Poems

Tarbert and its environs was the inspiration for much of MacGreevys poems.

A quiet Sunday afternoon in Tarbert is invoked in Homage to Marcel Proust.Set in childhood, it is introduced by MacGreevy for a recording by Harvard University as follows:

I will begin with a remembrance of my childhood at home in Ireland.The title invokes the name of a writer who I'm afraid was,and still is too long winded for me,but whom everyone around me in the 1920s seemed to regard as a very great figure in literature.So as the pages that I managed to get through were mostly about his childhood,it seemed to me that the use of his name in the title about my poem about my childhood was appropiate enough

Homage to Marcel Proust
To Jean Thomas

The sea gleamed deep blue in the sunlight
Through the different greens of trees.
And the talk was of singing.
My mother, dressed in black, recalled a bright image
from a song,
Those endearing young charms,
Miss Holly, wearing heliotrope, had a sad line,
The waves are still singing to the shore.
Then, as we came out from the edge of the wood,
The island lay dreaming in the sun across the bridge,
Even the white coastguard station had gone quietly to sleep -
it was Sunday,
a chain on a ship at the pier
Rattled to silence,
A young sailor of the island -
He was tall
And slim
And curled, to the moustaches,
And he wore ear-rings
But often he was too ill to be at sea -
Was singing,
Maid of Athens, ere we part…
Looking suddenly like a goddess
Miss Holly said, half-smiling,
'Listen…'
And we stopped
In the sunlight
Listening…
The young sailor is dead now.
Miss Holly also is dead.
And Byron…
Home they've gone and
And the waves still are singing.