I have to admit that I don't normally read poems it they longer that a single page and so this one at over 60 pages was for me an epic - however I was inspired to seek it out after it had been referred to by Theo Hobson in his book Faith and I am pleased that I made the effort as it is a really thought provoking piece.
MacNeice is writing as the world was been sucked, seemly inevitably, into the Second World War, and within the poem you encounter, and journey with the poet through, waves of doubt as an educated and 'cultured' man questions what value that culture, millennia of civilisation, has when it is clearly powerless to arrest the forces of evil that seem to grip the world.
Yet the poem end on a deliberately defiant note, with the choice to go on and go on with hope even when what is hope for seems implausible:
"Sleep, the past, and wake, the future,
And walk out promptly through the open door;
But you, my coward doubts, may go on sleeping,
You need not wake again - not any more."
It is this choice that interested Hobson - the rejection of a purely rational assessment of the world, which is inherent in religious faith, but also would appear to be essential to all human life if it is not to be overcome the negativity of the world around us. Hobson was questioning how it is possible to be a hopeful atheist as it would appear that it is only by a leap of faith that we can hope for an irrationally better future.
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