Louis MacNeice

Frederick Louis MacNeice (1907-09-12 – 1963-09-03) was a poet and playwright of Northern Irish birth. Though not a dogmatically political writer, he is often associated with his close friends, the left-wing thirties poets: W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day Lewis.

Sourced

• It’s no go the Yogi-Man, it’s no go Blavatsky,
  All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.
  • "Bagpipe Music", line 9, from The Earth Compels (1938)

• It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet;
  Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit.
  The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever,
  But if you break the bloody glass you won’t hold up the weather.
  • "Bagpipe Music", line 31

• Some on commission, some for the love of learning,
  Some because they have nothing better to do
  Or because they hope these walls of books will deaden
  The drumming of the demon in their ears.
  • "The British Museum Reading Room", line 4, from Plant and Phantom (1941)

• I am not yet born; O hear me.
  Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the clubfooted ghoul come near me.
  • "Prayer Before Birth", line 1, from Springboard (1944)

• 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.
  • "Prayer Before Birth", line 11

• O early one morning I walked out like Agag,
  Early one morning to walk through the fire
  Dodging the pythons that leaked on the pavements
  With tinkle of glasses and tangle of wire.
  • "The Streets of Laredo", line 1, from Holes in the Sky (1948)
  • MacNeice’s poem, a grotesque vision of the London Blitz, is not to be confused with the cowboy ballad "The Streets of Laredo".

• Then twangling their bibles with wrath in their nostrils
  From Bonehill Fields came Bunyan and Blake:
  "Laredo the golden is fallen, is fallen;
  Your flame shall not quench nor your thirst shall not slake."
  • "The Streets of Laredo", line 21