edna longley
Anne Shepard’ represents ‘The obscure but powerful ethics of Going North’ as a
pilgrimageto ‘mortify|Our blowsy intellects’.^79
If MacNeice’s North is purgative, his West is palliative but deceptive. In prob-
lematically bringing him back ‘home’, ‘The Closing Album’ reinstates history.
Initially called ‘The Coming of War’, this poetic memoir of an eve-of-war trip
to Ireland begins with ‘Dublin’, which epitomizes Irish–British history: ‘Nelson
on his pillar,|Watching his world collapse’; ‘The Four Courts burnt’ (an image
from the Irish Civil War).^80 The poem does not ignore power dynamics, but its
valedictory salute questions Irish nationalism too: ‘Fort of the Dane,|Garrison of
the Saxon,|Augustan capital|Of a Gaelic nation....’ Perhaps this also attaches the
‘neutral’ Free State to Europe. MacNeice tells Dublin: ‘You poise the toppling hour.’
It does so by ‘Appropriating all|The alien brought’ on a site where architecture and
nature symbolically interpenetrate: ‘Grey stone, grey water’. The poem works as a
snapshot, freezing history and war. It also sets up oppositions that will run through
the sequence: MacNeice’s Irish and English affiliations, city and country, peace
and war, forgetting (Dublin ‘days are soft|...enough to forget|The lesson better
learnt’) and remembering, MacNeice and Yeats. In ‘Dublin’ images of violence
(‘The bullet on the wet|Streets’) part-echo, part-demystify ‘Easter, 1916’. Then,
in ‘Sligo and Mayo’ and ‘Galway’, MacNeice follows Yeats by inscribing western
Ireland with World War. But, unlike Yeats, he does not disguise the fact:
The night was gay
With the moon’s music
But Mars was angry
On the hills of Clare
And September dawned
Upon willows and ruins:
The war came down on us here.Ireland, like Iceland, is time and space out. MacNeice’s ‘album’ stores memory
with pre-war images. But, because the end is really nigh, the west becomes wilder
and moreunheimlich; pastoral images mutate into war images: turfstacks ‘Like the
tombs of nameless kings’. Meanwhile, eclogue mutates into interrupted georgic.
In the last, ‘nameless’, open-ended poem, the speaker’s prospective involvement
in war pervades his mental landscape. Water now represents history on the move.
As war encroaches on the architecture of civilization, doom lapping like Yeats’s
storm howling, it encroaches on poetry. The sequence is revealed to be a love poem,
cancelled by war: ‘And why, now it has happened,|And doom all night is lapping
at the door,|Should I remember that I ever met you—|Once in another world?’
‘Another world’ recalls Thomas in 1916.
(^79) MacNeice, ‘Letter to Graham and Anne Shepard’, ibid. 32.
(^80) MacNeice, ‘The Closing Album’, inCollected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London: Faber,
2007), 178–82.