peter mcdonald
In ‘Plant and Phantom’, for example, written in September 1940, the War can be
feltbehind the poet’s abstractions in the long series of definitions of man:
Whose life is a bluff, professing
To follow the laws of Nature,
In fact a revolt, a mad
Conspiracy and usurpation,
Smuggling over the frontier
Of fact a sense of value,
Metabolism of death,
Re-orchestration of world.^20‘Metabolism of death’ has the packed feeling of a riddle, in common with the rest
of this (rather too mysterious) poem, but it conveys in part MacNeice’s sense of
his own life as something either preparing for or in league with its own death, and
the deaths of many others, in the near future. The ‘mad|Conspiracy’ of being alive
catches something of the ‘bout of irrationality’^21 which MacNeice saw his American
life (and love-life) as representing: it is a conspiracy against most of the logical
conclusions—about himself, the War, and his future actions—which MacNeice
felt himself able to draw. ‘Entirely’, written in March, figures life as ‘a mad weir
of tigerish waters|A prism of delight and pain’, and its central stanza makes the
spring into a (possiblyWaste Land-inflected) foresuffering of conflict, even in the
presence of love:
If we could find our happiness entirely
In somebody else’s arms
We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s
Yammering fire alarms
But, as it is, the spears each year go through
Our flesh and almost hourly
Bell or siren banishes the blue
Eyes of Love entirely.^22There is a conscious echo here of MacNeice’s earlier love poem, ‘The Sunlight
in the Garden’ (fromThe Earth Compels, 1938), in which love could defy ‘the
church bells|And every evil iron|Siren and what it tells’.^23 Now, ‘the blue|Eyes
(^20) MacNeice, ‘Plant and Phantom’, ibid. 170.
(^21) MacNeice to E. R. Dodds, 5 Feb. 1940, Bodleian Library, MS Dodds fols. 65r–66v:‘Don’task
me what’s going to happen next because I don’t know. I think maybe it’s about time I had a bout of
irrationality. I feel I’ve been fitting myself into patterns for so long & (though you may be sceptical
about ‘romance’?) it is so exciting to find oneselftimelessly happy; also I am going to write (at least
Ihopeso)quitenewkindsofpoems.Afterwhich,nodoubt,thedelugebutIcan’tthinkaboutthat
now.’
(^22) MacNeice, ‘Entirely’, inCollected Poems, 171.
(^23) MacNeice, ‘The Sunlight in the Garden’, ibid. 58.