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21 " A city built upon mud;A culture built upon profit;Free speech nipped in the bud,The minority always guilty.Why should I want to go backTo you, Ireland, my Ireland?...Her mountains are still blue, her rivers flowBubbling over the boulders.She is both a bore and a bitch;Better close the horizon,Send her no more fantasy, no more longings whichAre under a fatal tariff.For common sense is the vogueAnd she gives her children neither sense nor moneyWho slouch around the world with a gesture and a brogueAnd a faggot of useless memories. "
― Louis MacNeice , Autumn Journal
22 " Give those who are gentle strength,Give those who are strong a generous imagination,And make their half-truth true and let the crooked Footpath find its parent road at length....For never to beginAnything new because we know there is nothingNew, is an academic sophistry--The original sin.I have already had friendsAmong things and hours and peopleBut taking them one by one--odd hours and passing people;Now I must make amendsAnd try to correlate event with instinctAnd me with you or you with you with all,No longer think of time as a waterfallAbstracted from a river. "
23 " Why do we like being Irish? Partly becauseIt gives us a hold on the sentimental EnglishAs members of a world that never was,Baptised with fairy water;And partly because Ireland is small enoughTo be still thought of with a family feeling,And because the waves are roughThat split her from a more commercial culture;And because one feels that here at least one canDo local work which is not at the world's mercyAnd that on this tiny stage with luck a manMight see the end of one particular action.It is self-deception of course;There is no immunity in this island either;A cart that is drawn by somebody else's horseAnd carrying goods to somebody else's market.The bombs in the turnip sack, the sniper from the roof,Griffith, Connolly, Collins, where have they brought us?Ourselves alone! Let the round tower stand aloofIn a world of bursting mortar!Let the school-children fumble their sumsIn a half-dead language;Let the censor be busy on the books; pull down the Georgian slums;Let the games be played in Gaelic.Let them grow beet-sugar; let them buildA factory in every hamlet;Let them pigeon-hole the souls of the killedInto sheep and goats, patriots and traitors.And the North, where I was a boy,Is still the North, veneered with the grime of Glasgow,Thousands of men whom nobody will employStanding at the corners, coughing. "
― Louis MacNeice
24 " Let the old Muse loosen her staysOr give me a new Muse with stockings and suspendersAnd a smile like a cat,With false eyelashes and finger-nails of carmineAnd dressed by Schiaparelli, with a pill-box hat....Give me a houri but houris are too easy,Give me a nun;We'll rape the angels off the golden reredosBefore we're done. "
25 " Thus were we weaned to knowledge of the WillThat wills the natural world, but wills us dead. "
26 " Fort of the Dane,Garrison of the Saxon,Augustan capitalOf a Gaelic nation,Appropriating allThe alien brought,You give me time for thought. "
― Louis MacNeice , Collected Poems of Louis MacNeice
27 " SnowThe room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window wasSpawning snow and pink roses against itSoundlessly collateral and incompatible:World is suddener than we fancy it.World is crazier and more of it than we think,Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portionA tangerine and spit the pips and feelThe drunkenness of things being various.And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for worldIs more spiteful and gay than one supposes— On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands—There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses. "
28 " Close and slow, summer is ending in Hampshire,Ebbing away down ramps of shaven lawn where close-clipped yewInsulates the lives of retired generals and admiralsAnd the spyglasses hung in the hall and the prayer-books ready in the pewAnd August going out to the tin trumpets of nasturtiumsAnd the sunflowers’ Salvation Army blare of brassAnd the spinster sitting in a deck-chair picking up stitchesNot raising her eyes to the noise of the ‘planes that passNorthward from Lee-on-Solent. "