Making way for Grace, Louis MacNeice and his poetry

Astrology by Louis MacNeice. That’s the title. I took a flyer on this book because I know the poet. But the astrology never mentions his poetry, but it does quote a lot of poets on the stars. Is that the connection?

Read more: Making way for Grace, Louis MacNeice and his poetry

 It rather bothered me, reading this astrology book. It’s not bad and does cover a lot of ground with few errors. I wondered why he wrote it? I decided to read a biography on him by Jon Stallworthy ¹ Stallworthy, Jon, Louis MacNeice, W.W. Norton & Co., 1995 pg. 462.  Stallworthy is also an editor for Norton of The Norton Anthology of Poetry.    to find that out the truth. ² ibid. pg  463 . It seems it was the same man.

Two pages from the Astrology book by Louis MacNeice. I particularly like the quote, “If astrology is true, why read anything else?” It’s rhetorical btw. He never answers it. Pity that.

 

Carrickfergus was the beginning

“A lonely childhood I was born in Belfast between the mountain and gantries to the hooting of lost sirens and the clang of trams: Thence to Smoky Garrick in County Antrim. Where the bottle-neck harbor cólicas 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.” ‘Carrickfergus’, CP, p. 69  

MacNeice was born in Belfast on September 12, 1907, the son of a schoolteacher who was heartsick that her father had recently died, and an ambitious Anglican clergyman. (“I could hear his voice below in the study,” MacNeice writes of a boyhood memory of his father, “intoning away, communing with God.”)

He was christened Frederick, after the grandfather who left the Catholic Church for the Anglican Church of Ireland, because it allowed their priests to marry. His first name, Louis, was for a family friend. 

MacNeice was called Freddie until entering Oxford when he changed it. 

Shortly after his birth, his father got a post in County Antrim at St. Nicholas Church.. It was problematic for the minister as the parishioners didn’t want an “outsider” and Louis’s mother, Lilly, felt this keenly. She probably transmitted this melancholy to her children because her son’s poetry is all about loss and loneliness. Another factor was medicine being what was. His birth was falsely associated his birth with her uterine tumors.

MacNeice’s mother leaves

“My mother became steadily more ill,” MacNeice says in his memoir. Until “at last she went away [August 25th, 1913, to a recuperative house in Dublin] . The last I can remember of her at home was her walking up and down the bottom path of the garden . . . talking to my sister Elizabeth, and weeping.” When she bordered the train to Dublin, her children never saw her again.  She would die there next Christmas.  

          The  MacSpauldays 

The intervening years were difficult and lonely until he went to  Oxford. He distinguished himself in the Classics. Meeting  and befriending fellow poet  W. H. Auden, this got him into a poetry group with Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis (father of the actor Daniel Day-Lewis) that got called the McSpauldays.¹ by Roy Campbell, a fellow Oxfordian and satirist. Campbell derived the name from the prefixes of their surnames because he felt were “homogenized” all cut from the same cloth: socially (they were homosexuals), politically, (heavily leftist), and poetical. (modernist who used the symbol of nature intermixed with pistons, guns, submarines and other warlike projectiles, poems with lots of sexual innuendo subtext but never explicitly stating anything erotic.)

Pairings are important in the arts and in his chart, the group showed up at important time in life — his advent into adulthood and going away from home. A momentous break, the group a point conjunction between his Part of Friends and the artistic, if melancholy Moon 6 Aries 51, twelfth house.

Outside of the enigmatic Homer & Shakespeare, every artist has a fellow with whom he bounces off ideas, argues, and eventually comes to terms..  Some pairs are quite famous, Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Oscar Wilde and John Ruskin, Matt Damon & Ben Affleck or Tim Burton and his ex-wife Helena Bonham Carter.   While the actual work is produced solitary and alone, the prelude is done via another’s insight. Ask us how we know.

 In 1930, he married Giovanna Marie Therese Babette Ezra (she was called Mary),. As the stepdaughter of Sir John Davidson Beazley the great classical scholar of his generation and a specialist in Attic pottery. MacNeice used some family connections to get a post as classics lecturer at the University of Birmingham. In 1936 he went to teach Greek at Bedford College for Women, University of London. 

Mary, though did not make that move. She deserted him and their son, Daniel, for a lover. Like his mother, she never returned. ²

While there, he had an affair Eleanor Clarke, who was a married woman. and wrote Meeting Point.  Like the relationship, it too is failed, but still considered among his best.  

                        The Lonely-Hearts Poems

And there was another, mimicking the first, a beautiful fellow writer, married and thus safe while he mourned the loss of Mary.  It is through these poems that MacNeice masters loneliness, like a monk’s hair shirt. He had something to remind him and keep him company.

MacNeice’s best work is full of longing, but I sense he is pulling our leg (Mercury is opposite Saturn).

I think it’s an act that he knew would sell reading fellow Irishman John Synge’s plays. They share a conjunction in common and that would have intuitively helped. MacNeice with Mercury conjunct the fixed star Alkaid (the paid “mourners” and Synge’s with Alkaid conjunct Mars. But then everyone has a shtick.³

Sirius next to his Neptune gave a deep insight into melancholy, and eventually, fame., for everyone commiserates with the forlorn. It’s our soft spot.

Making way for Grace

In the end, all these interludes, women, and travel are just ephemeral getaways that last for the duration of the trip and fill up the time.  His poetry is like that too, interludes that fill the Spaces, making way for Grace.  ³ Cardinal Woolsey c. 1530 .
He died from pneumonia a few days before his birthday, September 3, 1963. 

The Astrology book was among the many unfinished manuscripts he left behind.  Marc Edmund Jones left a book on Nodes behind. Another thing he and MacNeice have in common, that and their oeuvre are both housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin.  If you are in the vicinity, drop in; it’s worth your time.

1. During his tenure there, he [J.R. Ackerley}] published colleagues and friends such as Clive Bell, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, Wyndham Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, as well as Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Auden, and C. Day Lewis (or MacSpaunday, as Ian Hamilton refers to them collectively). New Criterion Magazine, “A profligate’s reserve,” BOOKS, November 1999, New York, New York.
   ↩︎
2. This was probably because his own sexual preference and her inability to handle that. His charts suggests he would be more comfortable with someone who had the leanings as himself and would probably make a poor ardent husband . ↩︎
3. The comic Milton Berle aka “Uncle Miltie.” A shtick is Yiddish for gimmick. ↩︎

This post was revised on 27 June 2025.

Footnotes:

• 1
  Stallworthy, Jon, Louis MacNeice, W.W. Norton & Co., 1995 pg. 462.  Stallworthy is also an editor for Norton of The Norton Anthology of Poetry. 
• 2
  ibid. pg  463
• 3
  Cardinal Woolsey c. 1530

Tags: Fixed Star Alkaid, Fixed Star Sirius, Gemini Rising, John Synge, Northern Ireland, Poet, Preponderance In Virgo, September births