louis macneice’s war generated by the continually augmented nature of the information and recollection
thatflood through the rhymed form, resulting in a headlong rush of sentences
across line and stanza breaks. If the stanzaic grandeur and formality of occasion in
‘The Casualty’ seem to recall Yeats, its hurrying cadences and informality of register
pull the poem in an altogether different direction. Shepard himself is presented as
an individual beyond the reach of generalization, and ‘spilling across the border|Of
nice convention’; MacNeice’s poem, too, spills across conventional lines of demarc-
ation, determinedly refusing to point any morals, and saying nothing whatsoever
about the War in which Shepard loses his life.
The subject which is at the centre of the poem’s exotic and packed stage is
death; but even this is hedged about with irony and inaccessibility. As MacNeice
approaches this, the voice speeds up further, and the snappy, somewhat clipped
lines confront death’s horizon with both loneliness and perplexity:
How was it then? How is it? You and I
Have often since we were children discussed death
And sniggered at the preacher and wondered how
He can talk so big about mortality
And immortality more. But you yourself could now
Talk big as any—if you had the breath.
However since you cannot from this date
Talk big or little, since you cannot answer
Even what alive you could, but I let slip
The chance to ask you, I can correlate
Only of you what memories dart and trip
Through freckling lights and stop like a forgetful dancer.The movement here, from the enjambed rhyme words of ‘slip’ and ‘trip’ to the
internal half-rhyme of ‘stop’, culminates in a puzzled stopping short; the ‘forgetful
dancer’ transposes Yeats’s dancers, perhaps, into an image of interruption and
uncertainty. There can be no question of MacNeice’s ‘talking big’, even (or espe-
cially) on Shepard’s behalf, and the whole poem, which is gripped and propelled
by the particularity and loving detail of memory, makes an eloquent case for the
realities of life rather than the abstractions of ‘Any ideal, even ideal Death’ (as the
warmongering Troll puts it in ‘Troll’s Courtship’).^47
‘The Casualty’ makes it clear that MacNeice did not approach the losses of the War
in a shallowly journalistic spirit; on the contrary, he saw those losses as presenting
a profound challenge to any writing whichprioritized factual content over larger
questions of meaning. At the same time, ‘meaning’ was not to be quickly or cheaply
achieved, and was certainly distinct from the conclusions of even MacNeice’s own
variety of wartime propaganda. The death of MacNeice’s father in 1942 occasioned
(^47) MacNeice, ‘Troll’s Courtship’, ibid. 219.