edna longley
To go there at all was to create the artificial landscape appropriate to eclogue.
Yetdistance from mainland Europe lands Iceland metaphorical conviction as
‘perspective’, while its status as an island lands it conviction as contemplative
retreat. If most of the generically hybridLettersis ‘pastoral’ only in this broader
sense, Icelandic terrain is always on the horizon—a terrain part familiar as well as
foreign. For Auden, Iceland both activated and modified a deep-laid myth. InThe
Idea of NorthPeter Davidson terms Auden’s North ‘a complex structure made up of
obsessions with mining and geology, Icelandic sagas, Old English poetry, personal
experience of the north of England’.^66 MacNeice plays on the double euphony of
Iceland/island with ‘Ireland’, and can situate Iceland in imaginative proximity to
western Ireland, to Yeats’s western pastoral and his own.
Lettersrelativizes constructions of ‘Iceland’. Auden’s ‘Journey to Iceland’ reviews
the different maps and ‘hopes’ of the traveller, lover of islands, and so on.
Also an exorcism of his own Romantic templates, the poem recognizes that ‘the
fabulous|Country’ is ‘impartially far’.^67 Its ultimate Nordic image is ‘a blinding
snowstorm’ as ‘some writer|Runs howling to his art’. Thus Auden does not transfer
to Iceland the parabolic war games of his ‘northern’juvenilia,buttakesitasit
comes—or, as in his seemingly casual address to Byron, advances an aesthetic of
taking it as it comes. The poets set their own representations among other ‘Sheaves
from Sagaland’, often absurd. There are politics behind the book’s relativism.
Auden says in his first ‘Letter’ to Erica Mann: ‘The Nazis have a theory that Iceland
is the cradle of the Germanic culture. Well, if they want a community like that of
the sagas they are welcome to it. I love the sagas, but what a rotten society they
describe, a society with only the gangster virtues.’^68 But Icelanders may disappoint
Nazi tourists in search of Aryan purity, since they have effectively swapped epic
for pastoral. Addressing Christopher Isherwood, Auden says: ‘[The Icelander] is
unromantic and unidealistic...I can’t picture him in a uniform...[He] is seldom
irresponsible, because irresponsibility in a farmer or fisherman would mean ruin.’
Icelanders lack ‘fanatical patriotism’ and ‘hysterical nationalism’.^69 As generically
reflexive eclogue, the poets’ ‘travel book...thrown together in gaiety’^70 inscribes
Icelandic landscape with fissures between an epic past and a pastoral present. Yet
they do not fence off ‘georgic’ Iceland from dark politics. Auden says of whale
butchering: ‘It gave one an extraordinary vision of the cold controlled ferocity of
the human species.’^71
‘Eclogue from Iceland’^72 belongs to a series of poems in which MacNeice adapts
classical eclogue to commentary on 1930s Britain and Ireland. ‘Eclogue’ depicts the
(^66) Peter Davidson,TheIdeaofNorth(London: Reaktion Books, 2005), 85.
(^67) Auden, ‘Journey to Iceland’, inLetters from Iceland, 27.
(^68) Auden, ‘W. H. A. to E. M. A.—No. 1’, ibid. 119.
(^69) Auden, ‘Journey to Iceland’, 29–30.
(^70) MacNeice,The Strings Are False: An Unfinished Autobiography(London: Faber, 1965), 164.
(^71) Auden, ‘W. H. A. to ‘E. M. A.—No. 2’, inLetters from Iceland, 148.
(^72) MacNeice, ‘Eclogue from Iceland’, 124–135.