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

Seamus Heaney - shaping the future

Without wishing to sound overly egocentric, Seamus Heaney's death last Friday came at a particularly poignant moment for me.  A month or so ago, some relatives of Paul's were visiting Hastings for a wedding, and I learnt that one of them had grown up on a farm in Co. Derry beside that of the Heaney family, and that she had known the great man and his siblings as a child.  "I liked the poems he wrote about his childhood," she said, "but I didn't really understand a lot of the others."

After she returned to N. Ireland, I took down my copy of Opened Ground, Heaney's poems 1966 - 1996, and read it cover to cover, with joy and total admiration.  I finished it just before returning to Belfast last Thursday for the funeral of Paul's sister-in-law.  The news of Heaney's death came between the two nights of wakes between death and funeral, and contributed to the already keen sense of grief and loss.  I felt it particularly not only because I had immersed myself in his poetry over the preceding month, but also because of the awareness I had gained of his personal attitudes and approach to life.  These deserve to be as influential on society at large as his poetry has been, and will continue to be, on his fellow poets.

At the end of Opened Ground there is a transcript of Heaney's Nobel Lecture, given in 1995 after he had been awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.  In it he recounts the incident when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road:

Then one of the masked executioners said to them, "Any Catholics among you, step out here."  As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to be in sympathy with the IRA and all its actions.  It was a terrible moment for him, caught between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward.  Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don't move, we'll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to.  All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding a gun at his temple, he was pushed away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in the line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.

It is difficult at times to repress the thought that history is about as instructive as an abattoir; that Tacitus was right and that peace is merely the desolation left behind after the decisive operations of merciless power... But...the birth of the future we desire is surely in the contraction which that terrified Catholic felt on the roadside when another hand gripped his hand, not in the gunfire that followed, so absolute and so desolate, if also so much a part of the music of what happens.

This quiet, distinguished, erudite genius of a poet spent most of his life trying, through his poetry, to create the future we desire, while acknowledging the music of what happens.  If you read the text of the lecture, or listen to it being read by the great man himself (click here for a link) it is impossible not to be both moved and inspired.  My only regrets are that it has taken me until this late stage of my life to discover the full scope of his genius, and that he will no longer be producing the beautifully crafted work that will survive long after his own disappearance.  

Antony Mair