Six Poets (19 page)

One feels quite safe saying these things about MacNeice, knowing full well that this ironic, melancholic and disdainful man would have been the first they would have occurred to. He was a man riven by doubt and duality and made a virtue out of it, and his poems are full of debate. The others might make fools of themselves over Communism or boys or religion or tinpot psychology, but he didn't make a fool of himself. He wasn't single-minded enough … but perhaps not to be single-minded, that was to be the real fool. E. M. Forster said of himself that he had been nibbled away by kindness, lust and fun – they had diminished him. And in this respect, the common sense that makes him so sympathetic diminished MacNeice. Perhaps he recognised this:

A watched clock never moves, they said:

Leave it alone and you'll grow up.

Nor will the sulking holiday train

Start sooner if you stamp your feet.

He left the clock to go its way;

The whistle blew, the train went gay.

Do not press me so, she said;

Leave me alone and I will write

But not just yet, I am sure you know

The problem. Do not count the days.

He left the calendar alone;

The postman knocked, no letter came.

O never force the pace, they said;

Leave it alone, you have lots of time,

Your kind of work is none the worse

For slow maturing. Do not rush.

He took their tip, he took his time,

And found his time and talent gone.

Oh you have had your chance, It said;

Left it alone and it was one.

Who said a watched clock never moves?

Look at it now. Your chance was I.

He turned and saw the accusing clock

Race like a torrent round a rock.

Leaving it like that, it's a sad story, but it has a happy ending. MacNeice has now been dead long enough to be ripe for re-discovery. I'm not sure that's quite a happy ending, involving as it does articles in the Sunday supplements beginning ‘Shares in MacNeice are rising …': something Larkin was perhaps predicting as early as 1963 when he wrote of MacNeice's ‘poetry of everyday life, of shop windows, traffic policemen, ice cream sodas, lawn mowers and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboys were shouting'.

‘And then,' one feels Larkin is thinking, ‘then comes
me
!'

There is, though, appreciation much closer to home – that is, MacNeice's home. Some of the liveliest and most accomplished poetry being written today comes from Northern Ireland. The English may think of MacNeice as an Auden sidekick, and in Dublin he's still an outsider, but with the younger poets of Northern Ireland – Derek Mahon and Paul Muldoon – MacNeice comes into his own; they have picked up frequencies in his work inaudible in Dublin and London but not in Belfast. Never a poet of Northern Ireland (‘
Come back early or never come
'), MacNeice has nevertheless bequeathed to its poets in their shameful time a perspective and a detachment, a concern for the private in the confusion of the public that he learned in another shameful time.

I almost end with a poem that might be thought to be about ecology, though I think it's about the imagination.

When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards

And reading and even speaking have been replaced

By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you

Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste

They held for us for whom they were framed in words,

And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,

Or will your birds be always wingless birds?

But finally a lovely, touching poem, one of the best MacNeice ever wrote and which deserves a place in every anthology of twentieth-century poetry.

I see from the paper that Florrie Forde is dead –

Collapsed after singing to wounded soldiers,

At the age of sixty-five. The American notice

Says no doubt all that need be said

About this one-time chorus girl; whose rôle

For more than forty stifling years was giving

Sexual, sentimental, or comic entertainment,

A gaudy posy for the popular soul.

Plush and cigars: she waddled into the lights,

Old and huge and painted, in velvet and tiara,

Her voice gone but around her head an aura

Of all her vanilla-sweet forgotten vaudeville nights.

With an elephantine shimmy and a sugared wink

She threw a trellis of Dorothy Perkins roses

Around an audience come from slum and suburb

And weary of the tea-leaves in the sink;

Who found her songs a rainbow leading west

To the home they never had, to the chocolate Sunday

Of boy and girl, to cowslip time, to the never-

Ending weekend Islands of the Blest.

In the Isle of Man before the war before

The present one she made a ragtime favourite

Of ‘Tipperary', which became the swan-song

Of troop-ships on a darkened shore;

And during Munich sang her ancient quiz

Of
Where's Bill Bailey?
and the chorus answered,

Muddling through and glad to have no answer:

Where's Bill Bailey? How do
we
know where he is!

Now on a late and bandaged April day

In a military hospital Miss Florrie

Forde has made her positively last appearance

And taken her bow and gone correctly away.

Correctly. For she stood

For an older England, for children toddling

Hand in hand while the day was bright. Let the wren and robin

Gently with leaves cover the Babes in the Wood.

1922–1985

Philip Larkin was born in Coventry. He was educated at King Henry VIII School, Coventry, and St John's College, Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Kingsley Amis. 1945 saw the publication of his first book of poetry,
North Ship
, followed by two novels,
Jill
(1946) and
A Girl in Winter
(1947). Subsequent collections include
The Less Deceived
(1955),
The Whitsun Weddings
(1964) and
High Windows
(1974). He wrote two books of journalism,
All What Jazz: A Record Library
and
Required Writing: Miscellaneous Prose
, and edited the
Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse
. For twelve years he worked in campus libraries before taking charge of the Hull University library from 1955 until his death. He was the recipient of innumerable honours, including the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. One critic said that Larkin was ‘a laureate too obvious to need official recognition'. He died in 1985.