One of my favourite bits of MacNeice:
Upon the decks they take beef tea,
Who are so free, so free, so free,
But down the ladder in the engine-room
(Doom, doom, doom, doom.)
The great cranks rise and fall, repeat,
The great cranks plod with their Assyrian feet
To match the monotonous energy of the sea.
It starts off all fun and frolics, with the jazz band going and the cocktails coming. The rhythm and syncopation are infectiously camp. It’s all brushes and cymbals from the drummer, with the trumpeter warbling away at a solo and flapper girls strutting their stuff. (Yes, I know flappers were from the twenties, not the thirties, but grant me a little poetic licence.)
Then we go below-decks, and the privileged gaiety gives way to the relentless mechanical servitude of the pistons. Which MacNeice evokes brilliantly by taking us into the engine-room of the poem, the iambic niceties stripped away, leaving nothing but the pounding bare-bones beat of ‘doom’.
Obviously, the poem is a metaphor for politics (upper class v steerage) and maybe biology (luscious lips, fluttering lashes v beating heart). But the thing I like most about it is the feeling it gives me that life is somehow a metaphor for the poem.
What about the monotonous energy of the sea. MacNeice actually uses the word energy, the stuff that as far as we know now, can neither be created nor destroyed but is constantly reformed. Sea water and swell is/are probably the best metaphor we have for our present scientific understanding of e=mc2 It carries all before it and with it, while we abstractions are busy thinking we are the figurehead of the ship? I’m only this far through his Collected Poems and already wondering how much he knew about relativity.