Books: Epicurean’s Bad Time

HOLES IN THE SKY (61 pp.)—Louis MacNeice—Random House ($2.50).

When Irish-born and English-schooled Louis MacNeice first started writing verse in the late 1920s, he joined up with the bad boys, led by W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender, who had set out to purge the English soul of bourgeois stodginess and English poetry of romantic fripperies. The English soul remained pretty much undented, but poetry did get a badly needed injection of vitality and wit from Auden & Co. MacNeice did his part by writing broad barrel-organ lyrics:

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.

By the end of the ’30s, MacNeice dropped such high jinks and concentrated on introspective poems about personal life. His characteristic poetry was now modest, quiet and friendly; he contented himself with small observations and neat lyrics.

His latest book, Holes in the Sky, continues along the same pleasantly minor way. MacNeice’s poems are bedded in the conviction that western man is living in a bad time and that he must make the most of each immediate moment. With this moderate epicureanism, he values most the pleasures of physical existence, the “daydream free from doubt” which is art, and an attitude of simple respect for fellow men. On such a tentative basis men can still live in the modern world:

What is truth? says Pilate,

Waits for no answer;

Double your stakes, says the clock

To the ageing dancer;

Double the guard, says Authority.

Treble the bars;

Holes in the sky, says the child

Scanning the stars.

In another lyric he expresses his bedrock feeling toward human beings which goes beyond any theory about them:

And man is a spirit

And symbols are his meat,

So pull not down the steeple In your monied street.

For money chimes feebly,

Matter dare not sing—Man is a spirit,

Let the bells ring.