Madame Blavatsky makes it in MacNeice's Bagpipe Music

Louis MacNeice · Blavatsky Tributes Series · 4 pages

This short piece begins with a small mystery. Some years ago our editor, listening to BBC Radio Four, heard Blavatsky's name surface unexpectedly in a light-hearted tune in the manner of the nineteen-thirties. An assiduous search to trace the song came to nothing, until the lyrics were finally identified as belonging to "Bagpipe Music" by the Irish poet Louis MacNeice (1907–1963). The poem is reproduced here in full, together with a brief account of MacNeice's life and his literary contribution.

MacNeice's poem is a sharp, tumbling portrait of the appetites of the common man — a catalogue of wants set against a refrain of refusal, in which one thing after another is declared to be no good. Blavatsky appears only once, in the couplet following the two opening quatrains, dismissed in the same breath as the Yogi-Man by a voice that wants a bank balance instead. It is a passing reference and an unflattering one, yet it is also a small piece of evidence: by the nineteen-thirties her name had travelled far enough beyond theosophical circles to serve a satirist as shorthand for otherworldly aspiration, recognisable to any reader without explanation.

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