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A faint rainbow of oil.
The observation is exact, yet strange in its
context with the strangeness of any mechanistic intrusion upon natural
serenity-which, of course, is the theme of the poem. The oil-spot is a
symbol informed with the whole tragic meaning of the poem, and for
me it is more powerful than the image in the rather conventional closing
lines which lament that things so beautiful as the bombers
Shall fall through nights of winter gales
And plant their germs of pain in the limbs of men.
Mr. Nicholson's technic is defective. He is fond of the four-stress
couplet, but his control of it is insecure: it gets away from him, galloping
off for all the world like the One-hoss Shay, when there is nothing in
his matter to justify the frivolous rhythm. He is too much given to
alliterative assonance: teach
1
marsh, tick
I
rock, lore
I
fear, and
(horribly) bud
I
God. It smacks of laziness. And, finally, he does not
handle the long poem nearly so well as the short lyric. But when one
has made these exceptions, with a farewell salute to the all-encompassing
screes, there still remains an unpretentious, wholesome body of poetry
by a serious man who knows where he is going.
Louis MacNeice's new book is a disappointment, although anyone
who has followed his career for the last ten years must have been in–
creasingly conscious that the high promise of the early poems and the
Agamemnon-the
best translation of Aeschylus that I have ever read–
was not being fulfilled. There was a tension, a controlled warring of
energies, in his first work that has been relaxing steadily ever since, so
that now, in
Springboard,
it beats with a merely facile movement. The
strangeness of accent that signalized the fine 'Eclogue at the Five-Barred
Gate,' to cite only one poem, is domesticated here. It has become a
trademark, a trick. The lilting rhythms, one half of the oxymoron which
was Mr. MacNeice's most personal device, come all too easily:
Long fingers over the gunwale, hair in a hair-net,
Furs in January, cartwheel hats in May,
And after the event the wish to be alone–
Angels, goddesses, bitches, all have edged away :
0
leave me easy, leave me alone.
It has style, it is good; but there is that air of flippant neatness, of must–
we-go-into-all-this-again, that marks the machine-made poem. Which
criticism I should extend to the book as a whole.
If
only, (you think) he were not so damned competent, if he would
not write so much.... May it not be that the mining evil is this very
fluency Lhat suggests the society wit never at a loss for something apt to
say? the kind of poet who could compose a delicious motto for the collar
(collars?) of Cerberus himself? I am not trying to be malicious, but to
account for the fact, which disheartens me, that a poet who can write
