Epilogue for W. H. Auden

[2] Auden found MacNeice 'the ideal travelling companion, funny, observant, tolerant and good-tempered', and many years later would say: 'I have very rarely in my life enjoyed myself so much as I did during those weeks when we were constantly together.

Stephen Spender is back in London & I am going to a party he is having this Thursday... Not that I'm really lonely because I'm so busy – or else so idle in that I waste a lot of time seeing people & talking."

The poem mentions events that had occurred "down in Europe" while MacNeice and Auden were in Iceland, such as the fall of Seville (marking the start of the Spanish Civil War) and the Olympic Games in Berlin (which Adolf Hitler designed as a demonstration of the supremacy of 'Aryan' races).

This conviction is expressed both in the final stanza of Epilogue for W. H. Auden ("Our prerogatives as men / Will be cancelled who knows when"), and in another poem MacNeice wrote in late 1936, The Sunlight on the Garden.

Auden wrote in a similar way in his foreword to a new edition of Letters from Iceland, published in 1967: "Though writing in a 'holiday' spirit, its authors were all the time conscious of a threatening horizon to their picnic - world-wide unemployment, Hitler growing every day more powerful and a world-war more inevitable.

"[8] Michael O'Neill and Gareth Reeves devote five pages of their book Auden, MacNeice, Spender: The Thirties Poetry (1992) to a discussion of "Epilogue: For W. H.

[10] Richard Danson Brown writes that in this poem "MacNeice rehearses the tension between escapism and political reality as he reviews 'our Iceland trip' from his Hampstead home.

The poem oscillates between celebration of the trip as a holiday from responsibility and the insistent sense of calamity, sometimes in the space of the same couplet: 'Time for the soul to stretch and spit / Before the world comes back on it'."