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 stan smith

breaks, wondering ‘what the morning|Paperwill say...for the morning already|Is
with us, the day is to-day’.^50 The words recall, inevitably, Auden’s reiterated formula
inSpain, ‘to-day the struggle’, but also Cornford’s concern with ‘What the dawn
will bring to light’. The section thus prepares the moral ground for the words
with which section VI opens: ‘And I remember Spain|At Easter ripe as an egg
for revolt and ruin.’^51 Section VI, however, recalls this pre-war visit to Spain not
in affirmation of commitment but as one more instance of liberal backsliding
and evasion. Annoyed by the rain, noticing only obliquely the ‘writings on the
walls—|Hammer and sickle, Boicot, Viva, Muerra’, and the cripples and children
begging, all in the insistent ‘And...And’ of childish narration, it admits, ‘that,
we thought to ourselves, was not our business;|All that the tripper wants is the
status quo|Cut and dried for trippers’. He departed for home not remembering but
wilfully ‘forgetting Spain, not realising’

That Spain would soon denote

Our griefs, our aspirations;

Not knowing that our blunt

Ideals would find their whetstone, that our spirit

Would find its frontier on the Spanish front,

Its body in a rag-tag army.^52

Less histrionically than in Auden’sSpain, here thoughts have bodies, the menacing
shapes of the English fever become precise and alive, and private friendship blossoms
into a people’s army. The penultimate section XXIII of the poem recounts a return
to a different Spain, in the last days of December 1938, leaving London snow and
personal problems behind. Previously beset by nostalgia, the poem now, in the
depth of the Republic’s impending defeat, speaks of hope, the future. As the road
ran downhill into Spain, it reports, the issues were plain:

We have come to a place in space where shortly

All of us may be forced to camp in time:

The slender searchlights climb,

Our sins will find us out, even our sins of omission.^53

Despite the desolation of Barcelona, the people still manage to laugh, revealing that
life is more than ‘merely the bare|Permission to keep alive and receive orders’,
and humanity ‘more than a mechanism|Tobeoiledandgreasedandforever
unaware|Of the work it is turning out’.^54 MacNeice, who wrote, in a sceptical aside
on Communist pretensions in a prefatory note to the sequence, that ‘I refuse to be
‘‘objective’’ or clear-cut at the cost of honesty’, nevertheless sees in the embattled
Republic evidence that ‘Here at least the soul has found its voice’. Just as section V
had called up echoes of Christ’s momentary doubts in Gethsemane, on the eve

(^50) MacNeice,Autumn Journal, 111.
(^51) Ibid. 112. (^52) Ibid. 114. (^53) Ibid. 158. (^54) Ibid. 159.