Honouring Louis MacNeice

The grave of Louis MacNeice, Carrowdore, Co. Down

In his introduction to Faber's 2001 selection of Louis MacNeice's poems, the Irish poet Michael Longley tells the story of how, in 1964, he visited Louis MacNeice's graveyard in Carrowdore together with fellow-poets Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon.  MacNeice had died the year before, prematurely at the age of 55.  Mahon was the only one of the three who had met him personally, but all three were shocked by the death.  

Fifty years later, I found myself in the same spot, on our recent trip round the northern part of Ireland.  MacNeice enjoys a special place in my affections.  Not only do I admire him as a poet, but I realised comparatively recently that this admiration is something I inherited from my father - who also died prematurely, at the same age as MacNeice, though seven years later.  Among my books are three slim collections - The Earth Compels (1938), Autumn Journal (1939) and Plant and Phantom (1941), with my father's neat handwriting on the first inside page - the first having been bought in his last year at Oxford, the last during the war, in Edinburgh, when he was working for MI5.

MacNeice's reputation has lasted well, but he is gradually fading into obscurity - the 1988 Selected Poems  is half as long again as its 2001 successor, and there has been no Four Weddings and a Funeral to resuscitate his popularity as there was for his contemporary, Auden.  However, he was a great influence not only on Heaney, Mahon and Longley, but also on the younger poet Paul Muldoon, and consequently he is part of a continuity of influence that began before Yeats and will continue after Muldoon and his Irish successors.  Reading his poems now, I find them uneven, some snared in their time, but others beautiful and hopefully surviving for a long time in anthologies that will encourage people to read more of him.  One I am greatly fond of is Soap Suds:

   This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big

   House he visited when he was eight: the walls of the bathroom open

   To reveal a lawn where a great yellow ball rolls back through a hoop

   To rest at the head of a mallet held in the hands of a child.

   And these were the joys of that house: a tower with a telescope;

   Two great faded globes, one of the earth, one of the stars;

   A stuffed black dog in the hall; a walled garden with bees;

   A rabbit warren; a rockery; a vine under glass; the sea.

   To which he has now returned.  The day of course is fine

   And a grown-up voice cries Play! The mallet slowly swings,

   Then crack, a great gong booms from the dog-dark hall and the ball

   Skims forward through the hoop and then through the next and then

   Through hoops where no hoops were and each dissolves in turn

   And the grass has grown head-high and an angry voice cries Play!

   But the ball is lost and the mallet slipped long since from the hands

   Under the running tap that are not the hands of a child.  

Antony Mair