#louis macniece

[extollingtheeveryday]

Louis MacNiece, "Snow" (ID in alt text)

[reallybadblackoutpoems]

plurality (1967) - louis macniece

“birth is a curse and existence is a prison”

[ukdamo]

Dublin

Louis MacNiece

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.

[flashsil]

Since it’s also world poetry day today, I thought I’d share this.

@ddshelby0811 @hvkunst @allaboutdervla @theofficialdramallama @fuckyeahdervlakirwan

[j2parman]

The poet's first business is mentioning things.

Louis MacNiece, quoted by Tristram Fane Saunders in a review of Jonathan Gibbs’s Spring Journal (CB Editions, 2021), TLS, 12 March 2021, p. 25.

[violettesiren]

Borrowed wings on his ankles,

Carrying a stone death,

The hero entered the hall,

All in the hall looked up,

Their breath frozen on them,

And there was no more shuffle

or clatter in the hall at all.

So a friend of a man comes in

And leaves a book he is lending or flowers

And goes again, alive but as good as dead,

And you are left alive, no better than dead,

And you dare not turn the leaden pages of the book

or touch the flowers,

the hooded and arrested hours.

Close your eyes,

There are suns beneath your lids,

Or look in the looking-glass in the end room –

You will find it full of eyes,

The ancient smiles of men cut out with scissors

and kept in mirrors.

Ever to meet me comes, in sun or dull,

The gay hero swinging the Gorgon's head

And I am left, with the dull drumming of the sun,

suspended and dead,

Or the dumb grey-brown of the day is a leper's cloth,

And one feels the earth going round and round

the globe of the blackening mantle, a mad moth.

Perseus by Louis MacNiece

[linusjf]

Louis MacNiece: Teapot

​”The teapot takes in water and gives out tea. So the human individual takes in anything you give him and promptly transforms it; he is ready to give you out again his own reactions – first, in thought and emotion, then in voice or action.”

—Louis MacNeice.

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[pocketsoul1127]

Plurality - Louis MacNeice - Poem of the Week

Plurality – Louis MacNeice – Poem of the Week

It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one; World is other and other, world is here and there, Parmenides would smother life for lack of air Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks— No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes, Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights, All your foes are friends and all your days…

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