peter mcdonald
definition, an exercise in providing material of common interest, intended to bind
togethera listening public in a common purpose; but how the writing of poetry
could be made to fit into such a pattern was necessarily a more problematic matter.
Like his contemporaries, MacNeice had by 1941 long distanced himself from
‘propaganda’ poetry (and had, indeed, always been much further from such a thing
than many). The poems composed on his return to England, then, were never
likely to be examples of any officially minded or approved ‘war poetry’. In fact, the
pieces that were to be collected asSpringboard(with its carefully precise subtitle,
poems 1941–1944) resist most of the more obvious orientations for writing from
the Home Front. Like MacNeice’s war itself, they are given momentum by a literal
baptism of fire, in the London of the Blitz: poems such as ‘Brother Fire’, ‘The
Trolls’, ‘Troll’s Courtship’, and ‘Whit Monday’ provideSpringboardwith a founda-
tion of first-hand experience, in whichthe strengths of documentary-like directness
are brought together with a vivid, almost surrealist, disregard for ‘message’ or
conclusive argument.
MacNeice’s experiences of the major air raids on London were, of course,
in many respects experiences shared with the larger community under nightly
bombardment. But for the poet, these events were also in some sense bracing and
creatively empowering; the ungovernable individualist in MacNeice could find in
the Blitz an environment in which he could be—however strangely—at the same
time self-involved and communally committed. ‘Brother Fire’, with its concluding
address to the ‘delicate walker, babbler, dialectician Fire’, the ‘enemy and image of
ourselves’, asks an apparently odd question:
Did we not on those mornings after the All Clear,
When you were looting shops in elemental joy
And singing as you swarmed up city block and spire,
Echo your thought in ours? ‘Destroy! Destroy!’^31This concentrates attitudes which find their expression in some of MacNeice’s
journalism of the time. In one of his five ‘London Letters’, contributed to the
American journalCommon Sensein 1941, MacNeice reports on how ‘to walk along
a great shopping street...on the morning after a blitz, far from being depressing,
is almost exhilarating’, and adds immediately that ‘this may shock you but many
people share my experience’.^32
Writing for a large home audience, in the pages ofPicture Post,MacNeice
recounted his experiences during one of the biggest raids (on the night of 16–17
April 1941), and admitted that ‘it was—if I am to be candid—enlivening’, and
recorded ‘a voice inside me which (ignoring all the suffering and waste involved)
kept saying, as I watched a building burning or demolished: ‘‘Let her go up!’’ or
(^31) MacNeice, ‘Brother Fire’, inCollected Poems, 217.
(^32) MacNeice, ‘London Letter: Reflections from the Dome of St Paul’s’,Common Sense, 10/7 (July
1941); repr. inSelected Prose, 131–2.