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“Where and when exactly did we first have sex?” asks Paul Muldoon in his poem History. Was it as long ago as when, “you and I climbed through the bay window,

              And into the room where MacNeice wrote Snow,
              Or into the room they say he wrote Snow.”

History appeared in the 1980 collection, Why Brownlee Left - for readers today Snow may not have the fame that Muldoon assumes. Too often eclipsed by Auden in his own lifetime, MacNeice’s work is still read and discussed far less than that of his friend and collaborator. A couple of articles written about the poem and published in Essays in Criticism, did however appear whilst MacNeice was still very much a figure on the contemporary scene, at a time when the poem was widely known and anthologized. The first was a reading of Snow by R C Cragg in 1953 - an argument for the poem as one of real philosophical gravitas: a deliberate consideration on MacNeice’s part to make lyricism serve as an intellectual examination of the individual and his subjectivity versus the “variousness” of the masses. D J Enright then replied with an article entitled Criticism for Criticism’s Sake, published the following year. Cragg’s stance is used as an example of critics’ typical over-readings of simple, uncomplicated poems, as Enright rails against what he sees as an unnecessarily “elaborate analysis of an amusing little poem by Louis MacNeice.” Both of them apparently have a point.

Whilst the questions that Cragg and Enright ask of the way in which we read (or indeed misread) contemporary poetry have persisted in the fifty years since their own debate, the issues that MacNeice himself addresses seem suddenly in the current fraught political climate to be those of our own time. Perhaps more than ever, Snow rewards a closer look,

      The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was
      Spawning snow and pink roses against it
      Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
      World is suddener than we fancy it.

      World is crazier and more of it than we think,
       Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
      A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
      The drunkenness of things being various. 

      And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world
      Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -
      On the tongue and the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s
                                                                                      hands -
      There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Cragg in his article, suggests that “a poem is an experience, not a thought” and whilst this is certainly true, criticism cannot focus on the experience to the total exclusion of thought. In Snow, or any other unobtrusively weighty poem, thought is absolutely part of the experience of both poet and reader. Outside the interior of roses, and bay-windows, and comfort in which the individual can afford to pause and let his mind drift, events on the world stage seem to lurk in the way that they do in Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts. Auden’s evocation of “suffering” occurring while the world goes on, uncaring and seemingly oblivious, becomes a comment on British inaction towards Spain, American isolationism, and also, given Auden’s own emigration, something of a self-accusation.

Sylvia Plath copied MacNeice’s small poem Aubade, into the inside cover of a journal dating from 1950, the summer before she went off to Smith in the fall,

      Having bitten on life like a sharp apple
      Or, playing it like a fish, been happy, 

      Having felt with fingers that the sky is blue,
      What have we after that to look forward to?

      Not the twilight of the gods but a precise dawn
      of sallow and grey bricks, and newsboys crying war.

Aubade dates from November 1934. The sense of dark foreboding MacNeice was then identifying must have seemed to Plath, with the shadow of the Cold War and its nuclear threat looming, as applicable to her own position as an aspiring artist in the fifties, as it did to MacNeice and his generation in the thirties. Snow was written just one year after Aubade - the Spanish Civil War was about to begin, and Hitler and Mussolini’s ascent seemed unassailable. Certainties were becoming doubtful and anything, in the very worse way, was beginning to seem possible. The speaker seems to remind himself and warn the reader of this when he asserts that the world can be “more spiteful and gay than one supposes”. For all the lyricism of Snow, beneath the surface is MacNeice’s trademark sense of foreboding - his sense not only of inescapable involvement but also of culpability. As he deftly puts it in The sunlight on the garden (1937), “We are dying, Egypt, dying/And not expecting pardon.” In 1935, events on the European stage were beginning to make it more than clear that this was a time of extremes, in which nobody could afford the privilege of subjective “variousness” and subtlety of opinion. A time of international crisis demands that opinions and alliances be black and white: as precise and perfected as the neo-classical Berlin that Hitler and Albert Speer imagined into existence, and the ideal city that Mussolini constructed on the outskirts of Rome. This sort of precision and belief that events can be seen in terms of winners and losers, good and evil, right and wrong, is an impossible ideal that MacNeice knows to be mere fantasy and a dangerous one at that.

MacNeice’s awareness of Irish history is the bloody shadow that falls across the way he deals with the events of the thirties. He seems enabled by the knowledge that the realities of commitment to any political cause, can be in practice as contemptible as the actions of any demonized enemy. This allows him to approach the rise of fascism and onset of war with a knowingness and subtlety that is beyond that of Day-Lewis and Spender, more idealistic and inexperienced members of his generation. In Autumn Journal, in which private betrayals, and sins, “even of omission,” become inextricable from the moral wrong of Britain’s policy of appeasement towards Hitler, MacNeice, like Auden, is urging us, not to “turn away.” He sees even passivity as complicity with a moral wrong. The poet, he asserted in the statement that accompanied Autumn Journal,

    at the moment will tend to be a moralist rather than aesthete…  
    The world no doubt needs propaganda but propaganda (unless
    you use the term, as many do, very loosely indeed) is not the
    poet’s job. He is not the loudspeaker of society, but something
    much more like its still, small voice. At his highest he can be its
    conscience, its critical faculty, its grievous instinct.

Poetry becomes his own way of both bearing witness and taking action. The seamless interweaving of the personal and the public that MacNeice achieved in Autumn Journal, in which love, like political strategy must race “against the clock” and deal with what lies “between the lines,” is anticipated in Snow.

 
One of the most effective strategies at work in Snow is its unobtrusiveness - if, as Cragg argues it is a poem intent on “dressing up a philosophical idea,” then that idea creeps up on the reader, in the same way that it seems to have surprised the speaker. The poem manages to work on several levels, generating the energy that it locates in the window “spawning” snow and roses. We are invited into this room to share in the speaker’s intimate interior dialogue. Snow becomes a poem about poetry, about the act of representing the world, and about the almost tyrannical subjectivity that that endeavour demands. The self-consciousness that we witness stems from a poet who, as Autumn Journal testifies, knows that the artist’s actions and inaction - editing, omission, falsification, even lies, are precisely the same activities that can cause such havoc in society. The artist’s prerogative to see and present the world as he wishes is not so very far away from the emphatically un-sublime ego of any tyrant. The tension gives the poem its equipoise and is an emphatic antidote to anyone who would wish to see MacNeice as a safe poet of aesthetically pleasing interiors, and middle class privilege. Snow is a long way removed from “an amusing little poem.”

If we read Snow as a poem about poetry, about the workings of the imagination, and the way in which a poet can force a series of seemingly unconnected objects to lie together and serve his purposes, then it shows us a writer willing to embrace all that is idiosyncratic, and individual. The oddity of the images MacNeice uses is unremittingly matched by his oddity of language. Metaphorical “drunkenness” means that not only the room, but also expression itself begins to slide and take on its own identity and autonomy,

     Soundlessly collateral and incompatible:
     World is suddener than we fancy it.

     World is crazier and more of it than we think,

These lines have a self-conscious syntactical strangeness. We encounter a linguistic identity determined to express itself in the way that the speaker is determined to force his strange vision, the impossible fusion of snow, roses, pips and flames on to his readers. Objects that in logical terms are emphatically “incompatible”, are determinedly made to be the very opposite within the world that the poem offers us. If we are encountering something of an artistic manifesto, then Snow, in its artistic success, is its fulfillment. We seem to witness a poet put his finger on precisely the way his imagination works and we find ourselves suddenly confronted by a poet who can, and knows he can, make the most seemingly incompatible of subjects fit together. This is the poet who will go on, in Autumn Journal to address the Spanish Civil War and the Munich Crisis by confessing to the small domestic betrayals and treacheries of the end of a love affair.

MacNeice is enabled by the fact that he knows the distance that must be traversed to enable a reader to share one’s own vision. As Snow concludes,

      There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

That “more” is not only all that separates the exterior world and this domestic interior, but also all that separates MacNeice’s subjectivity from our own. The “glass” and “more” is also all that prevents real sensory engagement with the world: all that stops the speaker from feeling those snow flakes on his tongue, on his eyes and on his hands. The paradox is that poetry can of course bypass that seemingly impassable division. Therein lies its power. MacNeice knows that the imagination allows both him and us to feel those flakes in the same way that we feel the bitterness of pips that we have not actually tasted, and the heat of a fire whose flames are nowhere near.

Snow is a great and enduring example of the how poetry is inextricable from the most serious events in society - even as they happen. In irresistibly seductive terms it reminds us of the nature of the “incorrigibly plural” world in which any individual finds himself. MacNeice suggests that like the speaker who finds his interior world and its roses hijacked by the snow fall of the outside world, none of us are as invulnerable to attack or involvement - poetic, romantic or political - as we might care to presume. Dating from another tempestuous period in history, such a stance continues to hold great resonance. The thirties generation’s sense of emergency has never seemed more relevant.