louis macneice’s war ‘we’ and ‘he’ prove to be interdependent: the poetry spells out an intricate series of
consequentialknowledges—self-knowledge and the knowledge of what is needed,
as well as the knowledge of action. The religious imagery does not serve any
necessarily religious meaning; rather, it becomes a powerful element of the poem’s
logic—a metaphor, perhaps, for what happens when a man understands that his
actions, as well as his identity, are themselves metaphorically charged with meaning.
The same lesson might be implied, on a national scale, in ‘Neutrality’. But, like the
hero of MacNeice’sThe Dark Tower, the figure on the springboard must will his
own extinction in order to prove the reality of a free will.^54
The story of MacNeice’s war is in part that of the relationship, both uneasy and
deeply creative, between the artist’s personal circumstances and the larger world
in which these had their being. That world was a World War; but it was also a
world of ideas and beliefs, and of ethical, moral, and religious problems, in the
midst of which an actual life conducted itself, with degrees of both muddle and
coherence. Having been careful in dating all the poems inPlant and Phantom,
MacNeice was much more sparing in affixing dates to those ofSpringboard.There
are two exceptions: one is the air raid poem ‘Whit Monday’ (dated 1941), and the
other is the last poem in the book, ‘Postscript’, with its closing assertion of the
need for ‘a new|Shuffle of cards behind the brain|Where meaning shall remarry
colour’.^55 MacNeice’s new wartime marriage (to Hedli Anderson) is partly behind
the buoyancy and hope of the poem; but personal happiness is not the whole story,
as MacNeice’s appended date for the poem perhaps implies: for the last words in
Springboardare ‘June, 1944’.
(^54) See MacNeice,The Dark Tower(broadcast 1946, composed 1945): ‘I Roland, the black sheep,
the unbeliever—|Who never did anything of his own free will—|Will do this now to bequeath free
will to others’ (inSelected Plays of Louis MacNeice, ed. Alan Heuser and Peter McDonald (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993), 148).
(^55) MacNeice, ‘Postscript’, inCollected Poems, 250.