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 peter mcdonald

the only powerful section of ‘The Kingdom’, but here the Christianity is simply
contemplated,and perhaps admired, rather than shared or understood:

All is well with

One who believed and practised and whose life

Presumed the Resurrection. What that means

Hemayhavefeltheknew;thismuchiscertain—

The meaning filled his actions, made him courteous

And lyrical and strong and kind and truthful,

A generous puritan.^48

The impenetrably abstract noun of ‘the Resurrection’ is translated into human
adjectives by MacNeice, whose distance from his father’s beliefs remains marked.
In the context of his wartime writing, however, it is the assertion that ‘The meaning
filled his actions’ which does most work here, aligning Bishop MacNeice with those
other individuals inSpringboardwho translate values of belief or instinct into the
facts of being and action. Thus, it is the poem ‘Prayer before Birth’ which stands at
the head of this death-possessed collection, and its pleas for freedom of thought and
action which—however precariously—set the scene for the various encounters
between belief and obligation which the whole volume contains. The first-person
voice of this poem knows that the death of the self is only one—and perhaps the
least—of the mortal risks of living in time of war:

I am not yet born; forgive me

For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words

when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,

my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,

my life when they murder by means of my

hands, my death when they live me.^49

Even the communal dangers and solidarity of the Home Front cannot disguise
the fact here, that in war the losses taken are only part of the costs incurred; the
other part, which it requires a degree of moral imagination to accept, are the losses
inflicted—as the poem puts it, ‘my life when they murder by means of my|hands’.
MacNeice does not confine this awarenessto any narrowly religious interpretation,
though he does on occasion find that religious imagery is adequate to the purpose,
as at the end of ‘Thyestes’, where ‘such are we...Messmates in the eucharist of
crime|And heirs to two of those three black crosses on the hill’.^50
It would be a mistake to think that there is something distinctively ‘modern’
about the awareness that war involves even the individual who is not in active
service in a degree of (perceived or actual)guilt; and the experience of living in
Britain through the Second World War threw up no moral or ethical dilemmas that
had not occurred in the past. Nevertheless, MacNeice’s darker poetry of the Home

(^48) MacNeice, ‘The Kingdom’, ibid. 247–8.
(^49) MacNeice, ‘Prayer before Birth’, ibid. 213. (^50) MacNeice, ‘Thyestes’, ibid. 233.