Mar

3

This is the 100th anniversary of the Belfast poet Louis MacNiece; driving to Dublin early last sunday morning, I was listening to John Bowman and the recitation of the MacNiece poem Neutrality (37m 48 secs into the programme) – written in the late 1930’s, its specific reference to Knocknarea and Sligo and the Irish Free State during the Second World War.

The neutral island facing the Atlantic,
The neutral island in the heart of man,
Are bitterly soft reminders of the beginnings
That ended before the end began.

Look into your heart, you will find a county Sligo,
A Knocknarea with for navel a cairn of stones,
You find the shadow and sheen of a moleskin mountain
And a litter of chronicles and bones.

Look into your heart, you will find fermenting rivers,
Intricacies of gloom and glint,
You will find such ducats of dream and great
doubloons of ceremony
As nobody to-day would mint.

But then look eastward from your heart, there bulks
A continent, close, dark, as archetypal sin,
While to the west off your own shores the mackerel
Are fat on the flesh of your kin.

Here is some commentary and comments on the poem. It is Prayer Before Birth however that still sends shivers down me and probably countless other Leaving Cert students from the 1980’s.


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