‘what the dawn will bring to light’ of the Crucifixion, so section XXIII recalls that moment of backsliding betrayal
afterit, asking himself whether the cocks crowing in the new year constitute ‘the
heart’s reveille or the sour|Reproach of Simon Peter’.^55 Finding his own ‘niggling
equivocations’ shamed by the ‘matter-of-fact faith and courage’ of these ‘stubborn
heirs of freedom’, he struggles to come to terms with the disillusion of which
Lehmann and Muggeridge write, contrasting ‘We who play for safety’ with ‘these
people [who] contain truth, whatever|Their nominal fac ̧ade’, praying to ‘make
their half-truth true’.^56 MacNeice sees that commitment to what theTimes Literary
Supplementreviewer calls ‘the human reality’ does not preclude, but may even
demand, partisanship. The section ends with an aubade which is also a challenge
like that which Peter faced: ‘the cock crowing in Barcelona’. These ‘antinomies in
which we live’ are then resolved in the poem’s concluding section XXIV, which
announces that ‘night’s cocoon will open|When day begins’. The aubade is also
a cradle-song, prefiguring an ‘earnest of the real|Future when we wake’, the
prospect of ‘a possible land|Not of sleepwalkers, not of angry puppets’, where ‘the
individual, no longer squandered|In self-assertion, works with the rest’.^57 Though
‘The New Year comes with bombs’, MacNeice’s utopian vision, in a commitment
beyond doubt and credulity, transforms the plangent cadences of Auden’sSpain,
insisting that, still, ‘the choice is yours to make,|The mortgage not foreclosed, the
offer open’. A liberal-humanist socialist never deluded by the grandiloquent lies of
Stalinism, MacNeice the classical scholar rejects the melancholy analogies with the
landscapes of Acheron with which History consoles the defeated, recalling instead
another historic turning-point. The running water ‘To-morrow to be crossed’ is ‘no
river of the dead or Lethe’. The defeat of the Republic heralds yet another triumph
for Hitler and fascism; but the defiance of its defenders provides a model for the
greater struggle yet to come, for ‘To-night we sleep|On the banks of Rubicon.’^58
Autumn Journal, that is, far from being an autumnal lament for a world that has
been lost, looks toward a future yet to be won. And that, perhaps, is the abiding
significance of Spain.
(^55) Ibid. 159. (^56) Ibid. 161. (^57) Ibid. 163. (^58) Ibid. 164.
This essay is part of a research project supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology
(BFF 2002–02842), the Comunidad Autonoma of La Rioja (ANGI–2002/05), and the University of ́
La Rioja, Logrono, Spain (API–02–35). ̃