I have some sympathy with Effsee. The first post here struck me as provocatively stupid.

The poem is concerned with the threat to aboriginal cultures from empire - specifically the threat to Hebridean culture between the world wars, but MacNeice was intending the point to be applied more generally. Hence the title "Bagpipe music." Tom Stoppard used this poem in his play "Indian Ink" to illustrate the clash of cultures between the Brits and the subcontinent. There are references ("Blavatsky" etc) to a once-fashionable western preoccupation with guru cults, theosophy etc, and it's voice is that of a Kiplinesque Tommy. (The "glass" in the closing lines is a barometer. I'm not sure if the same term is used in US and Canada.)

Many years ago Luke Kelly sometimes recited the first verse of another MacNeice poem, "Dublin" as a preamble to "Nelson's Farewell." Hopefully this one will not need explaining:

Grey brick upon brick,
Declamatory bronze
On sombre pedestals,
O'Connell, Grattan, Moore...
And the brewery tugs and the swans
On the balustraded stream
And the bare bones of a fanlight
Over a hungry door
And the air, soft on the cheek
And porter running from the taps
With a head of yellow cream
And Nelson on his pillar
Watching his world collapse.