THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

dad’s on the dole: | Two shillings a week is | The price of a soul’). The time to dance, ‘An Address to Death’ asserts,
is now and ‘in the rhythm of comrades’. The same volume also contained two somewhat more ambiguous poems,
‘The Conflict’ and ‘In Me Two Worlds’. The first pictures a poet singing ‘on a tilting deck’ in a sea-storm in order to
‘keep men’s courage up’. Is this the floundering ship of capitalism? Or is the Party itself losing impetus with one
comrade worrying about who is steering? The poet sees himself as one ‘between two massing powers ... whom
neutrality cannot save’, but when he encouragingly speaks of the rallying force of ‘the red advance of life’, the surge
of blood might as well be a blush as a declaration of solidarity with socialist progress. In ‘In Me Two Worlds’ he sees
his body as a ‘moving point of dust | Where past and future meet’ and as a battlefield where ‘the armies of the dead’
meet their antagonists, ‘the men to come’, in an ‘inveterate feud’. This feud is to be fought out not in clear daylight of
dialectical materialism but in ‘my senses’ darkened fields’. In some ways we are back with Matthew Arnold’s
ignorant armies clashing by night. Day-Lewis’s volumes Overtures to Death (1938) and Poems in Wartime (1940)
signalled that he, like Spender, had begun to retreat from confident Marxist analyses as the Second World War
approached. The faded elegance of a nineteenth-century terrace in ‘Regency Houses’ may be a metaphor for
condemned bourgeois society, but the poem goes on to evoke a different melancholy, the disillusion of those who
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‘in younger days, | Hoping too much, tried on | The habit of perfection’ and who have now ‘learnt how it betrays | Our
shrinking flesh’.
Much of Day-Lewis’s later career was taken up with translations of Virgil, a poet who had oscillated between
public celebrations of a national mission and a delight in bucolic retreat. A version of The Georgics appeared in 1940
and was followed in 1952 by The Aeneid and in 1963 by The Eclogues. Louis MacNeice, a poet of a very different
disposition, was as a student and teacher of Greek and Roman literature equally attentive to the classical tradition
which fed his own poetic preoccupations. At the beginning of his career he published a series of verse dialogues with
the title ‘eclogue’ (‘Eclogue for Christmas’, ‘Eclogue by a Five-barred Gate’, ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, and ‘Eclogue
between the Motherless’). In 1936 he produced an often colloquial and distinctly unheroic verse translation of
Aeschylus’s the Agamemnon. Unlike Day-Lewis, MacNeice seems never to have fallen for the idea of feeling small
when faced with a working-class Communist or to have embraced simple solutions to what he saw as complex
historical, social, and political problems. ‘My sympathies are Left. On paper and in my soul’, he wrote, ‘But not in my
heart or my guts.’ In the poem ‘Snow’, published in the Poems of 1935, he describes the world as ‘crazier and more of
it than we think, | Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion | A tangerine and spit the pips and feel | The drunkenness of
things being various’. ‘Your thoughts make shape like snow’, he tells a Communist in a short lyric from the same
collection, ‘Consult the barometer — | The poise is perfect but maintained | For one day only.’ He concludes the poem
‘Entirely’, published in the collection Plant and Phantom in 1941, with the unblinkered assumption that ‘In brute
reality there is no | Road that is right entirely’.
MacNeice was an Ulsterman by birth and tradition, the son of a vicar of the fortress town of Carrickfergus who
rose to the episcopate of the Church of Ireland. The geography and the folklore of Ireland haunt his verse, but there is
a firm lack of commitment to any political or religious Establishment, whether Protestant or Catholic, whether
Unionist or Nationalist. When he writes affectionately of Carrickfergus in the poem of that name, he describes his
sense of exclusion from ‘the candles of the Irish poor’ yet he also implies a clear detachment from Protestant Ulster’s
involvement in the First World War. The quality of MacNeice’s scepticism, and of his refusal to accept the ’jejune
dichotomies’ that he mentions in ‘The Cromlech’, was determined by an intellectual exploration which looked beyond
Irish confines. He fluctuates between a God of discipline and a God of liberty, between divided vocations to the ascetic
and the sensual in ‘Stylite’ and in ‘London Rain’, the latter evoking a wet London which is a place where ‘God and
No-God’ | Play at pitch and toss’. In the charmlike ‘Prayer Before Birth’ (published in Springboard in 1944) he asks
for the spirit of delight and for freedom from those ‘who would freeze my | humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal
automaton | would make me a cog in a machine’. When he returns to an Ireland in wartime in the poem ‘Neutrality’
(published in the same collection), he recognizes a parallel
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between the geographical entity and ‘the neutral island in the heart of man’, both ostensibly non-committed, but both
internally vexed by ‘fermenting rivers’ and ‘intricacies of gloom and glint’.
MacNeice’s landscape and townscape poems provide a focus for his preoccupation with ambiguity and for his
divided literary loyalty between Ireland and England. In his unfinished autobiography, The Strings are False (1965),
he describes his enthusiasm as a schoolboy in Wiltshire for The Waste Land, an enthusiasm which expressed itself in
paddling a hired canoe ‘beneath the gas works, a fine place ... for reading Webster’. This feeling for incongruity and
for urban unloveliness emerges in the poem ‘Birmingham’ of 1934, a tribute to the city in which MacNeice taught