A commentary on the poem will follow.

Dublin

by Louis MacNeice

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.

Our Poetry Editor, Ira Maine Esq, writes:
It is probably because I am a Dubliner myself that I cannot resist this poem, this splendid evocation of the city where I was born and went to school. Down the middle runs the splendid River Liffey (Anna Livia Plurabelle) and across which I was required to travel, every day on my way to school. Up the steeply cobbled  St. Steven’s Lane, past the hospital on one side and the Arthur Guiness brewery on the other, with vast draught horses dragging drays of barelled porter up the endless slope.

My Aunt Lil had a shop in Winetavern Street, under the lee of St. Patricks Cathedral where Dean Swift once held sway. At the top of the street was ‘The Liberties’, a place of refuge for Huguenots and the like, and Fishamble Street, retaining still the much older Viking word used to describe a market. Henry Grattan, mentioned in the first verse, was born in Fishamble Street in the 18^th century and grew up to champion the cause of legislative freedom in the Dublin Parliament. Prior to Grattan, Irish parliamentarians couldn’t urinate without permission from Westminster.To commemorate him there is now near the university a full sized bronze statue of the man with arm outstretched, palm up, persuasive to the end. Amusingly in Dublin, if a problem is insurmountable and yet some person is rash enough to ask when the problem may be resolved, the laconic reply is invariably; ‘…when Grattan shuts his fist…’

Daniel OConnell, Member of Parliament, mentioned in the same MacNeice breath and living at about the same time as Grattan, became a huge influence in the struggle for Catholic Emancipation in 19^th century Ireland. What must be understood here is that, prior to the OConnell/Grattan intervention, only Anglicans could stand for the Irish Parliament. Catholics and Presbyterians were banned.The influence of Grattan and O’Connell on 19^th century Irish political life, considering the political climate of the day, was profound. What must be considered too of course is that, in the wake of the French Revolution, governments all over Europe were much more inclined to ease repressive legislation in the hope of avoiding bloody revolution at home. Reformers naturally, took full advantage of this.

Then there was Thomas Moore,(1779-1852) the Irish singer and song writer, who wrote all those very respectable melodies which were so suited to genteel accompaniement on the pianoforte that drawing rooms all over the British Isles resounded with them. They are of course, much less well known now but ‘The Minstrel Boy”, ‘Believe Me if all those Endearing Young Charms…’ and ‘The Last Rose of Summer…’ might strike a bell with one or two amongst us. Moore was, in his day, as well known and as popular as todays rock stars.

The first verse of  MacNeice’s poem easily evokes the atmosphere of Depression era Dublin, where once glorious Georgian buildings, now blackened by centuries of smoke, serve merely to accentuate the city’s drabness. Everything is grey, the buildings, the sky, the river itself. Outside the city, all along the coast, the well heeled bask, the inner city abandoned to the halt, the weak and the lame, the great Georgian buildings rented out, room by room to the poor who are packed like coffined sardines to maximise profit.

This terrible poverty is brought home to us by the poet with the minimum of hyperbole and with stunning effect;

‘…the bare bones of a fanlight, over a hungry door…’

MacNeice is watching and listening, his mind, easily distracted, switching, changing channels from the ‘hungry door…’ to the ‘…porter [Guinness] running from the taps…’ And then switching again to Nelson’s Pillar, in the middle of OConnell St. ‘…watching his world collapse…’ Admiral Horatio Nelson, made irrelevant by history, above it all, watching the British Empire fall apart at his feet.

MacNeice freely admits this is not his town. He, though born in Ireland, has distanced himself deliberately from it, educated in England, abandoned his accent in favour of that of the BBC and has lived most of his life in England. He admits he has made choices that disbar him now from an Irish, or at least a ‘Dublin’ way of life. He feels divorced from her, disconnected,’…yet she holds my mind…’ and why?

Because of her ‘seedy elegance…’ her ‘ghosts…’ ‘…her bravado…’ ‘…the glamour…the squalor…’ and because too, and inevitably he as a writer is drawn to her as the home of other writers like Synge and Beckett, Joyce and Swift, Sheridan, OCasey, Goldsmith and Yeats and too many others to mention.

Then the poet looks up and sees ‘…the mist on the Wicklow hills..,’ and compares his own situation to that of the mist. How close is he to Ireland, he wonders? Is it like the relationship between the hills and the mist? Or perhaps the distance between peasant and landlord? Or the Irish to the Anglo-Irish? Can one exist without the other?  The murderer is no murderer without his victim…. A moment can only exist if there are other moments…

I think that here the poet is quietly allowing himself to be Irish, perhaps asking Dublin to allow him in, moving from the distant mist to something closer, from the fine distinction between Irish and Anglo-Irish, which, in the end, is no distinction at all. By living outside Ireland he has become someone else, been  influenced by other people, other events. He is, to all intents and purposes, English, but he is Irish too.

The last two verses are congratulatory. Dublin is what she is, despite her past. She has gathered in ‘…all the alien brought….’. The influence of Dane and Saxon, the Roman legions with their alien, crucified language, the Sassanachs with their guns and drums, the gangsters, the betrayals, the uncivil wars which might, at any stage, have destroyed her.

Observing himself and his reaction to the city,the poet is surprised to discover that the city, for him, has ‘…poise[d] the toppling hour…’ enough to ‘…give me time for thought…’

Dublin has, miraculously and almost without his noticing, stopped time and allowed the poet space to collect his thoughts about Dublin, digest them, and set them down on paper.