And there was plenty to be seen.
Come back early or never come.
My father made the walls resound,
He wore his collar the wrong way round.
Come back early or never come.
My mother wore a yellow dress;
Gently, gently, gentleness.
Come back early or never come.
When I was five the black dreams came;
Nothing after was quite the same.
Come back early or never come.
The dark was talking to the dead;
The lamp was dark beside my bed.
Come back early or never come.
When I woke they did not care;
Nobody, nobody was there.
Come back early or never come.
When my silent terror cried,
Nobody, nobody replied.
Come back early or never come.
I got up; the chilly sun
Saw me walk away alone.
Come back early or never come.
This moving poem by Louis MacNeice is about the illness and loss of his mother, who died when he was five years old.
"She suffered gynaecological problems, a mental breakdown, which meant she left the family to go into a nursing-home in 1913, and, finally, death from tuberculosis a year later.
The loss of his mother at such an early age had a profound and lasting effect on MacNeice; his sister Elizabeth writes that “His last memory-picture of her walking up and down the garden path in tears seems to have haunted him for the rest of his life”.
“Autobiography”, one of his finest poems, turns this haunting into eerily effective art as it moves from an evocation of the beloved mother,“My mother wore a yellow dress; / Gently, gently, gentleness”,
into the nightmarish aftermath of her going,
“When I was five the black dreams
came; / Nothing after was quite the same”
(Michael O'Neill, University of Durham)
