louis macneice’s war Front looks harder and more searchingly at issues of complicity and guilt than much
ofthe writing of its time (including writing from the theatres of war themselves)
was able to do. AndSpringboarddid seem unnecessarily and perplexingly dark
to a number of its contemporary readers: one American reviewer, for instance,
complained that ‘These are not poems to rally resistance but are poems of shared
guilt.’^51 MacNeice’s initial uncertainties about whether or not the War was to be
‘my war’, and the comparative slowness of his decision to commit himself to work
in Britain as part of the War, perhaps enabled him to feel less certain of the inherent
virtues of the enormous, world-shattering enterprise in which he was committed
to playing a tiny part.Springboard’s most sombre poem, however, is concerned
with levels of guilt and complicity which MacNeice, like his readers since, found
painfully complex in terms of politics, history, and culture. This is ‘Neutrality’, a
short lyric which addresses (on the surface at least) the neutral status in the War of
Eire, ‘The neutral island facing the Atlantic’, and concludes with apparent reproach:
But then look eastward from your heart, there bulks
A continent, close, dark, as archetypal sin,
While to the west off your own shores the mackerel
Are fat—on the flesh of your kin.^52Certainly, there is a level of anger here; just as certainly, there is also a level of
complexity, making a point about matters of complicity in the context of a deeper
awareness of how far complicity might run. ‘Sin’ is paired with the rhyme of ‘kin’,
and MacNeice’s poem does not shy away from the whole issue of what it is to be
‘Messmates in the eucharist of crime’, to be kin—whether deliberately or not, and
whether knowingly or not, with the ‘archetypal sin’ of an evil world.
On a political level, there is much to say about the meaning, intention, and reality
of Irish neutrality: it may well be that (as in fact MacNeice believed) De Valera’s
policy was a near inevitability, given the political and economic conditions of the
time; and the country’s official neutrality should not be confused with any failure
on the part of the Irish people to play a significant role in the Allied war effort,
since many Irishmen fought and died, regardless of the diplomatic realities. To take
account of all this is not to debunk MacNeice’s poem as a piece of crude rhetoric
or propaganda—this would be a risky misreading. Ireland is put alongside ‘The
neutral island in the heart of man’, and both of these places or states are ‘bitterly
soft reminders of the beginnings|That ended before the end began’. The power
of ‘bitterly soft’—two words locked in a contradiction that can only be resolved
by thinking in Irish terms, of the ‘soft’ weather of the West of Ireland, perhaps, in
conjunction with the bitterness of historical and cultural politics of the Island as
a whole—fuels the riddle of beginnings and ends, so that the first stanza creates
a state of paradox and puzzle within which the rest of the poem does its work.
(^51) Coleman Rosenberger,Poetry(Chicago), 68/1 (Apr. 1946), 48.
(^52) MacNeice, ‘Neutrality’, inCollected Poems, 224.