peter mcdonald
re-entered the world of common or commercial sense. The Shannon itself is unlike the rivers
ofthe mountains. Today it was a broad dull silver band, placid in drizzling rain. The tombs
and broken towers of Clonmacnois were grey and placid too. Expecting nothing again.^14
When this material is taken up for the seventh poem in ‘The Closing Album’,
Ireland itself, with the monastic ruins of Clonmacnois as its symbol, is a place
locked into a dreaming state, while the travellers face the reality of a reawakened
horror from the past:
Eastward again, returning to our so-called posts,
We went out of our way to look at Clonmacnois—
A huddle of tombs and ruins of anonymous men
Above the Shannon dreaming in the quiet rain.
You millenarian dead, why should I arraign,
Being a part of it, the stupidity of men
Who cancel the voices of the heart with barbarous noise
And hide the barren facts of death in censored posts?^15The second half of the poem is a mirror of the first, where the distortions of
the present transform the landscape and dream of the first quatrain. The rhyme
scheme’s chiasmus (abcddcba) offers its own kind of ‘second sight’, as the second
stanza partially repeats the rhyme words of the first, but in the light now of that
‘world of common or commercial sense’ on the other side of the Shannon (a river
which begins to feel here like either Lethe or the Styx, though it may in fact be
closer, in the circumstances, to the Rubicon). Thus, ‘Clonmacnois’ is overlaid by
‘barbarous noise’, and ‘anonymous men’ by ‘the stupidity of men’, while ‘the quiet
rain’ gives way to the question ‘why should I arraign’—to which, of course, no
answer will be forthcoming. Unsettlingly, the mention of ‘our so-called posts’ in a
wartime Britain is finally refracted to become the ‘censored posts’ containing ‘the
barren facts of death’—a reference with powerful resonances of the Great War.
Leaving one past behind them, MacNeice and his companion are on their way to a
past that would not leave them behind.
In fact, MacNeice himself made the choice to leave Europe for the USA and
Eleanor Clark. In doing so, he seemed to be joining writers like W. H. Auden and
Christopher Isherwood, who had already made the journey; and like them, he was
subject to a good deal of disapproving comment from those who were carrying
on with the literary life in wartime Britain. Here, of course, biography and literary
history blur into one another, and become difficult to distinguish: MacNeice’s
worries about whether or not the War was his cannot be disentangled from his
hopes, in 1939–40, that Eleanor Clark might be his instead. The biographical fact
that, although Eleanor and Louis were close throughout his stay in the USA in
1940, they did not become lovers, carries a decisive force in MacNeice’s life, and is
(^14) MacNeice,The Strings Are False, 212.
(^15) MacNeice, ‘The Closing Album’, inCollected Poems, 685.