A long avenue leads to an elegant 19th century church, set on a steep, panoramically inspiring rise, the famous "high ground". The sun is shining; the breeze is kindly, with little threat of rain. The mood of the party gathered by the grave is celebratory, not sorrowful.
After three days of intense discussion, poetry readings and more than 40 scholarly papers, the participants at the Louis MacNeice Centenary Conference stand together at the poet's final resting place here at Carrowdore on the Ards Peninsula.
The setting is beautiful. For internationally-established poets Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, it is far more than a moment of literary history; it is profoundly personal. More than 40 years ago they had stood here as young men, aspiring poets, paying their respects to a mentor.
Heaney remembered the day: "I was the one with the car."
MacNeice - who had attended boarding school in England, studied at Oxford, taught at Birmingham University, worked with the BBC, and had been, as an emerging poet, part of the 1930s generation, a friend of Auden, and a singular literary voice - rests here, in a simple family grave, along with his maternal grandfather, Martin Clesham, his mother, Elizabeth, or Lily, his sister, Elizabeth, and his second wife, Hedli.
The conference at the Seamus Heaney Centre for Poetry - organised by the academic and critic Edna Longley, an authority on MacNeice, whose belief in the poet has been magnificently endorsed by the quality of the dialogue - confirms the variety and range of MacNeice's artistic vision. This is the poet who most closely understood and followed Yeats.
Christ Church, Carrowdore, is important to the MacNeice family. The poet's father, the Rev John MacNeice, had, while studying at Trinity, become friendly with a fellow student, William Carmody, who was, in time, to serve for four years as the rector. For the future poet's mother, then living in Belfast, Carrowdore was a special place.
Inside the church a floral festival had been arranged, with individual displays drawing on lines from MacNeice's poetry. The splendour evoked the closing lines from Flower Show: "Where flowers, whether they boast or insinuate, whisper or shout,/Still speak a living language." (From The Burning Perch, 1963).
Present at the grave, along with MacNeice's daughter, Corinna, who lives in New Mexico, were poet Richard Murphy, academic Terence Brown, and Peter McDonald, editor of the forthcoming New Collected MacNeice. Seamus Heaney read from Visitations.
It was Michael Longley who read Derek Mahon's defining elegy, In Carrowdore Churchyard: "Your ashes will not stir, even on this high ground,/ However the wind tugs, the headstones shake . . .You lie/Past tension now, and spring is coming round/Igniting flowers on the peninsula."
Conscious of the memories and of the years, Longley smiled and said that he felt more happy than sad. Heaney agreed that it was a remarkable moment: "It is moving, very moving."
The party set off for historic Carrickfergus and to the medieval church of St Nicholas, dating back to the 12th century, and built as MacNeice observed " . . . in the form of a cross but denoting/The list of Christ on the cross in the angle of the nave." (Carrickfergus, from The Earth Compels).
Meanwhile, a hectic dash across Ulster brought us to Omagh, where the Sixth Ben Kiely Literary Conference was in session in the impressive Strule Arts Centre, which was opened in June. The writer, who died on February 9th last, was celebrated by a number of speakers.
On interviewing Ben Kiely for his 70th birthday in 1989 I asked him about one of my heroes, MacNeice. Kiely paused and said: "Ah, Autumn Journal, and all the rest . . . Now there's the great neglected poet. He was too English for the Irish, and too Irish for the English, but by God he is a fine poet, a great poet indeed."
Later on Saturday night, in Belfast City Hall, the lord mayor, Jim Rodgers, toasted Louis MacNeice and John Hewitt, both born in Belfast in 1907. Both served literature well, both very different poets from contrasting traditions.
Both had an interest in the visual arts and would have enjoyed the outstanding McClelland Collection exhibition, featuring the work of Gerard Dillon, Colin Middleton and Jack B. Yeats, currently on show at the Strule Arts Centre in Omagh.
