BOOKS
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plex hannonies rather than in his simpler short pieces. In "Homage to
Clichees," for instance, he has devised and developed a series of repeated
images to celebrate his delight in the familiar:
the expected response
of his companion is elicited as though by stroking a cat, or is angled
from the stream of their conversation as the fish swim into the net and
the drinks swim over the bar. Here his observations intennesh so intri-
cately that even though you can take surprised delight in a single ex-
ample:
... an old man momentously sharpens a pencil as though
He were not merely licking his fur like a cat,
it becomes the best tribute to the unity which the poet has created that
no adequate illustration is 'possible short of the entire poem. For here his
attitude is less bald than in the somewhat stagey declaration in his "Epi-
logue" that he drinks Auden's health before "the gun-butt raps upon
the door." For, in "Homage to Clichees," the perishable stuff of the
everyday life which he relishes is embodied with such wann resilience
that the undertone of the menacing future which he expects reverb-
erates far more movingly than it would by means of any bare direct
statement.
Where his dependence on oblique and symbolic images can fail him
iswhen they are not reinforced by sufficiently mature experience. This
isthe trouble with the pictures of contemporary man and woman near
the end of the "Eclogue from Iceland." The details by which they are
presented do not bite deeply enough into actuality, they are too private
and trivial. The fact that this can be the case in one of MacNeice's
latest poems will be disturbing to those readers who believe that the
artist must progress and offer with each new year a better-appointed
model.But, despite the clarification and finning of his social attitude,
it cannot be said that MacNeice's graph has gone continually upward.
Heseems to have remained on about the same level from the time that
be
hit his individual stride five years ago, and he may not yet have writ-
tena solider poem than the sardonic conversation between a city-dweller
anda country-dweller, "An Eclogue for Christmas," in 1933. It must also
be
added that in spite of his realization, on the Iceland trip, that further
travel could be productive only of more souvenirs and "copy," 1937
foundhim, not following Grettir's advice, but in the Hebrides, evolving
another detached and sensitive descriptive poem about those islands.
It is undoubtedly true that MacNeice's conversational style is less
~ciaIIyuseful to the needs of our day than the public speech that may
be
developed from Auden's exciting rhetoric. Nor does MacNeice possess
theexuberance and inventiveness which Herbert Read believes Auden
10
have brought back into English poetry for the first time since Brown-
ing'sdeath. On the other hand, MacNeice's richest resource is sug-
sated in a curious remark which he made about Day Lewis, that he is
III
inferior poet to Auden "perhaps because his vision is purer and more
CllIlSistent."He recognizes that Lewis, though doctrinally correct, can
fallinto both priggishness and diffuseness by his humorless preaching
