Poems
02.09.2010 / 19.59 pm
 
by Louis Macneice
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I was born in Belfast between the mountain and the gantries
To the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams:
Thence to Smoky Carrick in County Antrim
Where the bottle-neck harbour collects the mud which jams

The little boats beneath the Norman castle,
The pier shining with lumps of crystal salt;
The Scotch Quarter was a line of residential houses
But the Irish Quarter was a slum for the blind and halt.

The brook ran yellow from the factory stinking of chlorine,
The yarn-milled called its funeral cry at noon;
Our lights looked over the Lough to the lights of Bangor
Under the peacock aura of a drowning moon.

The Norman walled this town against the country
To stop his ears to the yelping of his slave
And built a church in the form of a cross but denoting
The List of Christ on the cross, in the angle of the nave.

I was the rector's son, born to the Anglican order,
Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor;
The Chichesters knelt in marble at the end of a transept
With ruffs about their necks, their portion sure.

The war came and a huge camp of soldiers
Grew from the ground in sight of our house with long
Dummies hanging from gibbets for bayonet practice
And the sentry's challenge echoing all day long.

I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents
Contracted into a puppet world of sons
Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt mines
And the soldiers with their guns.


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Epilogue

Rows of books around me stand,
Fence me in on either hand;
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Christina

It all began so easy
With bricks upon the floor
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Soap Suds

This brand of soap has the same smell as once in the big
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James Phillip McAuleyJames Phillip McAuley (1)
(1917 - 1976)
An Australian academic, poet, journalist, literary critic, and prominent convert to Catholicism.
Gabriela MistralGabriela Mistral (3)
(1889 - 1957)
Gabriela Mistral was the pseudonym of Lucila de MarĂ­a del Perpetuo Socorro Godoy Alcayaga, a Chilean poet, educator, diplomat and feminist who was the first Latin American to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945.
Alden NowlanAlden Nowlan (4)
(1933 - 1983)
Was a Canadian poet, novelist, playwright, and journalist.
Wilfred OwenWilfred Owen (19)
(1893 - 1918)
Was a poet and soldier, regarded by many as the leading poet of the First World War.

Mont Blanc: Lines Written In The Vale Of Chamouni

I
The everlasting universe of things
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Licia Sonnets 34

Pale are my looks, forsaken of my life,
Cinders my bones, consume'd with thy flame,
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In all its raucous impudence
Life writhes, cavorts in pallid light,
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God spoke once in the dark: dead sound
in the dead silence. I turned
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'BUSK ye, busk ye, my bonnie, bonnie bride!
Busk ye, busk ye, my winsome marrow!
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