By standing in the right spot, and using some imagination, I convinced myself that both Strangford Lough and the Irish Sea are visible from Louis MacNeice's resting place in Carrowdore churchyard, on the Ards Peninsula, Co Down. It's an in-between place, both austere and calm, where one can imagine MacNeice delighting in those shifting patches of sunlight on the hills, which were his recurrent way of remembering and celebrating the Irish landscape without sentimentality.
The church is at the end of a startlingly straight driveway, hemmed in by trees, and cutting a right angle from the road with no regard for the gentle curves of the hills around it. MacNeice's grave is a modest affair, and his family connections with Carrowdore are tenuous enough (his maternal grandfather was buried here).
MacNeice is more often associated with Carrickfergus, where he spent his childhood, and which he recollects as an irredeemable nightmare. But somehow Carrowdore seems a fit resting place for a poet who could never assert his version of Irishness without insisting upon the need to question and qualify who he was and what Ireland had made him. His grave's position between sea and lough allows for hearing, in MacNeice's wonderfully loving and scathing phrase, Ireland's name "ringing like a bell/In an under-water belfry".
Yet the churchyard also insistently reminds us of other discordant sounds from history. Not far from MacNeice is the recent grave of an RUC man, kept pristine and proud, and closer still two Commonwealth soldiers who died one day before Armistice in the First World War.
MacNeice's Irish places are best memorialised by the poets who reclaimed his legacy as their own after his death. Paul Muldoon's poem `History' climbs through the bay window of the room (in Malone House in Belfast, now home to the Arts Council) where MacNeice purportedly wrote his crystalline poem `Snow'.
Derek Mahon paid homage to MacNeice in his elegy `In Carrowdore Churchyard'. Mahon insists several times on MacNeice's inability to "stir" after death, even here. For him, this place embodies the "humane perspective" which MacNeice lived up to. And, standing beside the grave on a crisp spring afternoon, it's hard not to agree that MacNeice's facility for "rinsing the choked mud, keeping the colours new" is in tune with this brittle and fertile place in which MacNeice will always lie "in the future tense".
