57
BOOKS
remarked: "Poets are not legislators (what is an 'unacknowledged legis-
lator' anyway?), but they put facts and feelings in italics, which make
peoplethink about them and such thinking may in the end have an out-
comein action." Such an attitude may seem too passive for much con-
temporary taste; and it has not brought into poetry the wide subject
matter of economics and science which Auden's unflagging curiosity has
explored, nor the more mechanically manipulated culverts and pistons
and other modern properties of Day Lewis. In "Turf-Stacks," written in
1932,MacNeice formulated his lack of political position:
For we are obsolete who like the lesser things
Who play in corners with looking-glasses and beads;
It is better we should go quickly, go into Asia
Or any other tunnel where the world recedes,
Or turn blind wantons like the gulls who scream
And rip the edge off any ideal or dream.
Buthe has not embra~ed either of the alternatives offered in that stanza,
though ironically bitter contemplation of his own country has brought
himcloser to the last one. He has never made of poetry an easy vehicle
forevasion, for although he has a warm feeling for landscape, he knows
that he always carries a city-bred mind with him. He has, however, set
himselffairly deliberately to writing descriptive poetry, as when he states
in "Train to Dublin" :
I give you the incidental things which pass
Outwards through space exactly as each was.
He knows that this demands an exacting discipline. Unlike most other
poetswho have been influenced by Eliot he has learned and declared
that "You must walk before you can dance; you can't be a master of
suggestionunless you are a master of description." He has consequently
evolvedthe neat craft of making the inner coherence of a poem depend
onthe subtle and precise interrelationships of a series of things observed.
Butsuccess in this kind requires tight-rope technique, for if any image
assertsitself too vividly, the balance is quickly upset, and the whole effect
fallsinto obtrusive fragments.
Nor is it conceivable that a poet could describe anything exactly as
it waswithout betraying some point of view towards his material. Mac-
Neice'sfrequent fascination with catching the effects of sunlight and
5IIIokesuggests that he has the eyes of a painter, but his interest is never
confinedmerely to recording surface textures. In some passages he may
revealthat
...
there is beauty narcotic and deciduous
inthe very midst of the sinister chaos of a modern city. But though his
subjectmatter is seldom political, he is increasingly aware of the social
implicationsof what he sees. He quoted last fall: "'Other philosophies
havedescribed the world; our business is to change it.' Add that if we
arenot interested in changing it, there is really very little to describe."
Andthe close of "Eclogue from Iceland," 1936, to which he travelled
withAuden, finds him in a much more positive mood than that of the
