A Human Voice

The last collection of his verse, made by MacNeice himself, contained only poems written between 1925 and 1948 and that was the collection that one came to think of as ‘the collected MacNeice’ – and it was followed by five other small volumes of varying quality, the last of them published in 1963. As Professor Dodds points out in his Introduction, MacNeice had in effect alreadypublished all his good verse, with the exceptionof the poem ‘Thalassa’ published also lately in the London Magazine. It is perhaps fitting that one should quote at some length from his last poem:

Run up the sail, my heartsick comrades;
Let each horizon tilt and lurch –
You know the worst: your wills are fickle,
Your values blurred, your hearts impure
And your past life a ruined church –
But let your poison be your cure.

Put out to sea, ignoble comrades,
Whose record shall be noble yet;
Butting through scarps of moving marble
The narwhal dares us to be free;
By a high star our course is set,
Our end is Life. Put out to sea.

I find this difficult affirmation of a dying man particularly moving. As always, MacNeice the man and MacNeice the poet seem definitely on speaking terms. His verse from the start had a broad, casual confessional quality. The poison is no doubt his familiar devil and nature god John Barleycorn; but I think MacNeice intends the reference also more generally – that the inescapable pressures of age and disillusionment and remorse and nearing death should make a man more a man, not less a man, should give him courage. The allegory, one could say, shows us a dying Viking chief making ready for a last sea raid. And the view of the sea as a kind of pantheist God-symbol, embodying both life and death for man, interchangeably, is already present in MacNeice’s earliest writings.

I do not question that a definitive edition of MacNeice’s poems is suitable enough, even if the editor can only add a few translations to the corpus of work already published. I do strenuously question, however, the exorbitant price of the volume. Why should any ordinary largish book of verse cost so much?

On the whole MacNeice’s later poems do not break much new ground. They are always worth reading. But his essential contribution to the life and page 361 literature of our times is already embedded somewhere in the middle period – a steady humanist affirmation in the face of war, betrayals, self-betrayal, bureaucratic monotony, the assault of meaninglessness, the decay of romantic love – in a word, the ills of man. That gay, suave, sad voice has become for many of us a part of our lives. At the moments of deepest uncertainty, near the centre of the labyrinth, one has heard an essentially human voice at one’s elbow – ‘Don’t lose hope. I am here also, knowing whatever you know, and a bit more as well. The issues are confused; but in the confusion our hope of salvation may lie. . . .’ I use the word ‘salvation’ advisedly, for MacNeice, though not a formal Christian, proposed to himself and others the problems of the religious agnostic who desires that belief should be possible. It was, of course, his unusual intellectual courage and warmth and humanity which made his statement of these problems always seem so real to us.

1967 (443)