war pastorals of sound’. By translating Golden Age fertility into great-souled creativity, Yeats
symbolicallyheals his (and others’) ‘dried up’ mind. If, in terming the tree a
‘laurel’, he invokes Daphne and Apollo, in terming the bird a ‘linnet’ he invokes
Wordsworth. Further, the daughter’s ideally ‘hidden’ life ‘Rooted in one dear
perpetual place’ (a localist touch here) recalls Wordsworth’s ‘Lucy’. Yeats again
unexpectedly summons Romantic English ‘nature’ to his aid when he proposes that:
‘All hatred driven hence,|The soul recovers radical innocence|And learns at last
that it is self-delighting,|Self-appeasing, self-affrighting’. In Coleridge’s ‘Dejection’
Ode: ‘From the soul itself must issue forth|Alight,aglory’.^62 Then Yeats balances
Romantic nature with English Renaissance pastoral, which values cultivated nature:
gardens, architecture (contrast Thomas’s ‘homes’). His last stanza parallels the
climax of Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’, a post civil-war pastoral in which the
hopes of the Fairfax dynasty are pinned upon the beauty, innocence, quiet virtue,
and marriage of the young ‘Maria’: ‘heaven’s centre, Nature’s lap|And paradise’s
only map’.^63 The poem’s accumulated pastoral resources enable Yeats to reaffirm
‘the ceremony of innocence’. And, in fusing pastoral’s poles of art and nature, he
models both a powerful aesthetic and an ideal polity:
And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.Letters from Icelanddirectly and indirectly alludes to the First World War. ‘Letter
to Lord Byron’ reports the death of the ‘swaggering bully’ John Bull, who ‘passed
away at Ypres and Passchendaele’.^64 In ‘Eclogue from Iceland’ MacNeice evokes
‘the hero|With his ribbons and his empty pinned-up sleeve|Cadg[ing] for money’,
and celebrates ‘that dancer|Who danced the war’ (the disturbed Nijinsky).^65 Just
as the Easter Rising and the war curbed—for a time, at least—Yeats’s Nietzschean
enthusiasm for heroes and heroines, so the tendency ofLettersis anti-heroic
and mock-heroic. With regard to ‘Ypres and Passchendaele’, it exudes a 1930s
mix of survivor guilt, inferiority complex, and belated protest. Yet the poets do
not espouse the alternative heroics of ‘Marxian revolution’. Perhaps the literary
chemistrybetweenAudenandMacNeiceworksdifferentlyfromthatbetweenAuden
and Auden’s English poetic hero-worshippers. Perhaps, too, Iceland provided the
conditions for anti-heroic aesthetics and politics.
(^62) Coleridge, ‘Dejection: An Ode’, inSamuel Taylor Coleridge, 114.
(^63) Andrew Marvell, ‘Upon Appleton House’, inTheCompletePoems, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972), 99. 64
Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, 55.^65 MacNeice, ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, ibid. 128 and 131.