Louise MacNeice's 'Thalassa

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

Peter McDonald printed this as as the last poem in his edition of MacNeice’s ‘Collected poems’. It has an attractive combination of elegy, defeat and determination.

Thalassa is the Greek word for the sea. For a classicist like MacNeice, it’s overloaded with connotations. From Xenaphon and his ragged army, desperately trying to get home, to the image of ageing Ulysses, pushing out on one more journey.

This is taken from McDonald’s beautiful ‘Collected poems’ Faber and Faber, 2007

Louis MacNeice's 'The Introduction'

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

One of the underrated poets of the twentieth century. A fine critic, an entertaining writer of prose and a fine poet, (unfairly I think) overshadowed in the history books by his friend W.H. Auden.

Perhaps his reputation also suffers because although Irish, he lived most of his life in England. So he misses out on the club value of ‘Irish Poet’ while remaining outside the charmed circle of “English Poets’.

This is not one of the poems I’d offer as proof of his excellence, but it’s one I like. The cosmic indifference of the universe: he was too early, she was too late.

This is taken from Peter MacDonald’s Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice, revised for Faber in 2007 for the centenary of his birth. This poem also appears in Michael Longley’s selection of MacNeice’s verse in Faber’s poet to poet series.

Louis MacNeice's 'Bagpipe Music'.

Louis MacNeice (1907-1963)

Whether you think this is a piece of entertaining nonsense or a ‘satirical elegy’ for traditional culture, it’s a great piece to read aloud.

First published in MacNeice’s ‘I Crossed the Minch’, a ‘travel book’, where this poem has a chapter to itself he later wrote ‘the bad feminine rhymes’ were meant to mimic the wheezing of the pipes. His biographer, Jon Stallworthy claimed that ‘their air of hasty improvisation suggests a new culture that has no time for the civil harmonies of the the old, the full rhymes of the traditional ballad.’ He also thought the ending ‘growls to a halt on a doom-laden note, the quintessential expression of Thirties despair.’

I’ve always imagined this being recited by a group of drunks at a ceilidh, with the stomping crowd joining in on ‘it’s no go’. Not having a drunken chorus I tried reading it a different way.

Louis MacNeice 'Cradle song for Eleanor'

This is one of the first poems I memorised, a very long time ago. Louise MacNeice is often overlooked or undervalued in histories of English poetry where he is overshadowed by his friend W. H. Auden. But he was one of the great lyric poets writing in English in the twentieth century. To mark the centenary of his birth in 2007 Peter McDonald edited a beautiful collected for Faber. McDonald also contributed an excellent discussion of Cradle song to 'Incorrigibly Plural: Louis MacNeice and his legacy' essays edited by Fran Brearton and Edna Longley (Carcanet 2012). (An essay is excellent when it makes you revist a poem you’ve known for forty years and see things you hadn’t previously noticed…)