Our End Is Life

Abstract

ions, ‘Ideal’ and ‘Real’, might dwarf the uncapitalised ‘lost’ or ‘good’ whose littleness still must stand up from the lines of this tentative manifesto. Goodness, for these two former teachers, is as much being good in class (‘the good who know’) as goodness in action. In a way, for the good to act, they must become the lost: ‘the guilt j Of human action’. And in a pre-echo, as it were, of Muldoon, ‘what can and must be built’, no matter how imperfect, is rendered in that exquisite final diminuendo of the modest, yet sacramental, claims of art, to ‘act, forgive and bless’. McDonald breaks his own rule at the end of this edition, including a poem not published by the poet in his lifetime. Dodds had published ‘Thalassa’ at the end of the penultimate section of his Collected Poems, just before a closing selection of translations, with the appended comment ‘From a recent manuscript: ?1963’. McDonald suggests that it is probably not MacNeice’s final poem, and may in fact be twenty years older. But having chosen not to include translations, he allows ‘Thalassa’ to conclude the Collected Poems. The decision is wholly justified: as with other supposed ‘last poems’, like Keats’s ‘Bright Star’ or Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’, it suggests not so much conclusion as continuation, a poem ordered for posterity. It certainly shares more than subject-matter with the latter: Put out to sea, ignoble comrades, Whose record shall be noble yet; Butting through scarps of moving marble The narwhal dares us to be free; By a high star our course is set, Our end is life. Put out to sea. Concluding the introduction to his 1988 selection,Michael Longley asked, ‘What other twentieth-century poet writing in English explores with such persistence and brilliance all that being alive can mean?’ Life for MacNeice was an end in itself, and at the end of his life he sought a humane art which would speak beyond that ending to those who might follow him on the voyages to which his poetry returned so frequently. Peter McDonald has given us a MacNeice as entire as we might wish it. The letters will follow soon and, as we readjust the map of twentieth-century British and Irish poetry, this edition will serve as one of its most noble records. doi:10.1093/camqtly/bfn007 4 Louis MacNeice, Selected Poems (London 1988), p. xxiii. THE CAMBRIDGE QUARTERLY 284