louis macneice’s war Were not there waiting in the dark.
Thebulletins and the gladiators beset me
Casting a blight on the Irish day.
And you beyond the clamour of Manhattan
Are terribly far away.^11‘The new horror that is the old redoubled’ contains a deliberate blankness, part
of its sense of determinism about the oppressive force of the ‘old’. While ‘the old
rhythms’—of life and love, as well as poetry—seem no longer capable of being
made to work, the old ‘horror’, about to return ‘redoubled’, is something that has
been waiting to come back. Whereas Eleanor is ‘terribly far away’, the ‘horror’
‘waiting in the dark’ has been there all along. MacNeice’s metaphor, when he says
that ‘The bulletins and gladiators’ are ‘Casting a blight on the Irish day’, risks—and
probably falls foul of—insensitivity, conflating as it does the depression of a young
man in autumn 1939 with a word, ‘blight’, of mortal significance for the Ireland
of a century before. However, MacNeice is concerned with a ‘horror’ close to a
different home, for the returning nightmare here is the ‘blight’ of the Great War,
ready again to infest a generation.
The sense of unreality and strangeness in Ireland is the same as that which
MacNeice had recorded the previous year, inAutumn Journal,where
posters flapping on the railings tell the fluttered
World that Hitler speaks, that Hitler speaks
And we cannot take it in and we go to our daily
Jobs to the dull refrain of the caption ‘War’
Buzzing around us as from hidden insects
And we think ‘This must be wrong, it has happened before,
Just like this before, we must be dreaming...’^12The dazed thought that ‘we must be dreaming’ is present also in ‘The Closing
Album’, but now there is to be no reprieve from the return of nightmare, such as
that represented by the Munich agreement inAutumn Journal. It is Eleanor Clark’s
America which is ‘A dream that has come untrue’ for the poet, since ‘now, my love,
there is more than the Atlantic|Dividing me from you’.^13 Ireland, for its part, is
stuck in a dream-world, part shabby and part glamorous, as in Galway, with ‘The
hollow grey houses,|The rubbish and sewage,|The grass-grown pier’, but also with
‘a hundred swans|Dreaming on the harbour’. Driving with Stahl back to Dublin
from the West, MacNeice crossed the River Shannon; his version of this inThe
Strings Are Falsemakes the journey one between dreaming and waking states:
Ernst wanted to catch a boat that night but we thought we had time to visit Clonmacnois
which lies on the east side of the Shannon. The Shannon in Ireland is a division between two
worlds. Once you have crossed it to the east you have left behind the world of second sight,
(^11) MacNeice, ‘The Coming of War’, ibid. 683. (^12) MacNeice,Autumn Journal, ibid. 109.
(^13) MacNeice, ‘The Closing Album’, ibid. 683.