This Video Poem Of Dublin Will Inspire You

We’ve seen all sorts of slick videos highlighting Dublin using the latest techniques like time lapse, drones and high production values. The latest released this week uses words as a way of showing off this wonderful city of ours. In this beautiful video, Dublin slam poet Stephen James Smith recites, Louis MacNeice’s poem, ‘Dublin’ the poem over a series of stunning, thought-provoking images of the city. Very captivating and moving piece of work that we think you’ll agree captures Dublin to perfection.

Grey brick upon brick

Declamatory bronze

On somber pedestals

O’Connell, Grattan, Moore

And the brewery tugs and the swans

On the balustraded stream

And the bare bones of a fanlight

Over a hungry door

And the air soft on the cheek

And porter running from the taps

With a head of yellow cream

And Nelson on his pillar

Watching his world collapse

This never was my town

I was not born or bred

Nor schooled here and she will not

Have me alive or dead

But yet she holds my mind

With her seedy elegance

With her gentle veils of rain

And all her ghosts that walk

And all that hide behind

Her Georgian facades

The catcalls and the pain

The glamour of her squalor

The bravado of her talk

The lights jig in the river

With a concertina movement

And the sun comes up in the morning

Like barley-sugar on the water

And the mist on the Wicklow hills

Is close, as close

As the peasantry were to the landlord

As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish

As the killer is close one moment

To the man he kills

Or as the moment itself

Is close to the next moment

She is not an Irish town

And she is not English

Historic with guns and vermin

And the cold renown

Of a fragment of Church latin

Of an oratorical phrase

But oh the days are soft

Soft enough to forget

The lesson better learnt

The bullet on the wet

Streets, the crooked deal

The steel behind the laugh

The Four Courts burnt

Fort of the Dane

Garrison of the Saxon

Augustan capital

Of a Gaelic nation

Appropriating all

The alien brought

You give me time for thought

And by a juggler’s trick

You poise the toppling hour

O greyness run to flower

Grey stone, grey water

And brick upon grey brick