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.

Meeting Point -- Louis MacNeice

(Poem #1301) Meeting Point Time was away and somewhere else, There were two glasses and two chairs And two people with the one pulse (Somebody stopped the moving stairs) Time was away and somewhere else. And they were neither up nor down; The stream's music did not stop Flowing through heather, limpid brown, Although they sat in a coffee shop And they were neither up nor down. The bell was silent in the air Holding its inverted poise - Between the clang and clang a flower, A brazen calyx of no noise: The bell was silent in the air. The camels crossed the miles of sand That stretched around the cups and plates; The desert was their own, they planned To portion out the stars and dates: The camels crossed the miles of sand. Time was away and somewhere else. The waiter did not come, the clock Forgot them and the radio waltz Came out like water from a rock: Time was away and somewhere else. Her fingers flicked away the ash That bloomed again in tropic trees: Not caring if the markets crash When they had forests such as these, Her fingers flicked away the ash. God or whatever means the Good Be praised that time can stop like this, That what the heart has understood Can verify in the body's peace God or whatever means the Good. Time was away and she was here And life no longer what it was, The bell was silent in the air And all the room one glow because Time was away and she was here. -- Louis MacNeice

MacNeice in this poem tries to capture the suspension of time that seems
to occur when one is in the company of a loved one. Three images in
particular stand out for me: the stalled escalator (escalators being the
embodiment of perpetual motion -- the infinite loop, as it were), the
inverted bell (pendulums at their extrema always seem to slow down more
than they should) and the empty desert (the high desert, like the
Siberian tundra and the antarctic plateau, has a profoundly hypnotic
_sameness_ to it).

Sadly, the rest of the poem (beguiling rhyme scheme apart) doesn't quite
do the trick. I found the sixth stanza somewhat pointless, and the
scansion of the second stanza is decidedly uneven. (That said, I'm not
sure if more exact prosody would have helped the poem or reduced it to
sing-song triteness). And finally, the ambiguity that gives poems like
"The Sunlight on the Garden" or "House on a Cliff" or "Snow" their
power, here seems to betoken a lack of confidence, a thinning of the
blood.

Methinks I cavil too much. All criticism aside, this remains a very
accomplished poem, if not MacNeice's finest. I really must read more of
his work.

thomas.

House on a Cliff -- Louis MacNeice

(Poem #1062) House on a Cliff Indoors the tang of a tiny oil lamp. Outdoors The winking signal on the waste of sea. Indoors the sound of the wind. Outdoors the wind. Indoors the locked heart and the lost key. Outdoors the chill, the void, the siren. Indoors The strong man pained to find his red blood cools, While the blind clock grows louder, faster. Outdoors The silent moon, the garrulous tides she rules. Indoors ancestral curse-cum-blessing. Outdoors The empty bowl of heaven, the empty deep. Indoors a purposeful man who talks at cross Purposes, to himself, in a broken sleep. -- Louis MacNeice

In previous Minstrels commentaries Martin and I have talked about the
ominous brilliance that runs through MacNeice's output from the 1930s: poems
such as "The Sunlight on the Garden" and "Snow" seem to capture perfectly
the menace of that 'low dishonest decade'. Sadly, the potential of those
early poems was never fulfilled; indeed, his post-war work suffers from a
seeming lack of conviction that was only beginning to be reversed when he
died in 1963 ("of pneumonia, which he contracted recording a radio programme
in a damp cave" -- so Michael Schmidt informs us, in his magisterial "The
Lives of the Poets").

MacNeice was not unaware of this regression, and "House on a Cliff" can be
read as an expression of his frustration. Outdoors is the world that the
poet wishes he could describe -- "the chill, the void, the siren" -- but
something is lost, "the locked heart and the lost key" make "his red blood
cool", until all he can do is "talk at cross / Purposes, to himself, in a
broken sleep".

thomas.

[Minstrels Links]

Poems by Louis MacNeice:
Poem #18, Bagpipe Music
Poem #521, The Suicide
Poem #757, The Sunlight on the Garden
Poem #864, Snow
Poem #1039, Prayer Before Birth
Poem #1062, House on a Cliff

Today's poem is very reminiscent of William Empson's equally powerful
apologia for not writing more poetry:
Poem #233, Let It Go -- William Empson

And it also reminds me of this one, by Ted Hughes:
Poem #882, Wind -- Ted Hughes

Prayer before Birth -- Louis MacNeice

(Poem #1039) Prayer before Birth I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the club-footed ghoul come near me. I am not yet born, console me. I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me, with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me, on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me. I am not yet born; provide me With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light in the back of my mind to guide me. I am not yet born; forgive me For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words when they speak to me, my thoughts when they think me, my treason engendered by traitors beyond me, my life when they murder by means of my hands, my death when they live me. I am not yet born; rehearse me In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white waves call me to folly and the desert calls me to doom and the beggar refuses my gift and my children curse me. I am not yet born; O hear me, Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God come near me. I am not yet born; O fill me With strength against those who would freeze my humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton, would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with one face, a thing, and against all those who would dissipate my entirety, would blow me like thistledown hither and thither or hither and thither like water held in the hands would spill me. Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me. Otherwise kill me. -- Louis MacNeice

I love the headlong momentum of this poem. MacNeice's poetry is usually
delicately balanced, informed by a world of possibility (and uncertainty).
Not so "Prayer before Birth", in which phrase piles on phrase in a desperate
catalogue of the perils of contemporary life. The cascading lines, heavy in
their use of internal rhymes and repetitions, assonances and alliteration,
are insistent, driving, a crazed litany; they're powerful, yet wonderfully
poignant. The unborn child speaking this dramatic monologue could be any of
us.

thomas.

[Minstrels Links]

Louis MacNeice:
Poem #18, Bagpipe Music
Poem #521, The Suicide
Poem #757, The Sunlight on the Garden
Poem #864, Snow

Various prayers:
Poem #177, Where The Mind is Without Fear  -- Rabindranath Tagore
Poem #344, The Navajo Night Way Ceremony  -- Anon. (Navajo)
Poem #349, A Prayer to the Sun  -- Geoffrey Hill
Poem #987, Prayer -- Carol Ann Duffy
Poem #1007, Abide With Me -- Henry F. Lyte
Poem #1020, A Prayer for My Daughter -- William Butler Yeats
Poem #1029, Prayer (to the sun above the clouds) -- Piet Hein

[Somewhat Technical Afterthought]

"Prayer before Birth" may look like free verse, but it's actually carefully
structured. Apart from the devices mentioned above, note the extensive use
of dactyls (metrical feet of one stressed and two unstressed syllables),
which contribute to the cadence of the poem:

 my thoughts when they think me
 -  /        -    -    /     -
 my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
 -  /   -   - /  -     -  /   -    - /    -
 my life when they murder by means of my hands,
 -  /    -    -    / -    -  /     -  -  /

The poet also uses the occasional spondee (two consecutive stresses) to
prevent the rhythm from becoming monotonous:

 I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
 - /    -    -   / -   /    -   -    /    /     /    -
 with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
 -    /      /     /    -   -    /    /    /    -
 on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.
 -  /     /     /    -   -  /     /     /    -

Snow -- Louis MacNeice

(Poem #864) Snow 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. And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes - On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands - There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses. -- Louis MacNeice

"Between" is one of the early MacNeice's favourite words. But where his
contemporary W. H. Auden uses it to betoken connection and even a unity of
sorts, in MacNeice it implies a sense of suspension (and suspense; there's
an air of menace that's never very far from the surface in his poetry).
Michael Schmidt puts it well:

"Indecision is powerful ... [MacNeice's poems are written in] a language
like Auden's, but subtly different, a language not authoritatively set down
but winding out like the guy-line strand of a web uncertain what it will
attach to or whether it will hold ... the verse is seldom finger-waggingly
didactic. It is experential, with the sudden changes of tone and of key,
which take us deep into feeling, a sens of the inviolability of individual
isolation"
        -- Michael Schmidt, "Lives of the Poets"

Seen in this light, MacNeice is a tired old man, not given to the certainty
of Auden on his left or Betjeman on his right, without the optimism of Dylan
Thomas nor even the darkness of Philip Larkin. But (and especially in the
1930s, rightly decribed by the ubiquitous Auden in later years as a "low,
dishonest decade") certainty is not always a good thing. To a reading public
discovering the horrors of Nazism and Fascism - horrors which were
exacerbated by appeasement and blindness and romantic self-delusion - the
revelation that "World is crazier and more of it than we think /
Incorrigibly plural" rings utterly true. MacNeice's skepticism set him
apart; it gave him (as it gave the equally independent William Empson) the
moral upper ground, as it were.

And of course, there's the verse itself. MacNeice's poetry might be
uncertain in subject material, but it's indisputably beautiful. Few even of
his generation equalled him in ease and flow of word and thought; Thomas and
Auden are his peers, never his masters. And there's an excitement, a thrill
born of "the drunkenness of things being various" that informs everything he
wrote: the insistent rhythms of "Bagpipe Music", the sinister beauty of "The
Sunlight in the Garden", the clipped tones of "The Suicide", the delicate
balance, the sense that Creation itself teeters on a knife-edge that informs
today's poem. Marvellous, simply marvellous.

thomas.

[Minstrels Links]

Louis MacNeice:
Poem #18, Bagpipe Music
Poem #521, The Suicide
Poem #757, The Sunlight on the Garden

W. H. Auden, William Empson, Dylan Thomas, John Betjeman, Philip Larkin: see
the Minstrels website for a full index:
http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/

The Sunlight on the Garden -- Louis MacNeice

(Poem #757) The Sunlight on the Garden The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold; When all is told We cannot beg for pardon. Our freedom as free lances Advances towards its end; The earth compels, upon it Sonnets and birds descend; And soon, my friend, We shall have no time for dances. The sky was good for flying Defying the church bells And every evil iron Siren and what it tells: The earth compels, We are dying, Egypt, dying And not expecting pardon, Hardened in heart anew, But glad to have sat under Thunder and rain with you, And grateful too For sunlight on the garden. -- Louis MacNeice

An truly beautiful poem - the complex, intertwined images building up into
an ominous picture of a world spiralling into war. The superposition of the
large-scale and the highly personal is highly effective, the ending lending
the rest of the poem a new and enhanced perspective. And the poem is lent an
extra poignancy by the knowledge (see the first link) that it was addressed
to the wife who had just left him.

And speaking of complex and intertwined, don't miss the exquisitely crafted
rhyme scheme, the combination of internal and end rhymes having a delight
all their own. The technique of rhyming the last word of a line with the
first word of the next is, incidentally, reminiscent of Joe Haldeman's
"Lines Composed on a Noisy Plane to Atlantic City", in Zelazny's 'Wheel of
Fortune' anthology. Zelazny refers to it as an old Welsh verse form - if
anyone can shed further light on this, do write in.

Notes:

  "We are dying, Egypt, dying": echoes Antony's word to Cleopatra in
  Act 4 of Antony and Cleopatra.
    -- [broken link] http://www.wmich.edu/english/tchg/lit/pms/MacNeice.Sunlight.html

Biography:

  MacNeice, Louis:

   1907-63, Irish poet. Educated in England, he became a classical scholar
   and teacher and later was a producer for the British Broadcasting
   Corporation. In the 1930s MacNeice allied himself with a group of poets
   of social protest led by W. H. Auden. His later poetry, expressing the
   futility of modern life, retains the sparkling wit, ironical flatness of
   statement, and colloquial tone of his earlier verse. His volumes of
   poetry include Poems,, Springboard (1945), Holes in the
   Sky (1948), Ten Burnt Offerings (1952), and Solstices (1961). He also
   rendered poetic translations of Aeschylus' Agamemnon (1936) and Goethe's
   Faust (1951).

        -- [broken link] http://www.encyclopedia.com/printable/07828.html

Links:

  Seamus Cooney has an detailed commentary on the poem
    [broken link] http://www.wmich.edu/english/tchg/lit/pms/MacNeice.Sunlight.html

  Dickinson's 'There's a Certain Slant of Light' has reminiscent imagery
    poem #92

  And Henley's 'The Rain and the Wind' resonates nicely with the ending
     poem #117

  As for MacNeice, we've run two of his poems:
    poem #18
    poem #521

-martin

The Suicide -- Louis MacNeice

Guest poem sent in by Smitha Rao

(Poem #521) The Suicide And this, ladies and gentlemen, whom I am not in fact Conducting, was his office all those minutes ago, This man you never heard of. These are the bills In the intray, the ash in the ashtray, the grey memoranda stacked Against him, the serried ranks of the box-files, the packed Jury of his unanswered correspondence Nodding under the paperweight in the breeze From the window by which he left; and here is the cracked Receiver that never got mended and here is the jotter With his last doodle which might be his own digestive tract Ulcer and all or might be the flowery maze Through which he had wandered deliciously till he stumbled Suddenly finally conscious of all he lacked On a manhole under the hollyhocks. The pencil Point had obviously broken, yet, when he left this room By catdrop sleight-of-foot or simple vanishing act, To those who knew him for all that mess in the street This man with the shy smile has left behind Something that was intact. -- Louis MacNeice

Louis MacNeice was born in Northern Ireland in 1907 and died in 1964. He
took a first in Greats at Oxford and later taught classics at the University
of Birmingham. Though his work is spoken of in the same breath as Auden's
the main worry about his poetry is its occasional lack of depth and
penetration, although in his best work there is a piercing sweetness and
melancholy.

This touching poem about a colleague who killed himself is a moving record
of MacNeice's response to years of office life. The image of 'a manhole
under the hollihocks' is an effective one for the sudden sense of a yawning
void at one's feet which extreme depression can sometimes produce. The last
two lines might serve as an epitaph on MacNeice himself.

                                        -Smitha.

We've run one MacNeice poem before, Bagpipe Music: poem #18

For a brief biography and a number of poems see
http://members.aol.com/carrickman/macneice.htm

Bagpipe Music -- Louis MacNeice

The second of our guest poems, sent in by Anustup Datta

(Poem #18) Bagpipe Music It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw, All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow. Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python, Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with head of bison. John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa, Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker, Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey, Kept its bones for dumbbells to use when he was fifty. It's no go the Yogi-man, it's no go Blavatsky, All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi. Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather, Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna. It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture, All we want is a Dunlop tire and the devil mend the puncture. The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober, Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over. Mrs. Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion, Said to the midwife "Take it away; I'm through with overproduction." It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh,(1) All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby. Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage, Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage. His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish, (2) Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish. It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible, All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle. It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium, It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums, It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections, Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension. It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall forever, But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather. -- Louis MacNeice

     ---------------------------------------------------------------

     (1) Caelidh : pronounced 'kaley', Gaelic term for a round of
     gossiping visits.

     (2) cran : a measure for the quantity of just-caught herrings.

     ---------------------------------------------------------------

     This poem is by Louis MacNeice (1907-1963), one of the great
     modern Scottish poets. It is set in in Scotland in the 1930's,
     they years of the Depression, years which led up to the Munich
     crisis if 1938 and the outbreak of WWII in 1939. The poem found
     an honoured place in a wonderful recent anthology of "Poetry to
     be Read Aloud".

     I really love the poem's vigorous meter and its wonderful sound
     - you can actually hear the bagpipes playing in the background.
     Definitely a poem to read aloud. In a weird way, one is reminded
     of the poetry of Philip Larkin, of whom more later.

     Anustup