war pastorals III Marginal Eclogues
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‘Inter-war pastorals’ are eclogues by definition, reflective and highly reflexive.
Here my texts are Yeats’s ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’ (1919), poems fromLetters
from Iceland(1937) by W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice, and MacNeice’s lyric
sequence ‘The Closing Album’ (1939). None of these poets might spring to mind
as a ‘pastoralist’, especially if admiration forWordsworth is any criterion. Yeats
attacks Wordsworth for subjectively ‘finding his image in every lake and puddle’;^53
MacNeice has stylistic objections to ‘the Wordsworthian exclusive crusade for
homespun’;^54 and Auden’s ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, linchpin ofLetters from Iceland,
defines its own bearings by means of an anti-Wordsworth philippic: ‘I’m also glad to
find I’ve your authority|For finding Wordsworth a most bleak old bore.’^55 Auden’s
political ground for preferring Byron, the ‘good townee’, is the mystificatory use of
nature worship: ‘We can’t, of course, invite a Jew or Red|But birds and nebulae
will do instead.’ But the priority of art over nature, or city over country, is a premiss
of eclogue, whether its parabolic landscapes are Arcadian or dystopian. Yeats owed
Wordsworth more than he pretended;^56 and ‘Letter to Lord Byron’ names Thomas
as Auden’s poetic first love. Further, all three poets are imaginatively attached to
ancestral countrysides in ways that complicate pure eclogue.
As the poets meditate from the sidelines—sometimes on the sidelining of
poetry—1914–18 shapes the prospect of other wars. Yeats can be as in denial of the
war as of Wordsworth, both denials having sources in Irish politics. InThe Great
War in Irish PoetryFran Brearton shows how Anglocentric paradigms, together
with Irish reluctance (until recently) to confront Ireland’s full involvement in the
war, have prevented critics from recognizing that the ‘way in which Yeats negotiates
with the Great War provides a context for and a contrast to his approach to the
Rising and the Civil War: the responses to all three events in his poetry may be
seen as inextricably linked’.^57 A crucial context for ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’,
as for ‘The Second Coming’, is less the First World War itself than the Russian
Revolution. In declaring ‘The ceremony of innocence is drowned’,^58 ‘The Second
Coming’ echoes Burke on the French Revolution. The millennial advent that Yeats
now expects is neither cosmic revelation nor the apotheosis of Irish nationhood, but
the triumph of the ‘Marxian criterion of values as...the spear-head of materialism
(^53) W. B. Yeats, ‘Dr. Todhunter’s Latest Volume of Poems’, inLetters to the New Island: A New
Edition(London: Macmillan, 1989), 89.
(^54) Louis MacNeice,Modern Poetry(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 43.
(^55) W. H. Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, in W. H. Auden and Louis MacNeice,Letters from Iceland
(London: Faber, 1937), 99.
(^56) See my essay ‘Pastoral Theologies’, inPoetry & Posterity, 90–133.
(^57) Fran Brearton,The Great War in Irish Poetry: W. B. Yeats to Michael Longley(Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), 49. 58
Yeats, ‘The Second Coming’, inThe Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent, 1990), 235.