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Throughout his career as a poet, Louis MacNeice, born in Belfast but schooled and resident in England, looks at the western counties of Ireland, and indeed the island itself, as a repository of historical memory, including the western Irish roots of his own family. While the east – that is, continental Europe – is embroiled in the Spanish Civil War and the coming Second World War and is thus seen as a site of significant contemporary action in MacNeice’s work, what action takes place in western Ireland tends to be in the past; both celebratory poems like the “Sligo and Mayo” and “Galway” parts of “The Closing Album”, parts 06 and more ambivalent pieces like “Valediction” and “Neutrality” stress an attachment to the past bred by insularity. Ireland’s concerns, to the expatriate MacNeice, are exclusively local and rooted in ancient history. The Irish Sea separates the island from the broader currents of European history, and it becomes an attraction for tourists from across the water, as noted in “Valediction”. Ireland – particularly the cultural nationalist ideal promoted by the Revival – is a kind of archive, but it is one which has become obscure, as indicated by “the tombs of nameless kings” (CP 181) in “Sligo and Mayo”. The holiday visitors who come to look into the past can no longer comprehend it, as the rest of the world has moved on. The pastoral modes that Yeats and his immediate successors applied to the west of Ireland obscure the violence of the present in favor of an idealized past that MacNeice cannot endorse.

“Like the tombs of nameless kings”: Louis MacNeice’s Western Anti-Pastoral