louis macneice’s war ‘‘Let her come down. Let them all go. Write them all off. Stone walls do not a city
make.’’’^33 Again, the element of intensely individual—even aesthetic—perception
is mingled with one of communal solidarity:
The hoses were playing on a big store from the street and from the buildings opposite; the
shifting pattern of water and smoke and flame was as subtle as the subtlest of Impressionist
paintings; the jets from the hoses, I noticed with surprise, were a deep mauve, but this
richness of colouring faded as the day grew brighter.... I was gazing into a shop of fancy
goods that were open to the air and coated with powdered plaster. ‘You can take one now,’
a man shouted to me, ‘price has gone down.’ Wisecracks among the ruins; wisecracks and
greetings and stories of the night—stories that in peacetime you’d think a bit tall, but which
now are a matter of course and often an understatement.
MacNeice’s apparently abstracted, aesthetically tinged vision of the fire is being
aligned here with a shared perception of the events as potentially absurd; in this
surreal environment, the oddness and tangential nature of a detached individual
is, paradoxically, something which Londoners have in common. So the thought
‘Destroy! Destroy!’, echoed in ‘Brother Fire’, is not ‘mine’ (as it were), but rather
‘ours’. In terms of ‘propaganda’ content, this is the very opposite of defeatist
thinking for MacNeice; but it still adds something like the thrill of the anarchic to
his presentation of the situation.
The German bombers, which are transformed by MacNeice into figures of
mythic comedy as ‘Trolls,’ who ‘ramble and rumble over the roof-tops’, ‘humming
to themselves like morons’, threaten the population with a death that (the poet
implies) holds few terrors. In the third section of ‘The Trolls’, MacNeice adapts the
painfully self-conscious meditations on death which had filled his poetry written
over the past year in the USA to the first-person plural of the Blitz:
Death has a look of finality;
We think we lose something but if it were not for
Death we should have nothing to lose, existence
Because unlimited would merely be existence
Without incarnate value. The trolls can occasion
Ourdeathbuttheyarenotable
To use it as we can use it.
Fumbling and mumbling they try to
Spell out death correctly; they are not able.^34How to ‘use’ death is at the heart of the matter for MacNeice; and the language of
his poetry here combines the abstract with the grotesque, insisting on the ‘we’ who
undergo this part-physical, part-metaphysical trial together in a bombed London.
At stake is ‘existence’ and its ‘incarnate value’, and it is the force represented
(^33) MacNeice, ‘The Morning after the Blitz’,Picture Post, 2/5 (3 May 1941); repr. inSelected Prose,
- 34
MacNeice, ‘The Trolls’, inCollected Poems, 218.