peter mcdonald
international situation; but they are also haunted by something much more personal
innature, which helps further to explain MacNeice’s uncertainty about whether or
not the imminent war would be his. Eleanor Clark, a young American writer whom
MacNeice had met and fallen in love with on his first visit to the USA, represented a
very powerful reason for the poet’s wishing to leave his life and work in London; and
her presence in ‘The Coming of War’—especially in its original, ten-poem form—is
just as important as any political or cultural considerations in MacNeice’s general
sense of ambivalence about the War itself.^8 Clark’s strong political commitments
(she was part of a circle of left-wing writers in New York) meant that her view of
the European war was just as detached as those of the partying literati of Dublin,
if for very different reasons. In this sense, her place in ‘The Coming of War’ is
doubly interesting: Eleanor embodies a possible romantic fulfilment which would
take MacNeice out of Europe and its conflicts; at the same time, she is a figure
whose political thought (which goes completely unmentioned) would interpret the
War in ways remote from anything of which MacNeice felt himself capable.^9
‘The Coming of War’ has some of the unevenness of lived experience, and is short
on the certainties of hindsight. As a travelogue, of sorts, the sequence takes stock
of a country which is both attractive and, for MacNeice, impossible: in ‘Dublin’,
the opening poem, there is ‘the air soft on the cheek|And porter running from the
taps|With a head of yellow cream’, but also ‘Nelson on his pillar|Watching the
world collapse’.^10 The journey takes the first-person voice through a place which has
many of the characteristics of Limbo: it is caught between two states, each of which
seems to be an unreality. One unreal state is that of Ireland, which is rendered
unreal by the imminent cataclysm; another is the War itself, unknowable and
unimaginable in the newly arriving future. In the welter of conflicting unrealities,
Eleanor Clark figures as a reality nowabsent:
O my darling if only you were with me
And the old rhythms could be made to work
And the new horror that is the old redoubled(^8) ‘The Coming of War (Dublin, Cushendun, the West of Ireland, and Back)’ appeared as ten poems
in MacNeice’s short volumeThe Last Ditch(Dublin: Cuala Press, 1940). It was shortened to seven
poems forPlant and Phantom(London: Faber, 1941), and cut to five forCollected Poems 1925–1948
(London: Faber, 1949), when the overall title was changed to ‘The Closing Album’. The 1940 version is
printed in full inThe Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber, 2007),
appendix 3.
(^9) See MacNeice to Eleanor Clark, n.d. [Apr. 1939], quoted in Jon Stallworthy,Louis MacNeice
(London: Faber, 1995), 245–6: ‘I have been thinking about this War question. You say, quite rightly,
darling, that it will be just a dirty war of power politics, so what am I doing in it? All you are interested
in is ‘‘The Revolution’’ & you say that, if one is going to take action, the only thing to do is to foment
the revolution directly. But look! If a war with Germany starts, it will be no damn good having an
immediate revolution at home or a mutiny at the front.... It seems to me that the only hope in this
War (if it happens) is for the people of England to enter into it on certain terms with the government
(i.e. that it shall be terminated as quickly as possible by negotiation & with no Versailles nonsense).’
(^10) MacNeice, ‘Dublin’, inCollected Poems, 680.