louis macneice’s war Captions; the groundswell of the pavement, steady
Asfate, rose up and caught him, rolled him below
A truck—this ex-professor who had already
Outlived his job of being in the know.^39The poem in fact consigns its subject to a suicidal end, almost scornfully, in the
assumption that all expert knowledge of the world has become redundant, and that
the rules of engagement with life have now changed fundamentally. In London,
MacNeice felt able to see more clearly the possibility of something ‘morepositive’
for art in the death which was now all around as well as within his thoughts. In
‘Broken Windows’, this finds expression:
Death in its own right—as War does incidentally—sets our lives in perspective. Every
man’s funeral is his own, just as people are lonely in their lives, but Death as a leveller also
writes us in life. & Death not only levels but differentiates—it crystallizes our deeds.^40
‘We did not need a war to teach us this,’ MacNeice goes on, ‘but war has taught
us it’; ‘Before the war’, he concludes, ‘we wore blinkers.’ There is something a
little disconnected about these notes, as though MacNeice is trying to make up in
epigrammatic economy for gaps of argument and evidence. It is possible that Auden
influenced MacNeice here, in particular the Auden ofNew Year Letter(1941) and
its ‘Notes’; nevertheless, the determination to be affirmative on the subject of death
is seriously declared, and it shapes MacNeice’s war poetry in a decisive way.
As he composed the poems ofSpringboard, MacNeice was working towards pat-
terns of affirmation to be drawn from the reality of loss, damage, and uncertainty.
Inevitably, this was sometimes a precarious business. A lengthy sequence, ‘The
Kingdom’, fails to rescue its subjects from the over-determined framework of signi-
ficance to which MacNeice subjects them, as parts of ‘the Kingdom of individuals’.
The influence of BBC propaganda writing has not been properly worked through
in these poems, so that the poetic voice becomes merely brisk and obvious:
these are humble
And proud at once, working within their limits
And yet transcending them. These are the people
Who vindicate the species. And they are many.^41The bathos is irredeemable, and the very length of the sequence seems to make
matters more explicit, and worse. Similarly, the short poem entitled ‘Convoy’
(based on MacNeice’s experiences while briefly attached to a Royal Navy ship to
gather material for a radio feature) announces that ‘All is under control and nobody
need shout,|We are steady as we go, and on our flanks|The little whippet warships
(^39) ‘Suicide’ appeared amongst the ‘Novelettes’ poems inLast Ditch; ‘The Expert’ in the same
sequence as printed in 40 Poems 1925–1940. The poems are reprinted inCollected Poems, 579 and 762–3.
41 MacNeice, ‘Broken Windows or Thinking Aloud’, 142.
MacNeice, ‘The Kingdom’, inCollected Poems, 242.