Autobiography poem louis macneice analysis
Louis MacNeice was buried with his mother, his sister and his grandfather in Carrowdore Churchyard, Co Down (Photograph: Albert Bridge)
Patrick Comerford
Recently, The Irish Timesinvited me to review Solitary and Wild, David Fitzpatrick’s new biographyof Bishop Frederick MacNeice, father of the poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963).
Frederick Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) was an Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of the “’30s Poets,” who included WH Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis.
Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, the youngest son of Bishop Frederick MacNeice and Elizabeth Margaret (‘Lily’) MacNeice, both originally from Co Galway.
When Louis MacNeice was six, his mother was admitted to a Dublin nursing home and she died in 1914 when he was seven. He would later blamed her illness and subsequent death on his own difficult birth.
MacNeice was educated at Sherborne and at Marlborough, where he was a contemporary of John Betjeman and shared a study with Anthony Blunt, and at Merton College, Oxford. At Oxford, MacNeice first met WH Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. Auden became a lifelong friend and inspired MacNeice to take up poetry seriously.
After graduating with a first-class BA in Classics, he was appointed Assistant Lecturer in Classics at the University of Birmingham. His writing brought him to contact with the leading poets of the day, including WB Yeats, who included him in the The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, and TS Eliot, who published several of his poems in The Criterion.
MacNeice later lectured in Cornell and throughout the US, and worked for the BBC, producing plays and reporting from India, Egypt, Ghana and South Africa, and in the 1950s was Director of the British Institute in Athens, where he became friends with Patrick Leigh Fermor. He died of pneumonia in 1963, aged 55, and was buried in Carrowdore Churchyard in Co Down, with his mother, his sist
Poem of the Week: “Autobiography” by Louis MacNeice
Samhain is upon us, so we’re celebrating by sharing poems with a sinister bent in honor of this Celtic predecessor of Halloween. In this week’s poem, Louis MacNeice explores the darker side of youthful memory. MacNeice reflects on the early loss of his mother, a loss which remains as a sort of specter for the child in the poem, one that he can’t fully rid himself of. The sense of unease created by the poem’s refrain perfectly sets the tone for Samhain.
Autobiography
In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.
Come back early or never come.
My father made the walls resound,
He wore his collar the wrong way round.
Come back early or never come.
My mother wore a yellow dress;
Gently, gently, gentleness.
Come back early or never come.
When I was five the black dreams came;
Nothing after was quite the same.
Come back early or never come.
The dark was talking to the dead;
The lamp was dark beside my bed.
Come back early or never come.
When I woke they did not care;
Nobody, nobody was there.
Come back early or never come.
When my silent terror cried,
Nobody, nobody replied.
Come back early or never come.
I got up; the chilly sun
Saw me walk away alone.
Come back early or never come.
–Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems (2013)
Categories:Louis MacNeice, Poem of the WeekTags:collected poemsAutobiography by louis mac neice
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BAGPIPE MUSIC
A large cast of characters populate the sprawling cityscape of Scotland in this surprisingly short, but dense examination of working-class vexation. The status quo seems intent on keeping these characters down and placing hindrances to upward mobility.
CARRICKFERGUS
The titular town of Carrickfergus is situated between Belfast and Dorset less a geographical spot on the map of space than on the map of time. The poem places the village in between the past and the future more as a metaphorical idea of the home that is not really home.
CARRICK REVISITED
While the village mentioned above was told from the perspective of a young man reliving childhood memories, the later visit to the same place now takes on a more mature theme. The speaker is now older and more experienced, and views home as a place that seems curiously resistant to movement and where the only energy in the town seems related to violence.
AN ECOLOGUE FOR CHRISTMAS
The poet’s concerted premise to write a long poem resulted what is structured as a dialogue between a sophisticated city dweller who comes to the country because the city cannot answer certain questions and a shepherd who has become wistfully aware of the impact of the decline and fall of the landed gentry.
SUNDAY MORNING
What starts out as a festive paean to the opportunity that Sunday morning offers for wasting time transforms by the end into a reminder that those careful wastes of time come with a price in the world of the incessant march toward mortality.
NEW JERUSALEM
The resurrection of Lazarus becomes a metaphor of connecting the past to the present rather than separating planning for the future from archiving the past as disconnected history.
STAR-GAZER
A memory of gazing through the small window of a moving train as the stars passed by 42 years earl