Dublin -- Louis MacNeice

Guest poem submitted by Dave Fortin:

(Poem #1362) Dublin Grey brick upon brick, Declamatory bronze On sombre pedestals - O'Connell, Grattan, Moore - And the brewery tugs and the swans On the balustraded stream And the bare bones of a fanlight Over a hungry door And the air soft on the cheek And porter running from the taps With a head of yellow cream And Nelson on his pillar Watching his world collapse. This never was my town, I was not born or bred Nor schooled here and she will not Have me alive or dead But yet she holds my mind With her seedy elegance, With her gentle veils of rain And all her ghosts that walk And all that hide behind Her Georgian facades - The catcalls and the pain, The glamour of her squalor, The bravado of her talk. The lights jig in the river With a concertina movement And the sun comes up in the morning Like barley-sugar on the water And the mist on the Wicklow hills Is close, as close As the peasantry were to the landlord, As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish, As the killer is close one moment To the man he kills, Or as the moment itself Is close to the next moment. She is not an Irish town And she is not English, Historic with guns and vermin And the cold renown Of a fragment of Church latin, Of an oratorical phrase. But oh the days are soft, Soft enough to forget The lesson better learnt, The bullet on the wet Streets, the crooked deal, The steel behind the laugh, The Four Courts burnt. Fort of the Dane, Garrison of the Saxon, Augustan capital Of a Gaelic nation, Appropriating all The alien brought, You give me time for thought And by a juggler's trick You poise the toppling hour - O greyness run to flower, Grey stone, grey water, And brick upon grey brick. -- Louis MacNeice

A magnificent poem -- I like it not just for the close proximity that
we, the readers, have to the poet's state of mind, but also for the
historicity of the poem. Fans of The Dubliners will recognize the first
few lines from their song romanticizing the blowing up of Nelson's
statue on O'Connell Street in 1966 -- perhaps a broader statement on the
decline of the British Empire in general. However, Dublin's own history
as a Danish foundation, as the seat of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy, as
the setting for the events of 1919 and finally as the capitol of the
newly founded Irish state is also celebrated -- though the last with
MacNeice's unfailing sense of irony.  The repetition of the phrase "grey
brick upon brick" sets the historical events against an unmoving force
to some extent -- the urbanization (and the poverty and dreariness that
comes with it) of Ireland as exemplified in the grey bricks of Dublin is
almost outside of the main historical events.

Dave.

[Minstrels Links]

Poem #MacNeice - more poems by Louis MacNeice
Poem #Yeats - poems by William Butler Yeats
Poem #41 - "Ireland, Ireland", by Sir Henry Newbolt

[Administrivia]

Yesterday's commentary had an error in it: the Mary who succeeded Edward
VI and preceded Elizabeth I was not Mary Queen of Scots, but rather
Henry VIII's eldest child (and half-sister to Ned and Bess). The error
was mine, not Christopher's; I added some glosses to his notes without
checking my facts. Apologies to all, and especially to Christopher, for
the goof. - t.