that it is his ghost leading her to the land of death where they will be eternally together.

Reverting to Springboard, the collection opens with “Prayer Before Birth”, an invocation put into the mouth of the MacNeices' unborn daughter which, like his own “Prayer in Mid-Passage”, is addressed to the Deity though called by various euphemisms. If further evidence were needed of how close MacNeice came during the war years to a return to Christian belief, it is provided by “The News-Reel” in which, having posed the question “Since Munich, what?”, he decides to defer attempting an answer until memory had elicited from the blind drama of events the threads of vision, the moments of understanding that had temporarily given

          hope that fact is a façade
And that there is an organism behind
Its brittle littleness, a rhythm and a meaning,
Something half-conjectured and half-divined,
Something to give way to and so find.

Notes

1. Louis MacNeice Reads Selected Poems, Argo Record sleeve (1961).

2. MacNeice, The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography by L. MacNeice (1965), 35.

3. Unpublished. E. R. Dodds collection, Bodleian Library.