Louis macneice autobiography poems

In this week's poem, Louis MacNeice explores the darker side of youthful memory.
Come back early or never come.
This is a haunting poem about the tragic death of the poet's mother, a loss he never fully came to terms with, and one that cast a long shadow over him for the.

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Louis MacNeice was buried with his mother, his sister and his grandfather in Carrowdore Churchyard, Co Down (Photograph: Albert Bridge)

Patrick Comerford

Recently, The Irish Timesinvited me to review Solitary and Wild, David Fitzpatrick’s new biographyof Bishop Frederick MacNeice, father of the poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963).

Frederick Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) was an Irish poet and playwright. He was part of the generation of the “’30s Poets,” who included WH Auden, Stephen Spender, and Cecil Day-Lewis.

Louis MacNeice was born in Belfast in 1907, the youngest son of Bishop Frederick MacNeice and Elizabeth Margaret (‘Lily’) MacNeice, both originally from Co Galway.

When Louis MacNeice was six, his mother was admitted to a Dublin nursing home and she died in 1914 when he was seven. He would later blamed her illness and subsequent death on his own difficult birth.

MacNeice was educated at Sherborne and at Marlborough, where he was a contemporary of John Betjeman and shared a study with Anthony Blunt, and at Merton College, Oxford.

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David Sutton

This week’s poem by the Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) is a kind of balancing act, self-revealing yet reticent, the trauma it turns on evident yet not explicit, controlled and distanced by the ballad form, so that without knowledge of the context the reader is like someone looking over the edge of a boat at a nameless shadow moving in the depths below. Awareness of the poet’s childhood circumstances provides most of the answer: his mother died when Louis was seven, having spent her last year in a Dublin nursing home, and Louis obscurely blamed himself for her death, his birth having been a difficult one. But the import of the refrain remains a little elusive. ‘Come back early or never come’ – is Louis talking to himself? To his mother’s shade? Whatever the case, it seems to me, as so often with MacNeice, a poem at once skilful and disturbing.

Note: ‘wore his collar the wrong way round’ – MacNeice’s father was a Protestant minister.

Autobiography

In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.

Come back early or never come.

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Born in Belfast in 1907, Louis MacNeice was a poet, greatly influenced by W.H. Auden, who was much loved by his contemporaries and known for his relaxed and honest style. His early life was spent in County Antrim and he was deeply affected by the death of his mother when he was just six years old. His father remarried and MacNeice was sent to school in England along with his sister.

At Sherborne School he received a grounding in the classics and began to take an interest in poetry. Whilst he was happy there, when he won a scholarship to Marlborough his attitude soon changed. A crueler environment may well have led MacNeice to bury himself in the classics and escapism of mythology. He began writing poetry and had some published in the school magazine. He also became firm friends with Anthony Blunt, who would later be involved in spying for the Russians during the cold war.

In 1926, MacNeice took up a scholarship to Oxford where he met W.H. Auden and became immersed in the world of poetry, publishing several more of his own works in the literary magazines of the time. His first co