[...] MacNeice’s interest in allegory had been long standing, while his own poetry in the ’forties and ’fifties exhibited an increasing symbolic and allegorical content. [16]

[Quotes MacNeice:] The Dark Tower is a parable play, belonging to that wide class of writings which includes Everyman, The Faerie Queene and The Pilgrim’s Progress. Though under the name of allegory this kind of writing is sometimes dismissed as outmoded, the clothed as distinct from the naked allegory is in fact very much alive [...] My own impression is that pure ‘realism’ is in our time almost played out, though most works of fiction will remain realistic on the surface. The single track mind and the single-plane novel or play are almost bound to falsify the world in which we live. The fact that there is method in madness and the fact that there is fact in fantasy (and equally fantasy in ‘fact’) have been brought home to us not only by Freud and other psychologists but by events themselves. This being so, reportage can no longer masquerade as art. So the novelist, abandoning the ‘straight’ method of photography, is likely to resort once more not only to the twist of plot but to all kinds of other twists which may help him to do justice to the world’s complexity. Some element of parable therefore, far from making a work thinner and more abstract, ought to make it more concrete. Man does after all live by symbols.(Louis MacNeice, The Dark Tower and Other Radio Scripts, 1947, p. 21; Brown, p.17.)

As his career progressed this interest in parable or allegory writing becomes even more developed. [18]

By comparison with traditional allegory the modern parable is ambiguous, obscure. Its relationship with reality is conceptually vague. In Varieties of Parable MacNeice expands upon this ‘constitutional ambiguity ...’. [18] He quotes a passage from a study of Kafka’s elusive parables, commenting upon it:

Mr. Gray suggests that other critics may have gone astray because they treat Kafka as though he were ‘a priest or psychologist who mistook his vocation’, whereas Mr. Gray - rightly, I think - prefers to treat him ‘as a literary artist, not inventing complex equivalents for a system of beliefs already held, but exploring the possibilities of an image which presented itself to his imagination, in this case the image of a castle and of a man trying to reach it’. Now this, as we have seen, seems to have been the procedure — at least at moments — even of a professedly allegorical writer like Spenser. And this is often the procedure when one writes a poem. Which brings me back to the point of ‘irreducibility’. Whatever the basic beliefs implicit in The Castle, the book cannot be reduced to a mere exposition of such beliefs. If you expound something, that something is not only prior to but more important than the work in which you embody it. (Varieties of Parable, p.154.)

The meaning of modern parable, the structuring and ordering of the work is, according to this view, implicit within the work itself, not imposed upon it from beyond itself. The meaning is not imposed from without, by a necessarily ordered, meaningful reality, or by an intellectual system. The writer of a modern parable explores an image, creates a special world, self-consistent, yet tantalizingly without simple conceptual meaning. His ‘conceit’ is indeed a ‘dark’ one. Throughout MacNeice’s poetic career and particularly since about 1940, poems appear which have to be understood as MacNeice suggests we should understand Kafka. They are allegory or parable of the kind that the poet eventually in his lectures identified as the modern variety. They explore an image that ambiguously suggests a relationship of meaning to our world, but they do not make it explicit. [19]

[..]

Yet MacNeice, in areas where cultural concensus still exists, was perfectly capable of writing convincing traditional allegories. Some of the best of his late poems are of this kind.1 The discovery of Romantic love is a theme MacNeice treats allegorically with some success. “The Burnt Bridge” is an assured, economical and convincing allegory of a traditional kind. [22]

[...]

MacNeice in his late poetry also demonstrates his ability to write convincing short semi-allegorical poems, when he organizes them round a central motif or ikon. These have the trenchancy and effectiveness of some of Herbert’s or Henryson’s short allegories. The effect of these poems is related to the fact that he uses traditional imagery and iconography deeply engrained even in our fragmented culture. [...] [23]

[...]

MacNeice, when he died, was perfecting this kind of poem, and from a passage in Varieties of Parable we know that this was the realm he wished to continue to explore: What I myself would now like to write, if I could, would be doublelevel poetry, of the type of Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution and Independence’; and, secondly, more overt parable poems in a line of descent both from folk ballads such as ‘True Thomas’ and some of George Herbert’s allegories in miniature such as ‘Redemption’. Sadly, we were robbed of these further experiments in the writing of allegory and near allegory, by MacNeice’s sudden death. [end; 24.]