louis macneice’s war of Love’ are parts of an imperfectly accommodated life, in which happiness is to
becompromised by a state of emergency. The voice in this poem is itself subject
to an uneasy accommodation, as MacNeice’s use of run-on lines pulls against the
metrical regularity of the rhyming stanzas. This is most apparent in the closing lines,
when the poet considers the situation ‘if the world were black and white entirely’:
We might be surer where we wished to go
Or again we might be merely
Bored but in brute reality there is no
Road that is right entirely.MacNeice’s ability to counterpoint a highly musical stanza form with an almost
flat speaking voice develops some of his 1930s practice; now, however, something
more than poetic style is at stake. The defeated effort to ‘get the hang of it entirely’
is becoming almost defiant in its rejection of absolute or clear solutions; and the
residual Americanism of ‘get the hang of it’ has its part to play in the poem’s sense
of time and place.^24
One image which recurs in MacNeice’s poetry of 1940 is that of the stylite, the
holy man whose asceticism drives him to separate himself from the world by taking
up residence on a pillar. In ‘Stylite’, of March 1940 (like the other poems inPlant
and Phantom, the poem is carefully dated by the author on its volume publication),
this figure combines different kinds of isolation, that of the visionary and that of the
hermit:
Thesaintonthepillarstands,
The pillar is alone,
He has stood so long
That he himself is stone;
Only his eyes
Range across the sand
Where no one ever comes
And the world is banned.^25The presence of Tennyson’s St Simeon Stylites is discernible here, providing the
figure with an element of the grotesque; so too is the idea of the intellectual
ensconced in his ivory tower (with which MacNeice was later to engage directly,
when the term was applied by Virginia Woolf to his own generation of British
writers).^26 In so far as this pillared saint represents the poet himself in 1940, he
(^24) ‘Get the hang of it’, originally an Americanism, was still sufficiently novel in English to merit
quotation marks from H. G. Wells in hisWork, Wealth, & Happiness of Mankind(1932): ‘Never before
has there been this need and desire to ‘‘get the hang’’ of the world as one whole’ (as cited inOED,
‘hang’,n., 3).
(^25) MacNeice, ‘Stylite’, inCollected Poems, 168.
(^26) See MacNeice, ‘The Tower that Once’,Folios of New Writing, 3 (Spring 1941); repr. inSelected
Literary Criticism, 119–24.