Euston railway station geograph-2197358-by-Ben-Brooksbank

''Rugby Football Excursion'' is a 44-line poem by

Louis MacNeice Frederick Louis MacNeice (12 September 1907 – 3 September 1963) was an Irish poet and playwright, and a member of the Auden Group, which also included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day-Lewis. MacNeice's body of work was widely a ...

. It was written in 1938 and first published in book form in MacNeice's poetry collection

The Earth Compels ''The Earth Compels'' was the second poetry collection by Louis MacNeice. It was published by Faber and Faber on 28 April 1938, and was one of four books by Louis MacNeice to appear in 1938, along with ''I Crossed the Minch'', ''Modern Poetry: A P ...

(1938). The poem recounts an excursion taken by MacNeice from

London London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...

Dublin Dublin (; , or ) is the capital and largest city of Republic of Ireland, Ireland. On a bay at the mouth of the River Liffey, it is in the Provinces of Ireland, province of Leinster, bordered on the south by the Dublin Mountains, a part of th ...

, in order to watch a

rugby football Rugby football is the collective name for the team sports of rugby union and rugby league. Canadian football and, to a lesser extent, American football were once considered forms of rugby football, but are seldom now referred to as such. The ...

match at Lansdowne Road stadium. MacNeice does not specify the occasion, but internal evidence from the poem establishes the match as a rugby football international when

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

defeated

Ireland Ireland ( ; ga, Éire ; Ulster Scots dialect, Ulster-Scots: ) is an island in the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean, in Northwestern Europe, north-western Europe. It is separated from Great Britain to its east by the North Channel (Grea ...

on 12 February 1938, 36 - 14.

Background

Louis MacNeice, like his fellow Irish writer

Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and tragicomic expe ...

, took a keen interest in rugby football. MacNeice played rugby while a pupil at Sherborne Preparatory School and

Marlborough College Marlborough College is a Public school (United Kingdom), public school (English Independent school (United Kingdom), independent boarding school) for pupils aged 13 to 18 in Marlborough, Wiltshire, England. Founded in 1843 for the sons of Church ...

, and later enjoyed watching matches involving Ireland. The Irish poet

Conor O'Callaghan Conor O'Callaghan (born 1968) is an Irish novelist and poet. Biography O'Callaghan was born in Newry in 1968 and grew up in Dundalk. His first novel, ''Nothing on Earth'', was published to acclaim in 2016 and was shortlisted for the Kerry Grou ...

, reviewing the ''Collected Poems'' of Louis MacNeice in ''

Poetry Poetry (derived from the Greek ''poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings i ...

'' magazine, notes that MacNeice left Ireland for boarding school in England at the age of ten and never lived in Ireland again. "However, he always supported Ireland in international rugby matches with England". ''Rugby Football Excursion'' recounts an excursion taken by MacNeice from

, in order to watch a

match at Lansdowne Road stadium. The journey begins by

train In rail transport, a train (from Old French , from Latin , "to pull, to draw") is a series of connected vehicles that run along a railway track and Passenger train, transport people or Rail freight transport, freight. Trains are typically pul ...

from

Euston railway station Euston railway station ( ; also known as London Euston) is a central London railway terminus in the London Borough of Camden, managed by Network Rail. It is the southern terminus of the West Coast Main Line, the UK's busiest inter-city railw ...

: The journey then continues by boat across the

Irish Sea The Irish Sea or , gv, Y Keayn Yernagh, sco, Erse Sie, gd, Muir Èireann , Ulster-Scots: ''Airish Sea'', cy, Môr Iwerddon . is an extensive body of water that separates the islands of Ireland and Great Britain. It is linked to the Ce ...

on the passenger vessel Hibernia, before arriving in

: ( College Park is a

cricket Cricket is a bat-and-ball game played between two teams of eleven players on a field at the centre of which is a pitch with a wicket at each end, each comprising two bails balanced on three stumps. The batting side scores runs by striki ...

ground in the grounds of

Trinity College, Dublin , name_Latin = Collegium Sanctae et Individuae Trinitatis Reginae Elizabethae juxta Dublin , motto = ''Perpetuis futuris temporibus duraturam'' (Latin) , motto_lang = la , motto_English = It will last i ...

.) MacNeice then evokes the atmosphere at Lansdowne Road, where is to be played the rugby football match. MacNeice does not specify the actual occasion, but the details provided in the sixth stanza - "Eccentric scoring - Nicholson, Marshall and Unwin, / Replies by Bailey and Daly" - establish the match as a rugby football international between Ireland and England in the

1938 Home Nations Championship The 1938 Home Nations Championship was the thirty-fourth series of the rugby union Home Nations Championship. Including the previous incarnations as the Five Nations, and prior to that, the Home Nations, this was the fifty-first series of the no ...

, played on 12 February 1938. England led 23-0 at half-time but Ireland improved during the second half, managing to score four tries (the last of which was scored by Maurice Daly, making his first and only appearance for Ireland). England won the match by 36 points to 14, with tries by (among others) Basil Nicholson, Robert Marshall and Jimmy Unwin. Pathé News made a newsreel of this match. The newsreel shows the English and Irish teams running onto the pitch, watched by a huge crowd, followed by various shots of the match in progress. After the match, as MacNeice recounts, he had "tea and toast with Fellows and Bishops" in a Regency room overlooking

St Stephen's Green St Stephen's Green () is a garden square and public park located in the city centre of Dublin, Ireland. The current landscape of the park was designed by William Sheppard. It was officially re-opened to the public on Tuesday, 27 July 1880 by L ...

, before taking "a walk through Dublin down the great / Grey streets broad and straight and drowned in twilight". The poem ends with MacNeice leaving Dublin, taking the boat from Dún Laoghaire back across the Irish Sea to England.

Structure

''Rugby Football Excursion'' is a poem of eleven

stanza In poetry, a stanza (; from Italian language, Italian ''stanza'' , "room") is a group of lines within a poem, usually set off from others by a blank line or Indentation (typesetting), indentation. Stanzas can have regular rhyme scheme, rhyme and ...

s, each of four lines. The poem does not make use of

end rhyme A rhyme is a repetition of similar sounds (usually, the exact same phonemes) in the final stressed syllables and any following syllables of two or more words. Most often, this kind of perfect rhyming is consciously used for a musical or aesthetic ...

. MacNeice does however make formal use of internal rhyme, rhyming the end of the second line in each stanza with the beginning of the fourth line ("Daly/Gaily", "twilight/High lights"). An additional internal rhyme comes in the last stanza, where "beery" rhymes with Dún Laoghaire (pronounced Dunleary). The poem is autobiographical, and is narrated in the first person by Louis MacNeice.

Themes

The literary critic Samuel Hynes notes how Louis MacNeice "commonly presented himself... as a lover of ordinary pleasures". Hynes quotes a passage from

Zoo A zoo (short for zoological garden; also called an animal park or menagerie) is a facility in which animals are kept within enclosures for public exhibition and often bred for Conservation biology, conservation purposes. The term ''zoological g ...

(1938), written the same year as ''Rugby Football Excursion'', in which MacNeice describes reacting with delight to (among other things) "Moran’s two classic tries at

Twickenham Twickenham is a suburban district in London, England. It is situated on the River Thames southwest of Charing Cross. Historically part of Middlesex, it has formed part of the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames since 1965, and the boroug ...

in 1937".Louis MacNeice: ''Zoo'', p. 40. ''Rugby Football Excursion'' is on one level a poem about the pleasure and excitement of watching a rugby football match: "Lansdowne Road - the swirl of faces, flags, / Gilbert and Sullivan music, emerald jerseys..." However, the poem also explores MacNeice's ambivalent feelings about Ireland and his Irish heritage, a theme which is present in other poems by MacNeice from this period such as Carrickfergus and

Autumn Journal ''Autumn Journal'' is an autobiographical long poem in twenty-four sections by Louis MacNeice. It was written between August and December 1938, and published as a single volume by Faber and Faber in May 1939. Written in a discursive form, it sets ...

. His walk through Dublin after the match takes him past "Statues of poets and Anglo-Irish patriots" but also takes in "Junkshops, the smell of poverty" and "street on street of broken / Fanlights over the doors of tenement houses".

References

* Louis MacNeice, ''

''. Faber and Faber, 1938. * Louis MacNeice, ''

''. Michael Joseph, 1938. * Jon Stallworthy, ''Louis MacNeice''. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.

Notes

{{reflist 1938 poems Rugby Football Excursion Sports poems