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 -
Throughout Dublin’s history, it has been dominated by a variety of cultures, including: 
 
 The Viking, after the Norse invasion in the 9th century. The ‘fort’ may refer to the walled city that grew up around Wood Quay in Dublin 8, the original site of Viking settlement. 
 The Norman, whose centre of power was located at Dublin Castle, still inside the walled city. 
 The English and British, who also used Dublin Castle as a military fortification (“garrison”). 
 The “Gaelic nation”, or those who sought independence from Britain at the beginning of the 20th century. Their nationalist rhetoric emphasised certain elements of Irish culture, especially Gaelic language and literature. After independence was achieved, Dublin remained Irelands’s capital despite its being the city where these elements were perhaps least in evidence. 
 
 Here, MacNeice is suggesting that Dublin is able to appropriate all these influences, and maintain its singular identity. 

Dublin