The first poem by Louis MacNeice I read was ‘Thalassa’. I was 14 or 15, studying for my Engl. Lit. O level in the early 1980s; the set text was The New Dragon Book of Verse. I already thought that I liked poetry, but the only poet I approved of was Shelley - because of his reputation for atheism and anarchism - and the only actual poems of his I'd read were shorts like ‘Dirge’ ('Wail, for the world's wrong’ was instantly resonant) and ‘The Mask of Anarch/, chiefly, I'm afraid, because of the transgressive (but not wholly understood) thrill of its title. I thought the New Dragon was a bit of a bore. It had worthy things like Gaunt's Dying Speech, of whose sentiments I disapproved, classics like Gray's Elegy, which I quite liked but felt I should resist. ‘Thalassa’ came in a section with the not altogether enticing title ‘Seascapes’: it was set alongside things like ‘Cargoes’ (it would take Paul Muldoon's inspired pastiche of Masefield in the voices of both MacNeice and Auden for me to see any value in ‘Quinquireme of Nineveh’) and James Elroy Flecker's ‘The Old Ships’, another poem whose lushness I enjoyed but felt I ought for some reason to discount.

‘Thalassa’ (CP 783) was immediately different. I was by now used to odd-sounding titles, but the oddness didn't continue into the poem:

Again, I was used to poems which sounded beautiful - that is, whose vocabulary and idiom gave the effect of some sort of linguistic intoxication: ‘I watched in vain/ To see the mast burst open with the rose,/ And the whole deck put on its leaves again’ struck me like this. But what was unusual about ‘Thalassa’ was that such inflated vocabulary - ‘Burgeon oblivious’; ‘every adverse force converge’ - coexisted with something like conversational English. ‘Run out the boat, my broken comrades’ sounded like someone talking directly in a language I understood.