war pastorals poets (‘Ryan’ and ‘Craven’) conversing with ‘Grettir Asmundson’, a ghost from
thesagas. Here (as in ‘Prayer’) aesthetic, ethical, and political issues interpenetrate.
MacNeice’s dialectics ask how, on the likely verge of European war, anti-heroic
liberalism might translate into poetry and action. Just as First World War veterans
must ‘cadge for money’, so Ireland since the Rising figures as ‘a nation|Built
upon violence and morose vendettas’. One ‘hero’ of the Rising, the socialist
James Connolly, is ‘Vilified now by the gangs of Catholic Action’. And, where
Yeats deplores ‘an old bellows full of angry wind’, MacNeice terms fascism ‘the
wall|Of shouting flesh’. Grettir serves as a role model because, like Yeats’s model
woman, he lacks extreme gifts: ‘the wisdom of Njal or the beauty of Gunnar’. He
represents himself as saved by misfortune from the temptations of power: ‘I was the
doomed tough, disaster kept me witty’. As an ‘outlaw’, he symbolically negotiates
Iceland’s mixed terrain: ‘Fording the gletcher, ducking the hard hail,|And across
the easy pastures, never stopping|To rest among celandines and bogcotton’. Like
the poem’s artist-heroes, Nijinsky and Chekhov, whose ‘haemorrhages drove him
out of Moscow’, Grettir personifies persistence and resistance against the odds.
‘Eclogue’ ends with MacNeice putting a more abstract version of these qualities
(also anars poeticathat prefiguresAutumn Journal) into Grettir’s mouth: ‘Minute
your gesture but it must be made—|Your hazard, your act of defiance and hymn
of hate.’ This parallels Auden’s attack, in ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, on the inertia that
props up ‘Each dying force of history’.^73 In their ‘Last Will and Testament’, another
ars poetica, the poets ‘pray’ for the power to assume ‘the guilt|Of human action’.^74
Letters from Icelandcan be classified as ‘literature of preparation’. Certain physical
features qualify Iceland to embody 1930s ‘waiting for the end’:^75 to generate
apocalyptic omens of war. Glaciers, geysers, and volcanoes suggest first and last
things. In Auden’s ‘Letter to R. H. S. Crossman’, ‘the Markafljot...|Wasting
thesefields, is no glacial flood|But history, hostile’.^76 MacNeice’s ‘Epilogue’, which
records ‘Down in Europe Seville fell’, remembers ‘Watch[ing] the sulphur basins
boil,/Loops of steam uncoil and coil,/While the valley fades away|To a sketch of
Judgment Day’.^77 On MacNeice’s psycho-cultural map, ‘North’ (the rigours of an
Ulster childhood) is a bleaker compass point than ‘West’ (he conceives his ancestral
Connemara as a lost ‘home’). In ‘Iceland’ geology puts humanity and poetry in its
place: ‘The glacier’s licking|Tongues deride|Our pride of life,|Our flashy songs.’^78
Here last things are more than symbolic, since all will ‘Relapse to rock/Under
the shawl|Of the ice-caps’. Yet the poem’s northern rigour implicitly prepares
the speaker and his poetry for war. Similarly, MacNeice’s ‘Letter to Graham and
(^73) Auden, ‘Letter to Lord Byron’, 58.
(^74) Auden and MacNeice, ‘Auden and MacNeice: Their Last Will and Testament’, ibid. 258.
(^75) William Empson, ‘Just a Smack at Auden’, inThe Complete Poems, ed. John Haffenden (London:
Penguin, 2000), 81–2. 76
77 Auden,‘LettertoR.H.S.Crossman,Esq.’,inLetters from Iceland, 91.
MacNeice, ‘Epilogue’, ibid. 260.^78 MacNeice, ‘Iceland’, ibid. 230.