peter mcdonald
by the trolls—something above and beyond, or even below and aside from the
Luftwaffe—which makes its comically inadequate challenge to this sense of worth.
Death, now in the current events of London, is providing exactly the sharpening of
perception and crystallization of human value which an isolated and unhappy poet
had imagined it bringing in his poems of the year before. When the troll speaks, in
‘Troll’s Courtship’, it cannot begin to understand the death it might bring:
Because I cannot accurately conceive
Any ideal, even ideal Death,
My curses and my boasts are merely a waste of breath,
My lusts and lonelinesses grunt and heave
And blunder round among the ruins that I leave.^35The epigraph which MacNeice gave to the first section ofSpringboard—George
Herbert’s line, ‘Even poisons praise thee’^36 —helps explain the place the trolls
occupy in the poet’s parables of the London Blitz. At the same time, it provides
another kind of puzzle:whom, exactly, are these poisons praising? One answer
seems to be ‘ideal Death’, presented often in the light of religious address—and
nowhere more so than in the poem ‘Prayer in Mid-Passage’, and its invocation of
‘Thou my meaning, thou my death.’^37
In a series of prose notes headed ‘Broken Windows or Thinking Aloud’, dating
from 1941–2 and possibly intended to form the basis of an article or broadcast,
MacNeice touched repeatedly on the conjunction of death and meaning in the War
and writing—with the characteristic rider ‘Not that my primary concern at the
moment is writing’:
The War has thrown us back upon life—us & our writing too. But we were less alive than
our art because more negative.... The ‘message’ of a work of art may appear to be defeatist,
negative, nihilist; the work of art itself is alwayspositive. A poem in praise of suicide is an act
of homage to life.^38
MacNeice’s ‘Novelettes’ sequence (begun in Ireland and completed in the USA) had
included poems like ‘Suicide’ and ‘The Expert’, both of which the poet subsequently
abandoned, and neither of which quite justifies the claim of ‘a homage to life’.
The subject of ‘The Expert’ is given to ‘soft-pedalling desire’ (the phrase MacNeice
himself used in his fraught correspondence with Eleanor Clark), and ends up
‘Drunk and alone among the indifferent lights|In stark unending streets of granite
and glass’:
He ducked his head to avoid illusory stalactites
And fell, his brain ringing with the noise of brass(^35) MacNeice, ‘Troll’s Courtship’, ibid. 219–20.
(^36) George Herbert, ‘Providence’, inThe Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1941), 119. (The line is ‘Ev’n poisons praise thee’.) 37
MacNeice, ‘Prayer in Mid-Passage’, inCollected Poems, 234.
(^38) MacNeice, ‘Broken Windows or Thinking Aloud’, inSelected Prose, 138.