Selected Poems

by Michael Longley, Michael Longley (Editor)

Book by MacNeice, Louise

Genres: Poetry, Ireland, Classics, Irish Literature, Fiction, 20th Century

160 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1990

About the author

Michael Longley was a Northern Irish poet. Following his death, the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, called Longley "a peerless poet".

Reviews

[Steven Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

[Bazanye · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are so so many situations and circumstances I find myself in in life, day to day life, or extraordinary events, sad times, happy times, when a MacNiece line just leaps to mind. The man has the words that perfectly sum up so many things I go through, have gone through. I am always going to be currently reading this book.

[Ben Thurley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Irish-born MacNeice is one of the Twentieth Century's English, Irish and Anglo-Irish Modernist poets, but certainly not one of the better known ones. The poems in this slim volume were selected by MacNeice's friend and fellow poet, W.H. Auden.

There are a handful of moments, well-observed and beautifully-realised represented here, but many of the poems seem to lack focus or intensity, meandering near their subject with a vague airiness. But the ones that shine (often with a dark and/or satirical gaze) ... wow!

The English "small householder" in "Spring Voices", afraid to seize the promises of joy and freedom, preferring to retreat into the safe and familiar, lest he

loiter into a suddenly howling crater, or fall, jerked back, garrotted by the sun.

Or the "Dark Age Glosses" in which a contemporary observations of a bird or a woman or recollection of a war veteran are linked viscerally through evocations of woodsmoke, and flames, forests or snapped bowstring, to mediaeval texts: Norse sagas and English and Irish annals.

And, of course, probably MacNeice's most anthologised poem, "Prayer Before Birth.

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

[Rachel · Rating 4 out of 5]

I associate MacNeice and Auden in my mind, something for which I partially blame the Backlisted podcast, and MacNeice suffers by the comparison. Then again, he greatly gains by a comparison to, say, Betjeman, or (lol) McGough. I'd forgotten that 'Entirely' was one of my favourite poems as a teenager and that I still knew it off by heart. It ages well!

I do so admire his commitment to form and the fact that he has things to SAY with his poetry. You can tell he felt prose or lightly-disguised fiction just wouldn't do, and it makes reading it a far better experience.

An Eclough for Christmas:
Our street is up, red lights sullenly mark
The long trench of pipes, iron guts in the dark,
And not till the Goths again come swarming down the hill
Will cease the clamour of the pneumatic drill.

Valediction:
I can say Ireland is hooey, Ireland is
A gallery of fake tapestries,
But I cannot deny my past to which my self is wed,

OOF.

Eclough from Ireland:
Who risk their lives neither to fill their bellies
Nor to avenge an affront or to grab a prize
But out of bravado or to divert ennui
Driving fast cars and climbing foreign mountains.

Postscript to Iceland:
Holidays should be like this,
Free from over-emphasis,
Time for the soul to stretch and spit
Before the world comes back on it

Leaving Barra:
For few are able to keep moving,
They drag and flag in the traffic;
While you are alive beyond question
Like the dazzle on the sea, my darling.

Autumn Journal:
I loved my love with the wings of angels
Dipped in henna, unearthly red,
With my office hours, with flowers and sirens,
With my budget, my latchkey, and my daily bread.

Sligo and Mayo:
The coal-black turf-stacks rose against the darkness
Like the tombs of nameless kings.

When We Were Children:
When we were children words were coloured
(Harlot and murder were dark purple)

Elegy for Minor Poets:
And give the benefit of the doubtful summer
To those who worshipped the sky but stayed indoors
Bound to a desk by conscience or by the spirit's
Hayfever. From those office and study floors
Let the sun clamber on to the notebook, shine,
And fill in what they groped for between each line.

Autolycus:
in his last phase when hardly bothering
To be a dramatist, the Master turned away
From his taut plots and complex characters
To tapestried romances, conjuring
With rainbow names and handfuls of sea-spray
And from them turned out Happy-Ever-Afters.

Apple Blossom:
For the last blossom is the first blossom
And the first blossom is the best blossom
And when from Eden we take our way
The morning after is the first day.

Nature Notes:
We have to surrender, finding
Through that surrender life.

Favourite poems: Thalassa; Turf-stacks; The Hebrides; Bagpipe Music; Entirely; Didymus; Prayer Before Birth; Under the Mountain; Slow Movement; All Over Again; Flower Show; Coda.

[Tony · Rating 5 out of 5]

"World is crazier and more of it than we think
Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion
A tangerine and spit the pips and feel
The drunkenness of things being various."
from Snow

I've had this book sitting on my shelf waiting to be read for some time. I just haven't quite got around to it. But now I have and it is magnificent. Sometimes you come to a writer too early or too late but I feel like I've come to MacNeice at the perfect time.

This 'Selected Poems' is packed full of thoughtful beauty demonstrating that poetry can cut through to your heart with a delicacy that prose often fails to provide.

This selection features poems from between 1929 and 1962. There's a chunk from 'Autumn Journal' (1939), which I've read in its entirety and recommend with the same passion that I recommend this 'Selected Poems'.

"No.
You cannot argue with the eyes or voice;
Argument will frustrate you till you die
But go your own way, give voice the lie,
Outstare the inhuman eyes..."
from 'Ecologue from Iceland' (1936)

Its subjects are home; landscape; Ireland; love; ageing; grief; time and it's passing; death and pretty much everything else. The selection from 'Autumn Sequal' that focuses on Gwilym's funeral is particularly moving.

"The third illusion, a fine mesh
Of probably impossibles; of course,
Of course, we think, we shall meet him in the flesh

Tomorrow or the next day, in full force
Of flesh and wit and heart. We close the door
On Wales and backwards, eastwards, from the source

Of such clear water, leave that altered shore
Of gulls and psalms, of green and gold largesse.
November the Twenty-fifth. We are back once more

In London. And will he keep us waiting?...Yes"

from 'Autumn Sequel' (1956)

There's not much more for me to say. I've read some fantastic poetry in 2019, from the contemporary - like Fiona Benson's astonishing 'Vertigo & Ghost' - through older writing of the long dead. This was one of the best though and it makes me want to read everything MacNeice ever wrote, which is probably what a book like this should hope to achieve. Read it.

[Rory Armstrong · Rating 4 out of 5]

The permanence of what passes

To me, MacNeice's poetry - while excellent - lacks a certain firmness of subject matter: it tends to jump around specific subjects giving light touches, and infrequently deep dives. When this happens it's incredible, but it's not always his style to do so. This, for me, took a bit of time to get used to, but once there I consumed this volume.
This volume speaks to me clearly as an Irish poet, however it is edited by Michael Longley so could be a particular bias in the poems chosen to bring that out.
I did enjoy it a lot, however while MacNeice does have a whole host of excellent poems, he fails to achieve any masterpieces (although I am still to read Autumn Journal: A Poem). Still, this is well worth reading.

[Fionnbharr Rodgers · Rating 5 out of 5]

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold;
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

…I mean for fuck’s sake, like. MacNeice was indecently good. Who gave him the right to write like that?

[ThePageGobbler · Rating 3 out of 5]

My poetry knowledge leaves a lot to be desired so I'm probably wrong but I wasn't mad about these. It's fascinating to see his response to the run-up to war in Europe and I think that's largely where the best material is, with the juvenilia coming across as pretty placid and the later stuff as a bit imitation Yeats. Indeed that kind of Yeatsian touch in the political poetry which can be rather bitter and inconclusive can be wearing. The 'Eclogue from Iceland', that being said, is pretty fantastic and genuinely one of the more unique poems I have read.

[Pollymoore3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Re-reading him after some years. I do love Louis Macneice, great poet of the everyday and the bittersweet. He sets out to make you feel quite pessimistic and grim, yet you end up laughing for joy. Favourites: “Snow”; “Prayer before Birth” that wonderful incantation; “Apple Blossom” and “The Truisms”.

[Rachel Woods-Oshiro · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the short poem Snow, he’s having an existential trip spurred on by fresh roses in a vase up against a window where snow is falling outside and I don’t think a day goes by i don’t think about this line:
World is suddener than we fancy it.

[˗ ˏ ˋ Lili ˎ ˊ ˗ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some good poems mixed with 20th-century typical xenophobia

[Robin Helweg-Larsen · Rating 5 out of 5]

MacNeice wrote one perfect poem, "The Sunlight on the Garden". Insightful, wistful, tightly rhymed in a pattern maintained for four stanzas, easy to memorise, it is frequently anthologised and rightly so.
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot ask for pardon.

This and "Bagpipe Music" are easy to find in 20th century verse collections. They and a lot more, including good excerpts from his longer works, are in this excellent selection.

The similarity of much of his work to Auden is clear (for example in "Postscript to Iceland" after their shared journey there), but the thing that intrigued me unexpectedly was the similarity to the poems of T.H. White. The Irish background, English education, writing of cities and countrysides and cultures of both places, the being in Ireland at the outbreak of World War II... the rhyming, the frequently loose structures, the general tone of many of the character sketches... all those aspects of White's "A Joy Proposed" echoed as I read MacNeice. MacNeice, however, is without question the superior poet.

MacNeice was born in 1907. By his early 30s he had published four volumes of verse (as well as other material) that was sufficiently good and well-received for him to publish this selection. The tone is set with the opening lines of the first piece, An Eclogue for Christmas:
A: I meet you in an evil time.
B: The evil bells
Put out of our heads, I think, the thought of everything else.
A: The jaded calendar revolves,
Its nuts need oil, carbon chokes the valves,
The excess sugar of a diabetic culture
Rotting the nerve of life and literature

Throughout the book we have the passage of time with the deterioration of society, culture and one's own life, expressed in a blending of old and new images, in rhyme. They are poems of the 1930s, all from the same man, all on the same theme.

And yet one or two stand out: 'The Sunlight on the Garden' is one of the best poems in the English language, casting a spell with its dazzling intricate rhymes, immediately memorable, endlessly anthologised. 'Bagpipe Music' is also very commonly anthologised because of its bounce, cynicism and humour:
The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober,
Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over.
Mrs. Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion,
Said to the midwife 'Take it away; I'm through with over-production'.

A good question, then, is why these two poems stand out against the rest in the book. What makes them so successful, with their very different moods? I think their common quality, largely lacking in all the other pieces, is that they are very easy to learn by heart and recite, they are almost singable even on a first reading.

[Miroku Nemeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Time was away and she was here
And life no longer what it was
The bell was silent in the air
And all the room one glow because
Time was away and she was here.
"Meeting Point""

There is sound and meaning that can be found in only the greatest of poets in this collection. I wish that I would have read him decades ago, for his poetry moves with the music of the earth and the spirit. If you haven’t read MacNeice, get this collection or a larger collection, and read his poetry out loud. It is tightly written, and rich in every way. Two of my favorite poems from this collection are “The Sunlight in the Garden,” and “Nature Notes: Dandelion”, though there are many that I have read, paused in a reverie, and wished I had more people to share with.
The Sunlight on the Garden

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.




NATURE NOTES: DANDELIONS
Incorrigible, brash,
They brightened the cinder path of my childhood.
Unsubtle, the opposite of primroses,
But, unlike primroses, capable
Of growing anywhere, railway track, pierhead,
Like our extrovert friends who never
Make us fall in love, yet fill
The primroseless roseless gaps.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Louise MacNeice was not a well-known name to me. I chose to read this book because Harold Bloom included his poems in his list of the Western Canon. This collection is interesting. Similarities abound to Auden. He is a Northern Irish poet, so seems to have a foothold in both English and Irish voice, and it is easy to see his impact on other Northern Irish poets such as Heaney and Muldoon. He is at once critical of Ireland as an Englishman, and loving of Ireland as an Irishman.

In my opinion, the masterpiece of the collection is “Eclogue from Iceland.” There is a wonderful section within this poem that is eminently quotable:
Let us thank God for valour in abstraction
For those who go their own way, will not kiss
The arse of law and order nor compound
For physical comfort at the price of pride:
Soldiers of fortune, renegade artists, rebels and sharpers
Whose speech not cramped to Yea and Nay explodes
In crimson oaths like peonies, who brag
Because they prefer to taunt the mask of God,
Bid him unmask and die in the living lightning.
What is that voice maundering, meandering? (32)

Unfortunately, the publisher of the book really made a significant error in my copy. After page 122, the remainder of the book is a reprint of the first pages printed backwards and upside down. I only lament what I’ve missed, and will have to track down his other poems.

See my other reviews here!

[anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

“TO POSTERITY
When books have all seized up like the books in graveyards / And reading and even speaking have been replaced / By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you / Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste / They held for us for whom they were framed in words, / And will your grass be green, your sky blue, / Or will your birds be always wingless birds?”

[Mark Mullee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't know whether I'm supposed to be rating the poems or the selection. Anyway I learned a lot from reading MacNeice and whether Auden's selection is lacking something crucial I'll never know unless I read MacNeice's original collections. If anyone has recommendations where to start, please share.

[Steve Cameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

my Scottish higher english chosen poet. too young then? too old now?

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

thought I’d just knock a refresher in what a poet what an acrobat love the journals look at him go xxx