118
PARTISAN REVIEW
'The Casualty' and 'Whit Monday' and 'Thyestes' in this collection, and
who has written perhaps a dozen fine pieces elsewhere, is capable of so
much dog. It must be confessed, though, that these specious effects,
hollow as they are, provoke less impatience than such religio-philosophi–
cal exercises as 'Prayer Before Birth' and 'The Kingdom.' These are
Mr. MacNeice in a new vein, and an incongruous vein it is. The
'Prayer' has every appearance of being intended seriously, yet its pseudo–
liturgical diction and the cumulative pomposity of its versification make
it sound like a cruel parody. The same air obtains in 'The Kingdom,'
though for a different reason. This poem celebrates the inoffensive,
unimportant people
quorum est regnum caelorum;
the drawback seems
to be not that the poet is insensitive to the value of these people, for he
clearly is not, but that the mask of cynicism which he has worn so long
cannot in a moment be put off. The result is disturbing. One walks
through 'The Kingdom' like King Agag, delicately, expecting to be
hewn asunder at any moment by the ax of satire. The poet seems to
feel the same uneasiness, and altogether the Kingdom is distinctly not
of this world. Or, when it descends to such lisping as
Everything in that house was mutually possessive:
She was Our Mother, Dad was called Our Dad,
Connie Our Connie and the cat Our Tiger,
of any world that I want to know. It
i~
too early as yet to pronounce the
Wyrd of Wyrds over Louis MacNeice: there is evidence in
Springboard
that he is still poetically alive. But the ghosts are gathering around him,
and disconcertingly they are the ghosts of his own poems.
The poetry of Cecil Day Lewis has lost the revolutionary fervor
that blazed in his early work. He is, in a sense, disillusioned. The political
faith that his group held in the early '30s has had to be abandoned, and
the poet who once campaigned with a confidence that bred slogans as
often as poetry can now write
It is the logic of our times,
No subject for immortal verse–
That we who live by honest dreams
Defend the bad against the worse.
Yet this is not the kind of disillusionment that kills. The political atti–
tudes, characterized by sweeping, mechanistic conceits, have been re–
placed by a narrower but deeper preoccupation with the individual.
The problem is no longer social, but moral. This does not imply a retreat
from actuality. Mr. Lewis has never been more aware than he is in these
recent poems of private responsibility for the ordering of the public mess:
Each man died for the sins of the whole world:
For the ant's self-abdication, the fat-stock's patience
Are sweet goodbye to human nations.
