Rugby Football Excursion

The poem recounts an excursion taken by MacNeice from London to Dublin, in order to watch a rugby football match at Lansdowne Road stadium.

MacNeice does not specify the actual occasion, but the details provided in the sixth stanza - "Eccentric scoring - Nicholson, Marshall and Unwin, / Replies by Bailey and Daly" - establish the match as a rugby football international between Ireland and England in the 1938 Home Nations Championship, played on 12 February 1938.

After the match, as MacNeice recounts, he had "tea and toast with Fellows and Bishops" in a Regency room overlooking St Stephen's Green, before taking "a walk through Dublin down the great / Grey streets broad and straight and drowned in twilight".

And then a walk through Dublin down the great Grey streets broad and straight and drowned in twilight, Statues of poets and Anglo-Irish patriots— High lights of merged traditions.

[6] Hynes quotes a passage from Zoo (1938), written the same year as Rugby Football Excursion, in which MacNeice describes reacting with delight to (among other things) "Moran’s two classic tries at Twickenham in 1937".