MacNeice

Emma Olson 

After writing through the post-war disillusionment of the 1950’s, Louis MacNeice developed an estranged, ambiguous voice in his last two books of poetry. Alan Gillis describes MacNeice’s later works as “dreamlike” and “parabolic”, focusing on the last poem of Solstices, ‘All Over Again’: “In many of MacNeice's last poems, the future recedes and the present breaks down into a mortuary of empty signs and the labyrinthine phantoms of the past. 'All Over Again' seems to be subtly, structurally infected by this imprisonment within an endless process of recycling” (Gillis 119). ‘All over again’ leads into the first poem of his next book, The Burning Perch. The first few poems of the collection, ‘Soap Suds’ and ‘Déjà Vu’, mirror the tragic sense of recycling and inescapable past. As Gillis points out in ‘All over Again’, MacNeice loses a sense of coherent rhythm by enjambment and muddled diction, comprising a continuous loop that equates one sentence. Similarly, Déjà vu is one long sentence, attaining its recycling quality by its enjambment and refrain- “It does not come round in hundreds of thousands of years” and its thrice repetition of “it does not come round” producing the same looping quality as ‘All over again’. MacNeice’s circular, perplexing style transfers from one collection to the next, as the past overlaps into the present and the self is caught in an alienated prism. The substance of the poem consists of mundane moments, following “the same bean of coffee” and “selfsame pencil” that comprise the present’s “mortuary of empty signs”. The succession of ordinary moments appears to entrap the reader in a mindless daze, a prism of time that is as predictable and monotonous as the sound of a train on tracks, hence repeating itself without recognition. While the beginning of the poem is in second person, suggesting that “you” will be entrapped in “this imprisonment”, the poem progresses into the perspective of the narrator. MacNeice takes away the poem’s autonomy by injecting himself into the last line, completing the poem with the refrain. By this, he exhibits his control in producing the effect of ‘Déjà Vu’, induced by the endless recycling and repetition of the words themselves. These “self-same” moments are then a product of an intellect, suggesting that there is an escape to the “double vision” MacNeice references. In using future tense, he suggests the past interjecting into the future, a prism of time that is static yet flows within. The over-flowing of past into present, present into future produces the spiraling effect MacNeice references himself: “So this double vision must pass and past and future unite”. The end of many poems in The Burning Perch are ambiguous and possess a quality of extension further into the past and the future at opposite ends, interconnecting the two. This interconnection is also seen in the careful flow in the sequence of poems- ‘Déjà vu’ ends in “it does not come round” while the following poem begins “Round the Corner was always the sea”. MacNeice transfers from future tense in the end of ‘Déjà vu’ to past tense in the beginning in “Round the Corner’ and then shifts to present tense in the end of the poem, with the same continuous refrain that adds to the circular thought pattern of the poem. The spiral-like quality of his poetry is evident in this subtle repetition and transition of tenses, offering a type of continuum throughout the collection. MacNeice traps his reader inside this prison of “an endless process of recycling” through the linkage of refrain, repetition, and transition between tenses. Yet, by interjecting a first person narrative he exerts his control over the act of writing itself, possibly suggesting an escape to this self-fortified prison.