2. I.e., akin to parable. 3. The Roman emperor Nero (37-68) reputedly fiddled while Rome burned. LOUIS MACNEICE 1907-1963
Born in Belfast, the son of a strong-willed Anglican rector (later to become a courageously independent bishop), Louis MacNeice illustrates the English critic Cyril Connolly's dictum that 'the one golden recipe for Art is the ferment of an unhappy childhood working through a noble imagination.' MacNeice's mother fell ill and died. 'When I was five the black dreams came; / Nothing after was quite the same.' Sent to English schools, where he lost his Irish accent, he was educated at Marlborough College and Merton College, Oxford. He became a lecturer in classics at Birmingham University and, later, at Bedford College, London. Following the breakup of his first marriage, he traveled to Iceland with his friend the poet W. H. Auden, then to Spain on the eve of?and again during?the Spanish Civil War, and to the United States at the beginning of World War II. After returning to England in 1940, he joined the British Broadcasting Corporation as a feature writer and producer and, except for a year and a half spent in Athens as director of the British Institute, worked for the BB C for the rest of his life.
He was a pioneer of radio drama, a playwright, a translator (of Aeschylus' Agamemnon and Goethe's Faust), and a literary critic. Best-known as a poet, however, he was early identified with the other liberal and leftist Oxford poets, Auden, Stephen Spender, and C. Day Lewis. Openness, honesty, and a consistently high level of craft characterize his poems. In a responsive, flexible voice, they ruminate tentatively and ponder without resolution. MacNeice delights in the surface of the world his senses apprehend and celebrates 'the drunkenness of things being various,' often (as in 'Bagpipe Music') with wit and a wild gaiety. In love with life's irreducible multiplicity, he strives to embrace life's flux, despite an underlying sense of sadness and, sometimes, tragedy: 'All our games are funeral games.'
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2442 / Louis MACNEICE
Sunday Morning
Dow n the road someone is practising scales, The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails, Man's heart expands to tinker with his car For this is Sunday morning, Fate's great bazaar,
5 Regard these means as ends, concentrate on this Now, And you may grow to music or drive beyond Hindhead1 anyhow, Take corners on two wheels until you go so fast That you can clutch a fringe or two of the windy past, That you can abstract this day and make it to the week of time
10 A small eternity, a sonnet self-contained in rhyme.
But listen, up the road, something gulps, the church spire Opens its eight bells out, skulls' mouths which will not tire To tell how there is no music or movement which secures Escape from the weekday time. Whic h deadens and endures.
1933 1935
The Sunlight on the Garden
Th e sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold,
5 When all is told We cannot beg for pardon.
Ou r freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
10 Sonnets and birds descend; An d soon, my friend, We shall have no time for dances.
Th e sky was good for flying Defying the church bells
15 An d every evil iron Siren and what it tells: Th e earth compels, We are dying, Egypt, dying1
An d not expecting pardon,
20 Hardened in heart anew, But glad to have sat under Thunder and rain with you,
1. An upland district in Surrey popular for out-1. Cf. Antony's speech in Shakespeare's Antony ings. and Cleopatra 4.16.19: 'I am dying, Egypt, dying.'
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BAGPIPE MUSIC / 244 3
An d grateful too For sunlight on the garden.
1937,1938
Bagpipe Music
It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw, All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow. Their knickers0 are made of crepe-de-chine,? their panties / silky material
shoes are made of python, Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.
John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whisky,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.
It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky,1
All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi. Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather, Wok e to hear a dance record playing of Ol d Vienna.
It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture,
