Poem Of The Week : Thalassa By Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

Supposedly Louis MacNeice’s final poem, there is a valedictory quality to ‘Thalassa’. Lacking the interpretative complexity of much of the poet’s earlier work, the poem bears an unmistakable tonal kinship with Tennyson’s ‘Ulysses’: forthright, shot through with a sense of human weakness, MacNeice’s narrator encourages defiance in the ‘broken comrades’, for whom the journey will become an existential imperative.

Ploughing a determined furrow towards the unknown, the poet’s formal, rhyming sestets provide a robust structure for an odyssey. The narrator’s Lear-like invoking of burgeoning surges and ‘adverse forces’ is a brazen tempting of fate in a sea that hoves into view, like one more force to be overcome, in the concluding stanza.

The frailties that MacNeice describes in the second verse are manifold, emblematic of a wider acceptance of what it means to be human; calling the ‘impure’, the ‘ignoble’ and the ‘fickle’ to arms, the poet finds negative metaphorical vigour in virtue’s obverse – the ‘ruined church’ and ‘poison’ of experience are restored to nobility in the embattled struggle.

Freedom is conferred in the effort of will expended: the pristine image of the narwhal and the alabaster wave tops as the boat shears the water, is a beautiful conflation which underwrites in eloquent marbling, an equation between endurance, liberty and idealism.

‘Thalassa’ is taken from The New Oxford Book of English Verse, 1250-1950 and is published by the Oxford University Press (1972)