58
PARTISAN REVIEW
young Irish intellectual who, in "Valediction," had two years previously
turned away from his own country in the manner traditional to "The
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man." For in the "Eclogue" the ghost
of Grettir tells the two summer visitors that they had better go back to
where they had come from, and that in spite of the enormous odds against
their being able to make anything prevail:
Minute your gesture but it must be made-
Your ha<.ard, your act of defiance and hymn of hate,
Hatred of hatred, assertion of human values,
Which is now your only duty ...
Yes, my friends, it is your only duty.
And, it may be added, it is your only chance.
N~twithstanding the dramatic tension here, MacNeice's talent so far
seems fundamentally lyrical. In saying that I bear in mind that he has
already published a translation of the
Agamemnon
and a two-act play of
his own,
Out of the Picture.
But whereas the translation displays a firm
controlled simplicity that recreates much of the original passion, his own
play is the one occasion where MacNeice seems to have collapsed into
being affected by the least valuable elements in Auden, and has pro-
duced a. loosely blurred mixture where it is hard to say whether the
intention is satire or farce, since nothing comes through clear. Moreover,
in his poems, MacNeice's continual subject is Time, conceived wholly in
the lyric mode of dwelling on the moment's evanescence, as when he
advises a Communist that before he proclaims the millenium, he had
better regard the barometer-
This poise is perfect but maintained
For one day only.
Both his mind and imagery are so possessed with this theme that he
finally tries to shake off his preoccupation by affirming that he does not
want always to be stressing either flux or permanence, that he does not
want to be either "a tragic or a philosophic chorus," but to keep his eye
"only on the- nearer future." From the stuff of that "nearer future" he
makes his most balanced and proportioned poems.
In an ode for his son, which owes something to Yeats' "A Prayer
for my Daughter," he would ward off from him the desire for any abso-
lute "which is too greedy and too obvious." MacNeice cannot accept the
"easy bravery" of being "drugged with a slogan," and can hand on to
his son neither decalogue nor formula but only symbols, and those only
so far as he can feel them emerge from close and concrete samples of
experience. Most of all he would pray:
let him not falsify the world
By
taking it to pieces;
The marriage of Cause and Effect, Form and Content,
Let him not part asunder.
The desire for such fusion has found fulfillment in the architectural
structure of many of his longer poems, and it is the chief evidence for
MacNeice's skill as an artist that his clearest successes are in their com-
