Poetect

POEMS -- Louis MacNeice -- Random House ($2.50).

That buildings should look like what they are meant to be is an architectural first principle whose modernistic practice is currently labeled "functionalism." The same label can be applied to the literary practice of certain contemporary poets whose poems, like "functionalist" buildings, are constructed with a marked weather eye on the modern living conditions they are meant to reflect or relieve. As distinct from the Symbolist, Surrealist, Imagist or Metaphysical poets, who seem to borrow from Music, Psychology, Painting and Mathematical Physics their respective poetic first principles, these poets seem to borrow theirs from the demotic art of Architecture. Most dazzling of the lot, yet slyest, is W. H. Auden; sincerest and slickest, Stephen Spender; most headlong, most jerry-built, C. Day Lewis; most prosy and homeliest, Louis MacNeice.

Born an Irishman (1907) and not much liking it--

( can say Ireland is hooey, Ireland is A gallery of fake tapestries, But I cannot deny my past to which my self is wed, The woven figure cannot undo its thread)--

MacNeice went to Oxford (1926-30), is a lyric poet of the English tradition. In his collected Poems (1926-37) he publishes a number of the most engaging, and a few of the excellent poems of the times.

A countrified Celt as well as a citified Englander, Poet MacNeice spends many of his poems in trying to figure how a contemporary European can seriously find any purpose in modern country life, any coherence in modern city life. In the beautiful and economically hopeless rural districts

The peasant shambles on his boots like hooves Without thinking at all or wanting to run in grooves. And the moneyed, sophisticated city man seems in worse shape: I who was Harlequin in the childhood of the century, Posed by Picasso beside an endless opaque sea, Have seen myself sifted and splintered in broken facets, Tentative pencillings, endless liabilities, no assets. . . .

Playing no favorites, Poet MacNeice represents the activities of his molelike rubes and his lizard-like slickers as equally unsatisfactory. He conveys the impression, nevertheless, that Something is watching both like a cat. What that Something is his poems fail to signify--except that it is deadly to human moles and lizards. Bagpipe Music gives a crazy rehearsal of things done in town and country, raises echoes that such things will not do. For townees the echo runs:

It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky, All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi. For yokels: It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible, All we want is a packet of fags* when our hands are idle.

For both: It's no go the picture palace; it's no go the stadium, It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums. It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections, Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension. It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever, But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.

Typical of MacNeice's poetic architectonics are this poem's lame off-rhymes gainsaying its skipping rhythm, its ringing-in of contemporary figureheads, economic policies, modes and means of life. Elsewhere his use of such architectonics sometimes seems awkwardly overt, more often deftly apt. But his very best poem, Snow, transcends the architectural accomplishment of looking like what it is meant to be, approaches the true poetic accomplishment of being what it means.

*Cigarets.

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