peter mcdonald
Here, the reader (who is not—and certainly notonly—an Irish one) is told twice
to ‘Look into your heart’, and there finds a Yeatsian Sligo and Knocknarea, as well
as the ‘intricacies of gloom and glint’ with ‘ducats of dream and great doubloons of
ceremony’. All of this inward looking reveals, not an actual Ireland, but an Ireland
of the mind, a kind of inveterate Romanticism and wishfulness which insists on the
possibility of distancing itself from ‘archetypal sin’. ‘Neutrality’ declares the wishes
false; but it implicates all concerned, including its author. If there is anger in the
concluding lines, there is also distress, and a measure at least of self-accusation.
‘Neutrality’ acts according to the principle, which MacNeice was forming during
the war, that the individual—whether as a mind or as an imagination—can be
willingly subsumed in both a common purpose and a common peril.Springboard
works best when the poet finds images for this, and is at its weakest when he
attempts to explain or discuss the situation. The over-explicitness which hampers
some poems in the volume was to remain as a dangerous current, by which a
good deal of MacNeice’s writing in the immediately post-war years was dragged
down. But MacNeice’s best poetry—notably that of his last two collections,Solstices
(1961) andThe Burning Perch(1963)—was prefigured by the strongest and most
intensely pressurized poems of the war years. ‘The Springboard’ itself is among
these, and its central figure epitomizes the problems—of conflicting duty and
desire, individuality and common purpose—with which MacNeice’s imagination,
at its most resilient, was able to deal. A man’s form, like that of a diver, ‘High
above London, naked in the night|Perched on a board’,^53 gives to the poem a
quasi-surrealistic immediacy, which is also that of MacNeice’s Blitz writing. At the
same time, metaphysical questions are absorbed almost casually into the poem’s
fabric, while ‘His blood began to haggle over the price|History would pay if he
were to throw himself down.’ The situation combines the implied public scrutiny
in a sense of duty with the private agony of suicidal despair—both things which
MacNeice knew plenty about by 1942. The figure seems paralysed by both his own
‘unbelief’ and a more general scepticism, in the knowledge that ‘His friends would
find in his death neither ransom nor reprieve|But only a grain of faith—for what
it was worth.’ Yet MacNeice ends the poem with the jump itself:
And yet we know he knows what he must do.
There above London where the gargoyles grin
He will dive like a bomber past the broken steeple,
One man wiping out his own original sin
And, like ten million others, dying for the people.In the first of these lines, when the meaning and argument are at a point of
maximum strain, MacNeice has the courage to risk flatness, in a statement of
monosyllabic exactness. The climactic dive into extinction is something in which
(^53) MacNeice, ‘The Springboard’, ibid. 236.