Summer Rain & Uncertainty: What Light can Louis MacNeice’s Poetry Shed on our Cultural Moment?

In the summer of 1939, Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice found himself in London, on his way from a lectureship at Cornell University in New York to Galway in Ireland, where his son lived. These were, of course, the dread-filled months before the Second World War, and London had begun its panicked preparations for a German invasion: blackout regulations were drafted, gas masks supplied, valuable books and artefacts stowed away in the countryside.

Summer in London that year was unlike any other, not just because war was on the horizon, but also because the city was having some of the strangest weather in its history. After a hot June and a cold July, August saw a storm so vicious that it flooded parts of London and killed seven people who had taken refuge in a corrugated iron shelter in Valentine’s Park, Ilford, when it was struck by lightning.

MacNeice’s ‘London Rain’, written in July, seems to have anticipated that event. It’s a poem about lashing summer rain that ‘sizzle[s] / Upon the gleaming slates’. As MacNeice observes the downpour, it seems to raise other questions in his mind regarding the supposed natural order of things. From the weird weather, he moves on to debate religion and atheism. His stanzas follow a God and (an ironically personified) atheist figure ‘No-God’ who battle it out by means of an inane gambling game.

Either framework, MacNeice glibly suggests, would allow an escape from accountability:

‘Under God we can reckon

On pardon when we fall

But if we are under No-God

Nothing will matter at all,’

MacNeice’s poetry about London is as accomplished as any, combining a kind of perplexed soul-searching with a poetics of the mundane.

A God would pardon MacNeice’s sins, while a No-God would make sin itself meaningless, an argument that seems all the more facetious when MacNeice takes it to its logical extreme: ‘Arson and rape and murder,’ are atrocities that would soon become commonplace and count for nothing.

A sudden change in the weather as ‘the rain gives over’, awakens MacNeice from his delusion. It is up to us, he realises, to find meaning in life’s events, and not surrender blindly to some higher power.

‘The argument was wilful,

The alternatives untrue,

We need no metaphysics

To sanction what we do

Or to muffle us in comfort

From what we did not do.’

The poem ends with uncertainty and with hope. Uncertainty because the question of God remains unresolved. Hope because MacNeice, like many Londoners that summer, is optimistic that meaning will be ‘discover[ed]’ in the impending war. That it is not mere senselessness.

‘London Rain’ is rarely commemorated to the same degree as Blake, Wordsworth or Eliot’s odes to the city. This is largely the story of MacNeice’s legacy. Born in Belfast but educated in English boarding schools, critics argue about how to categorise — and anthologise — his work. And yet, while the Irish and English poetic traditions compete to claim MacNeice as their own, both seem to disavow him in the same breath. In one, he is in Yeats’s shadow. In the other, he is in Auden’s.

But MacNeice’s poetry about London is as accomplished as any, combining a kind of perplexed soul-searching with a poetics of the mundane. It is, as Philip Larkin wrote in his obituary, ‘the poetry of our everyday life, of shop-windows, traffic policemen, ice-cream soda, lawn-mowers, and an uneasy awareness of what the newsboys were shouting.’

MacNeice’s work is also, like Eliot’s, influenced by his time as a fire watcher during the Blitz, watching over London for signs of flames born of incendiary bombs. This experience famously spawned ‘Brother Fire’, a poem about the bombing of the City of London, which expresses a perverse fascination — delight, even — in the ruinous effect of the Blitz on London’s financial district and on the corrupt institutions it represented.

The summer of 1942 found London to be a bomb-crippled shell of its former self, and MacNeice is palpably concerned with quantifying the value gained against the sacrifices made…

The fire watcher’s aerial perspective of London informed another poem too, ‘The Springboard’, which imagines a diver ‘perched on a board’ above London, debating whether or not to take the suicidal plunge. It was written in June 1942 and is, like ‘London Rain’, about indecision. Will the diver choose to jump to his death or not? Would it mean anything if he did?

The war was supposed to have eased the anxiety of the late 1930s, but now, three summers later, MacNeice finds himself still plagued by the same uncertainty, like a diver ‘spreadeagled above the town’. Here, though, the vague existential fretfulness of July 1939 has turned into something darker, more urgent. The summer of 1942 found London to be a bomb-crippled shell of its former self, and MacNeice is palpably concerned with quantifying the value gained against the sacrifices made, as the diver’s ‘blood began to haggle over the price / History would pay if he were to throw himself down.’

The poem ends with a prediction — that the diver will take the fatal jump:

‘There above London where the gargoyles grin

He will dive like a bomber past the broken steeple,

One man wiping out his own original sin

And, like ten million others, dying for the people.’

The diver will sacrifice himself not to ‘mend the world’, but for some vague notion of ‘the people’, which could be a symbol for wartime Nationalism. Or maybe he won’t jump at all. Maybe he will decide that none of this is, in fact, worth it.

Both these poems are concerned with articulating and honouring the state of uncertainty in which London found itself during the war — a profound sense of bewilderment that was born in the summer of 1939 and, despite three years of bloodshed, had only ripened into a sadder, darker version of itself by the summer of 1942. Today, we have grown used to the noise of opinions on all sides, but perhaps what MacNeice’s poetry teaches us is that voicing our doubts may be the more honest option.