peter mcdonald
romp and scurry about’, and then delivers the observation that ‘This is a bit like
us’,comparing the ‘destroyers and corvettes’ to ‘pragmatic|And ruthless attitudes’
which protect the individual’s ‘course for all his soul’s more basic needs’.^42 In ways
its author cannot have intended, the poem is truly an exercise in the art of sinking.
As MacNeice pointed out in a prefatory note to the book,Springboardcontains a
numberoftitleswhich‘havethedefinitearticle,e.g.‘‘TheSatirist’’,‘‘TheConscript’’ ’
(as well as ‘The Mixer’ and ‘The Libertine’); as the poet goes on to insist, ‘any
such individual seems to me to have an absolute quality which the definite article
recognizes.’^43 Yet there is one individual in the volume whose ‘absolute quality’ was
more vividly and intimately known to MacNeice—this is the subject of the poem
‘The Casualty’ (the opening poem in the book’s second section), Graham Shepard,
who died on active service in the Atlantic in 1942. In the elegy he composed for
his closest friend, MacNeice broke out of the over-definite and slightly glib tone of
his weaker war poems, and found another register, in which the strangeness and
shock of actual loss are not compromised by the imposition of larger patterns of
significance. The idea of death at sea strikes echoes ofThe TempestandLycidas,but
MacNeice adds a disconcerting note to the underwater scene:
So now the concert is over, the seats vacated,
Eels among the footlights, water up to the roof
And the gilded cherubs crumbling—and you come in
Jaunty as ever but with a half-frustrated
Look on your face, you expect the show to begin
But you are too late and cannot accept the proof
That you are too late because you have died too early
Andthisisundersea.^44The moment of Shepard’s ‘instantaneous’ death, which is one ‘Congealing the
kaleidoscope at Now’, throws time out of joint, both for the imagined dead man
and for the imagining poet. The confusion between ‘too early’ and ‘too late’, which
Shepard is made to experience, sits close to the harrowing refrain of MacNeice’s
1940 poem ‘Autobiography’ (‘Come back early or never come’),^45 and anticipates by
twenty years the romantic misalignments of his late love poem ‘The Introduction’
(‘And she frightened him because she was young|And thus too late...And he
frightened her because he was old|And thus too early’).^46 The undersea stage set
adds an incongruous glamour, and MacNeice makes sure that Shepard’s charac-
ter is celebrated as one of largely incongruous individuality, of irreverence and
unpredictability. The impossibility of containing Shepard’s character in definition
or generalization is enacted by MacNeice’s ability to play off the stanzaic form of
his elegy against the straying and multiplying energies of syntax—a syntax itself
(^42) MacNeice, ‘Convoy’, ibid. 221. (^43) MacNeice, prefatory note, ibid. 804–5.
(^44) MacNeice, ‘The Casualty’, ibid. 237–8. (^45) MacNeice, ‘Autobiography’, ibid. 200.
(^46) MacNeice, ‘The Introduction’, ibid. 593.