To Posterity
When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards
And reading and even speaking have been replaced
By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
And will your grass be green, your sky blue,
Or will your birds be always wingless birds?
The question that Louis MacNeice was asking in that short poem some six decades ago is a question that now only we can answer, at least more sufficiently than any of its prior readers. Featured as the second poem in his twelfth collection of poems, Visitations, published in 1957, the poem concerns itself with how new technologies disrupt the way of the world. Socrates, recorded in Plato’s Phaedrus, worried writing would weaken memory and lead to a decline in true understanding. Baudelaire warned in an 1859 review that photography, by satisfying the public’s appetite for exactitude, would impoverish the imagination and encroach on the domain of art. The fear that each new medium diminishes what it displaces is as old as media itself. But it was Susan Sontag, in On Photography, who gave that fear its modern formulation: that the proliferation of images does not deepen our experience of reality but substitutes for it, giving us the world pre-digested and at reduced cognitive cost, so that we accumulate photographs of experiences we have not quite had. Now, in the middle of the third decade of the 21st century, that substitution has reached the shore of language. For instance, artificial intelligence generates text, summarizes arguments, composes images, and delivers verdicts, while the feeds and reels and algorithmically curated streams now do for attention what photography did for experience: relieving us of the effort of forming it ourselves.
The critic John Bayley once said, writing about Philip Larkin, that “What is perfect as a poem is what is imperfect in life.” With this poem by MacNeice, Bayley’s maxim feels brilliantly inaccurate, because the poem is not only perfect as an aesthetic artefact but also perfectly descriptive of a rather imperfect world. Indeed, the “other, less difficult, media” MacNeice envisioned has materialized in an array of digital productions — reels, memes, short-form videos, social media feeds, AI-generated images and texts, instant messaging, bite-sized news, and online search summaries — all of which are altering how we perceive and interact with the world. This sudden influx of new, transformative technologies makes MacNeice’s solemn questions about the continuing vibrancy of nature something more than an elegy for the attentive mind: they have become a test, addressed to us specifically, of whether we are still capable of receiving the world in the full and difficult sense that the world has always been received throughout the long history of mankind.
In his 1936 essay “Subject in Modern Poetry,” MacNeice writes that “it is notoriously difficult to write a history of one’s own times,” so he decided to anticipate the anxiety of the future by turning to an image from the immediate past. In the first line of the above cited poem, the deadened condition of books is registered with extraordinary precision, in part by repeating the word itself. “Books” appears twice in that first line, one for the living thing and the other for the lifeless-as-stone. MacNeice collapses the distance between the two in a single syntactic move so that the living book and its monumental twin inhabit the same line the way life and death inhabit the same body. In his 1998 essay on the same poem, Peter McDonald interprets the second “books” as works of “monumental masons”: the stone volumes carved atop Victorian and Edwardian tombs, their pages splayed open for eternity, their text not a text but a gesture toward text — readable in form, unreadable in fact, frozen mid-sentence, if anything is written on them at all, as though thought itself had seized in the act of being expressed. MacNeice does not say that books will become gravestones; he says they will become like the books on gravestones, which is a more unsettling declaration. Left unread to be merely symbolic, they will retain the posture of meaning, as containers of our epistemological history, without the substance that history promised.
The phrasal verb “seized up” is doing quite a crucial work in the line because it carries the mechanical sense of an engine locking, a joint stiffening, a process failing from within. There is a strangeness to the verb in that line, and indeed, to the very idea it is expressing. A machine is defined by its predictable utility and demands as minimal human intervention as possible. Books, in contrast, are valued because they contain knowledge, and humans are rabidly hungry for it — a hunger that, up until the dour condition MacNeice conjures, was considered eternal. In MacNeice’s conjured world, books have been replaced by “other, less difficult media” and so will “seize up” due to neglect.
Consider now the MacNeice of “Snow,” published twenty-two years earlier in 1935 — where and when the “world is crazier and more of it than we think, / Incorrigibly plural” and the speaker reels with “the drunkenness of things being various.” One appreciates the full distance the poet has traveled between these two works. In “Snow,” language tumbles after experience, breathless, plural, sensory, overwhelmed by the gorgeous excess of things. However, in “Posterity,” that tumbling has halted; confronted by the early incursions of a lifestyle made too easy by technology, the poet fears for the worse. He imagines things will become so uniform, despite their technical variety, that even the capacity to frame that world in words — to feel it, to reach it, and to transmit it through language — would have seized up, cold and frozen like the books above Victorian gravestones.
And reading and even speaking have been replaced
By other, less difficult, media…
The calcification that the phrase “seized up” conjures is what the simplifying concept of “other, less difficult, media” accelerates, and MacNeice’s adjective “less difficult” is the poem’s most intense, if quietly devastating, critical judgment. It does not imply “worse,” or “inferior,” or even “shallower” per se. It condemns these innovations as, through a clear implication of banal convenience, “easier,” which is the more precise, the more damning, the more insidious, and the more corrosive charge, because ease is what we want; it is our chief animating desire. Difficulty, however, is necessary for human beings to further develop towards increasingly sophisticated civilization. Difficult, dearly wrought experience, is a necessity for a full human life.
The phrase “other, less difficult, media” also implies a hierarchy of cognitive effort: that reading, and especially speaking in the sense MacNeice means it — the sustained, argumentative, syntactically complex speech of educated discourse as well as the socially charged speech of substantive dialogue — demand something of us that other media are specifically designed to spare us. In the 1950s, the medium most dramatically responsible for sparing us this effort was television, whose mass adoption in British living rooms was accelerated by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, and which one might imagine MacNeice watched, with evident unease, from his house, or his office at BBC, in London.
But the lineage of “less difficult” media runs further back and extends much further forward. Photography, which Baudelaire feared would reduce the world to a flat inventory of surfaces, simplified the labor of visual representation; cinema absorbed the effort of sustained reading into passive spectatorship; radio replaced the discipline of print, as well as the focus that reading demands, with the immediacy of the voice; and television collapsed all of these into a single warm screen that asked nothing in return beyond the capacity to sit still and fix one’s gaze. Each successive medium made the earlier one look demanding. What the internet and, then, the smartphone accomplished was obviate even the patience that television required to sit through its scheduled broadcasts and commercial interruptions. The scroll, the reel, the algorithmically curated feed — these are media engineered against duration, against the kind of attentiveness that a good poem, a well-combed paragraph, or a slapping sentence demands.
Reading, on the other hand, requires the reader to construct meaning across time, to hold the beginning of a sentence in mind while arriving at its end, and to tolerate not-yet-knowing, among other things. So does speaking, in MacNeice’s sense, since genuine speech requires listening, which requires the same temporal discipline, the same willingness to be inside someone else’s syntax, perspective, sense, and sub-text before responding. Beyond moving us further and further away from each other to engage in any meaningful discourse at all, the “less difficult media” strip us of opportunity to develop these capacities, replacing the effort of meaning-making with the gratification of recognition: from the image that needs no decoding, the caption that pre-digests its own content, to the notification that delivers its dopamine without demanding anything in return to have earned the chemical reward. What MacNeice intuited perhaps from the evidence of early television, we have now seen completed in our cultural preference for the easy, frictionless, superficial, uncritical, and enervating.
we wonder if you
Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
The claim of the natural world and the various things it contains being “framed in words” is epistemological before it is aesthetic, and it is the claim that makes the poem something more than a simple cultural elegy. Here, MacNeice is advancing a proposition about the structure of experience: that the world is not perceived and then translated into language, but that language is among the conditions under which the world is perceived at all. That the world is “framed in words” does not simply mean it is described by, or recorded with, words. Rather, it means it is constituted or held in shape by words or language, which provides the coherence without which color and taste dissolve into mere sensation. The flowers and fruit “held” their color and taste for MacNeice’s generation because his generation possessed a verbal architecture adequate to receive them. Without that verbal architecture, without the syntax and the accumulated metaphorical history that a language carries inside it, the question becomes genuinely terrifying: will the grass be green, will the sky be blue, in any sense that reaches a perceiving mind? The question sounds rhetorical but it is not. Wallace Stevens tread the same philosophical territory some decades earlier in many of his poems, in which the argument is pressed with a completeness that MacNeice’s compressed lyric only implies. In the following poems, Stevens offers a fuller articulation of what MacNeice fears will be lost, namely a substantial perception of the world won through language:
“The Search for Sound Free from Motion”
All afternoon the gramaphone
Parl-parled the West-Indian weather.
The zebra leaves, the sea
And it all spoke together.
The many-stanzaed sea, the leaves
And it spoke all together.
But you, you used the word,
Your self its honor.
All afternoon the gramaphoon,
All afternoon the gramaphoon,
The world as word,
Parl-parled the West-Indian hurricane.
“Description Without a Place”
Thus the theory of description matters most.
It is the theory of the word for those
For whom the word is the making of the world,
The buzzing world and lisping firmament.
It is a world of words to the end of it,
In which nothing solid is its solid self.
As, men make themselves their speech: the hard hidalgo
Lives in the mountainous character of his speech;
And in that mountainous mirror Spain acquires
The knowledge of Spain and of the hidalgo’s hat—
A seeming of the Spaniard, a style of life,
The invention of a nation in a phrase,
In a description hollowed out of hollow-bright,
The artificer of subjects still half night.
“Certain Phenomena of Sound”
You were created of your name, the word
Is that of which you were the personage.
There is no life except in the word of it.
“To an Old Philosopher in Rome”
Total grandeur of a total edifice,
Chosen by an inquisitor of structures
For himself. He stops upon this threshold,
As if the design of all his words takes form
And frame from thinking and is realized.
“Variations on a Summer Day”
Words add to the senses.
The words for the dazzle
Of mica, the dithering of grass,
The Arachne integument of dead trees,
Are the eye grown larger, more intense.
In these passages, Stevens insists our experience of the world is not complete unless we can discriminate our disparate experiences through precise descriptions and precise words, which is why his “buzzing world and lisping firmament” are so precisely qualified. A world is not only a world and a firmament is not merely a firmament; each world has its own atmosphere and each firmament its own ambiance. For him, language realizes the world, and perception without words is like sensation without shape. In those passages Stevens is making a philosophical case. However, in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” he returns to this premise a bit differently:
It was her voice that made
The sky acutest at its vanishing.
She measured to the hour its solitude.
She was the single artificer of the world
In which she sang. And when she sang, the sea,
Whatever self it had, became the self
That was her song, for she was the maker.
Then we,
As we beheld her striding there alone,
Knew that there never was a world for her
Except the one she sang and, singing, made.
The singer’s voice makes the sky most itself precisely at the moment it disappears into darkness because her song about the sky arrests it, intensifies it, and gives it a human measure. Stevens’s “single artificer” is the imagination working through language, and the world she makes is not a copy of the real world but its consummation. MacNeice’s natural world that is “framed in words” is the same claim, stripped to its anxious bone: if the sole artificer is gone, if the song stops and the frame that is language dissolves, the sky does not simply go undescribed. It goes, in some fundamental sense, unseen and unrealized. If people are less and less interested in their world and their environment because of their distraction from it, they lose the ability to see and their conception of their world becomes not only shallow but false. The poem asks its later readers to consider whether, in a world of “less difficult media,” in which, for instance, doomscrolling has taken the place of taking a walk after work in the evening, the sky will still be blue, or whether it will have become, as it is gradually becoming in our time, a digital reality: a background, a setting, a screensaver that is present to the eye but absent to the mind.
The strongest image in MacNeice’s poem is the image of the “wingless bird” in the last line: “Or will your birds be always wingless birds?” It’s an image of a diminished or distorted experience of the natural world, conferred by an impoverished culture. Perhaps it’s easier now to see how the short and fast-paced contents across the internet, the great giant farming our attention, have diminished and distorted our experience of the natural world. However, it’s going to be hard work to convince anyone that this sorry state of things, in which distraction is our dominant condition, is mediated by our impoverished culture or that the culture is impoverished in the first place. Though our grass is still green and our sky is still blue as it should, the crux is that we are too preoccupied by the empty relationship we have with our screens, digital appearances, and outside noise to notice the gorgeous and inspiring beauties of the green grasses and blue skies around us. (We are always busy.) Also, we have traded the jolt of natural happiness we feel at being present with nature and each other for the momentary jolt of pleasure, earned through wasting time, of looking at the curated and performative realities brought to us by the wingless, silicon birds on our hands. “Content is the killing of time,” the American critic David Schurman Wallace writes in his review of Baron Wenckheim’s Homecoming by László Krasznahorkai, and that testimony perfectly represents this particular trade-off. Genuine engagement is sacrificed for fleeting digital distractions.
MacNeice posed precisely the question for our age, an age of technologically enforced devolution. His is that rare poem which, if given proper attention, can force one to change — or to save in some essential sense! — one’s life. But to be saved we have to soberly consider the world in which we live.
pinsignia]
To frame the natural world in words is one thing, but to frame the life of a culture, from its events, its arguments, to its shared public reality, is another, and MacNeice’s anxieties in Visitations are double in that regard. The “wingless birds” of “Posterity” is a metaphor for nature that is not framed in language, and so goes unrecognized. But the poem MacNeice placed before it in the collection, the dedication “To Hedli,” gives voice to the reality of public life that suffers the same fate. Written for his second wife Hedli Anderson, it is a six-line poem that reads, in 2026, like a diagnosis just as “Posterity” reads like a prophecy made out of questions:
The days running into each other, but oh the distance between!
The march or rout of events grows blurred in printer’s ink
With all those public fears which bruise our minds;
Yet, whatever stooge and pundit think they think,
You know, as I know, that their catchwords mean
Far less than what in time the timeless vagrant finds.
The word “rout” is doing a double work; it is synonymous with “march” and also means a military defeat — meaning’s disorderly retreat before a sheer mass of events. In 1957, the blurring agent was the printer’s ink. But today it is the feed, the constant notification, the twenty-four-hour doomscroll, capitalistically converting our history, both private and public, into content and mercilessly converting that content into noise that deafens us to the real. “Catchwords” is MacNeice’s word for what we now call talking points, buzzwords, soundbites, or the prefabricated phrases (meme) that travel fast across the world precisely because it asks nothing of the mind that receives it except laughs, likes, and a smidgin of our time. Against all of this, MacNeice sets a single figure in “the timeless vagrant,” someone who moves through experience with an unhurried and genuinely open attention. This vagrant is the reader “Posterity” needs. Can such a person still exist?
MacNeice is not the only one who poses this question. It belongs to the whole tradition in which he writes, and the poets of his generation had already begun asking it before 1957. The “timeless vagrant” has a diametric opposite in the poetry of MacNeice’s generation, and Auden drew his portrait seventeen years before “Posterity” was published. “The Unknown Citizen,” which was published in The New Yorker on December 30, 1939, is a mock-official elegy for a man identified only by his bureau of statistics number, whose life is reconstructed entirely through institutional reports. He had “a victrola, a radio, a car, and a frigidaire.” He “held the proper opinions for the time of year.” “He was popular with his mates and liked a drink.” The poem’s epigraph announces that a marble monument has been erected by the state in his honor, and its final couplet delivers its subtle indictment with the flat certainty of a government communiqué:
Was he free? Was he happy?
The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.
Of course, the questions are not absurd at all. They are the only questions that matter. What Auden exposes through his mock-official voice is a citizen so thoroughly mediated by union reports, social psychology workers, Producers Research, and High-Grade Living that the categories of freedom and happiness have become genuinely inapplicable to him. He is not unfree and not unhappy, but he lacks the interiority that happiness or its perceived lack would require.
This is the figure who worries MacNeice when he asks whether his posterity will find “in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste / They held for us.” The Unknown Citizen does not wonder about the color or taste of the flowers and the fruits. He can’t, because such wonder is the fruit of an inner life and a linguistic frame. It requires the capacity to notice, to name, to compare a present perception against a remembered one. He has the proper opinions; he does not have, in MacNeice’s sense, the words or even the hunger for it, since he’s living a standardised life rather than a life informed by fresh experiences. Auden’s satire is comic in register and MacNeice’s lyric is elegiac in register, but they converge on the same diagnosis that media, in the broadest sense, the organized transmission of approved perception, can produce a citizen who is present to the world without being present in it, without really living in it.
If Auden’s citizen represents the outer limit of MacNeice’s anxiety about posterity, the inner cost of such mediation — what it does to the self as a perceiving and remembering instrument — is the territory MacNeice himself had already begun to explore in his own poetry. This inner cost, particularly its impact on the self’s perceptive faculties, becomes clearest when MacNeice is set against himself. “Snow” is the poem in which he is most completely the poet of sensory surplus. It opens without any preamble into abundance:
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.
Even the syntax here is plenitudinous: paratactic, accumulative, devoid of hierarchy among the things it names. “On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one’s hands” — the senses are listed without subordinating any of them to the others; sensation arrives all at once, through every aperture. The poet is overwhelmed and delighted in the same breath, and the language is barely keeping pace with the reality that exceeds it in every direction.
“Posterity” is the same poet twenty-two years older asking whether the conditions for that delight still hold. “Snow” presupposes a mind capable of receiving the world’s variety, a mind trained through reading and speaking to notice and to name. The former questions the consequences of replacing that training with something easier, something that delivers pre-packaged perceptions in place of raw ones that can only be earned through experience. The answer, encoded in the figure of the “wingless birds,” is that variety becomes sameness. The incorrigibly plural world does not disappear. Rather, it becomes invisible, present to the eye but absent from the mind that cannot frame it or engage with it actively. If “Snow” is a poem of Whitmanian delight, as Mark Ford and Seamus Perry claim, “Posterity” is its photographic negative because the same abundance is now at risk of going dark.
The question of what arrests that darkness — what, if anything, recovers the capacity for variety in a world of diminishing difficulty — is one MacNeice himself only posed. He did not offer an antidote. Other poets have tried, though, like Stephen Spender. “The Pylons,” published in 1933, two years before “Snow” and deep in the same decade that formed MacNeice’s sensibility, is the period document that most directly identifies what the “less difficult” structure does to a landscape. Its first two stanzas register the old world with the precision of an elegy or obituary written before the death has quite occurred:
The secret of these hills was stone, and cottages
Of that stone made,
And crumbling roads
That turned on sudden hidden villages.
Now over these small hills, they have built the concrete
That trails black wire
Pylons, those pillars
Bare like nude giant girls that have no secret.
The phrase “no secret” is important here because it suggests the old landscape had depth, had layers, and had the quality that rewards attentiveness as well as curiosity. However, the pylons strip those qualities away not by destroying the beauty of the old but by replacing it with something less demanding, something “bare.” The valley with its “gilt and evening look” and “green chestnut / Of customary root” is “mocked dry like the parched bed of a brook.” Nature, though still present, is rendered irrelevant.
Granting the pylons the future, the poem is both remarkable and uncomfortable in equal measure. “There runs the quick perspective of the future,” Spender writes, and the pylons “dwarf our emerald country by their trek / So tall with prophecy / Dreaming of cities.” The American scholar Elton Edward Smith observed that Spender “glorifies the pylons and grants to them the future,” and that this is an acknowledgment that the nonhuman structure carries its own social logic: “[it] proves to be of the very highest social value, for rural electrification programs help create a new world of human equality.” MacNeice inherits this ambivalence. The “less difficult” media are not simply villainous because they, too, carry with them their own social promise of access, democratization, and ease. The question MacNeice refuses to ask in his short poem is whether ease is the reapings of progress or a counterfeit of progress. The pylons dream of cities, but the cities they dream of may have no flowers or great architecture left to admire or hold attention because the people might be too fascinated about the coming of the “bare” new that they stop caring about the magnificent old.
MacNeice most directly expressed his doubled concern that the future comes with gifts in one hand and losses in the other in his late collections — Visitations and The Burning Perch — in which the weight of both could be held at once. The late lyrics could hold that weight because MacNeice was not alone in sensing what was coming. He just got to it a bit later. Stanley Burnshaw, an American poet whose work has never received the attention it deserves, arrived at the same diagnosis from a different direction and an earlier vantage point. “End of the Flower-World,” written in 1924 when Burnshaw was just nineteen and working in a steel mill in Pittsburgh, performs a strange and unsettling inversion: it bids us not to fear for the birds, the grass, the trees, for these will persist, will return to earth, and will be, still. What we should mourn is the human race:
Flourish again, mindless of the people,
The strange ones now on a leafless earth
Who seem to have no care for things in blossom.
Fear no more for trees, but mourn instead
The children of these strange, sad men: their hearts
Will hear no music but the song of death.
The “strange ones” are not strange because they are cruel; cruelty, after all, is part of nature. Rather, they are strange because they are indifferent, which is ten-fold worse. The main insight in Burnshaw’s lyric is that “the children of these strange, sad men” are casualties of an inattention so complete that beauty has become so secondary as to become inaudible in their world. The green grass is still around and the blossom still opens. However, the human apparatus for receiving them, Burnshaw prophesies in anticipation of MacNeice’s worry, has gone silent. This image is exactly like MacNeice’s “wingless birds” pushed one generation further down the road, less rhetoricalized. Yet both images have the same terrible implication of doom and decay.
In 1963, the year of MacNeice’s death, Burnshaw returned to this theme in “Historical Song of Then and Now.” Whereas “End of the Flower-World” mourned the estrangement from nature quietly, the later poem expresses its mechanism with a brutal clarity. The human creature that once “made of itself a god / And the veins a level sun” now finds itself lost in consequences it cannot navigate:
Now it stumbles, dwarf in the maze
That the thinking hand had spun.
Blind in its blaze of stone,
Whom can this breed indict
That its sun is a blast of darkness,
That light is always night?
“Light is always night” is the sharpest possible gloss on the MacNeicean anxiety about posterity: a world saturated in images, in information, in media lit from every angle, in which genuine perception has been extinguished by too much light. Abundance has become its own blindness. The catchwords multiply. And “the timeless vagrant,” MacNeice’s ideal man, cannot find a path through them. But what burns against this darkness? The question of what remains, what form imagination takes when its usual conditions have been weakened, is what MacNeice’s poem ultimately asks, and what the best poetry of his posterity has tried to answer.
Imagination persists, some late poems of MacNeice in The Burning Perch suggest, by holding darkness and vitality in the same breath. But the most searching meditation on cultural transmission in all of MacNeice’s posterity belongs to Derek Mahon (often regarded as a stylistic successor to MacNeice), whose most famous poem “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” takes the argument to its most visceral extreme. Mahon’s mushrooms have been waiting in the dark of a disused shed since the civil war, waiting with a patience that, by the poem’s fourth stanza, has morphed into desperation. “A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole”; they have been “so long / Expectant that there is left only the posture.” They are both literal and allegorical: the lost of Treblinka and Pompeii, the unread books, the abandoned traditions, the unreceived transmissions of every generation that trusted the next one to keep listening. The poem ends with their plea:
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’
The “you” is the tourist, the casual visitor, the person who passes through without stopping, without looking, without the kind of sustained attention that the mushrooms’ long patience deserves and demands. This figure, produced at scale by MacNeice’s “less difficult” media, is also Auden’s Unknown Citizen’s cultural descendant: fully equipped, thoroughly comfortable, and fundamentally absent in the world. The mushrooms’ “naive labours” are the accumulated effort of human culture across centuries: its books, its arguments, its slow training in difficulty, its capacity for the kind of attention that notices color and taste in flowers and fruit. Whether those labours have been in vain is precisely the question that “Posterity” throws at us. Mahon, writing a decade after MacNeice’s death, does not answer the question either. He keeps the door open. The question of whether posterity will choose to enter is finally a question about imagination: whether it’s going to persist, find new forms, and whether the frame, once weakened, can be remade.
Indeed, the frame can be remade. Tracy K. Smith’s “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?,” published in her third collection of poems Life on Mars (2011), is one of the clearest contemporary pieces of evidence we have that this subject can be effectively updated for our days. The poem begins in the language of the digital and the celestial, reaching toward something uncanny, mysterious, perhaps even sublime:
After dark, stars glisten like ice, and the distance they span
Hides something elemental. Not God, exactly. More like
Some thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being — a Starman
Or cosmic ace hovering, swaying, aching to make us see.
The Bowie-being is the imagination’s new frame. It is not classical, not linguistic in MacNeice’s sense, and it is assembled from pop culture and cosmology and private longing rather than from the accumulated verbal architecture of literary tradition. Yet it is still reaching toward the sky with the same hunger MacNeice feared might be extinguished in our time. Smith’s poem is one long act of wondering, of not-knowing held open rather than closed by a comfortable answer, and that holding-open is what “the timeless vagrant,” in the dedication poem of Visitations, does: “You know, as I know, that their catchwords mean / Far less than what in time the timeless vagrant finds.”
The lines that matter most for this argument come from the poem’s first section, where Smith speaks as her child-self:
I’m forever a child looking out my window at the night sky
Thinking one day I’ll touch the world with bare hands
Even if it burns.
Here is the primal impulse MacNeice was defending when he asked whether his posterity would still find “colour and taste” in flowers and fruit. The frame is different, though: rawer, more provisional, built from the Bowie-being rather than from the accumulated literary tradition that MacNeice and his generation trusted, followed, and continued. Yet the hunger is the same hunger. Smith’s poem suggests that imagination does not die when its usual media, like books, change; it migrates, finds new vessels, learns to wonder in new languages and forms. Whether those new languages are adequate to the task MacNeice set for them, whether they can frame the world with the precision and depth that words at their best can reach, is a question that Smith’s poem, too, wisely leaves unanswered for us to answer for ourselves.
Of MacNeice’s two posthumously published collections, G. S. Fraser wrote that MacNeice always had “that Irish air of being in the middle of some humorous, dangerous, probably heroically futile conspiracy.” In “Posterity,” too, MacNeice is engaging in a conspiracy of sorts. He is conspiring with his readers across time, asking us to be “the timeless vagrant,” asking us to hold “colour and taste” against the erosion of the easy and the convenient. It is, in the exact technical sense, a mantic act: the poet speaking beyond his own moment, entrusting his meaning to a future he cannot and will not see, placing his words in the hands of a posterity he can only hope will have the capacity to receive them.
MacNeice’s final image, just like the rest of the poem, is a question and stands alone: “Or will your birds be always wingless birds?” That “or” is the hinge of the poem’s faith. It opens onto the possibility that the answer is no, that the frame can be held, that reading and speaking in the full and difficult sense can persist, that the world can still be received in all its incorrigible variety that the poet had rejoiced in in 1935. The Northern Irish poet Michael Longley, one of the poets in whose poetry MacNeice’s legacy lives on, understood this. His own “memorandum to posterity,” the six-line poem “The White Garden” from his 1995 collection The Ghost Orchid, asks the same question MacNeice asked and answers it with the same reticent faith:
So white are the white flowers in the white garden that I
Disappear in no time at all among lace and veils.
For whom do I scribble the few words that come to me
From beyond the arch of white roses as from nowhere,
My memorandum to posterity? Listen. ‘The saw
Is under the garden bench and the gate is unlatched.’
Longley’s answer here is the only answer that poetry can honestly give us: the gate is unlatched. “To Posterity” is ultimately a test: are we the posterity that found color and taste in flowers and fruit, or the one that settled for the “wingless,” artificial simulacrum of the real thing? The answer, MacNeice understood, was always going to be ours to decide. The gate is unlatched. What remains is to go through it.