peter mcdonald
is a character for whom time is almost up, and seems to be under sentence of
death:‘Round his neck there comes|The conscience of a rope,|And the hang-
man counting.’ The poem ends—puzzlingly perhaps—with a glimpse of another
pillared figure, ‘A white Greek god’, who is both ‘Confident’ and has his ‘eyes on
the world’. While MacNeice does not want to be the ascetic stylite, he knows that
he cannot become the Apollonian figure of commitment and achievement; like so
much else written by him in 1940, this is the record of an unresolved dilemma. In a
poem MacNeice published in America, ‘Coming from Nowhere’, the stylite makes
another appearance, ‘Hunched on the rock|A pillared saint|With knees drawn
up|And vacant eyes’.^27 Here, it is ‘Love’ which ‘Makes him alone|Cut off from
men’, as ‘He sits and waits|Till time erodes|The walls of thought,|The thoughts
of self.’ The poem ends, like ‘Stylite’, by envisaging a resolution which its whole
tenor has already rendered (at the very least) wishfully unconvincing:
Until from nowhere
Again the sun
Unrolls a carpet;
Then he leaves
His rock and with
Deliberate feet
On golden water
Walks the world.Perhaps the unlikelihood of a happy resolution to his affair with Eleanor matches
here the implausibility of the saint’s serenely confident return to the world, in a
Christ-like walking on the waters. In fact, the only water on which the poet was to
‘walk’ was that of the Atlantic Ocean, on the perilous trip back to Britain, under
constant threat of U-boat attacks, which he made at the end of the year.
Theperilsofthevoyage(arecordofwhichsurvivesastheopeningchaptersofThe
Strings Are False) were foreseen by MacNeice, and were not perhaps entirely unwel-
come. A number of the 1940 poems return to images of death for their resolution,
and their author, who already regarded his past life as dead, was inclined to invoke
suicidal alongside other impulses. In an American poem of May 1940, ‘The Death-
Wish’, in which ‘people, over-cautious, contrive|To save their lives by weighting
them with dead|Habits, hopes, beliefs’, the idea of suicide is on a continuum with
sexual desire:
it is not surprising that
Some in their impatience jump the rails,
Refusing to wait the communal failure, preferring
The way the madman or the meteor fails,
Deceiving themselves to think their death uncommon,(^27) ‘Coming from Nowhere’ was included inPoems 1925–1940, where it is dated Feb. 1940; repr. in
Collected Poems, 761–2.