Louis MacNeice Quotes

His father gave him a box of truisms Shaped like a coffin, then his father died; The truisms remained on the mantelpiece.

For the last blossom is the first blossom And the first blossom is the best blossom And when from Eden we take our way The morning after is the first day.

The best people never land, sir.

The dark was talking to the dead; The lamp was dark beside my bed.

In my childhood trees were green And there was plenty to be seen. Come back early or never come.

Time was away and somewhere else.

Tonight we sleep On the banks of Rubicon—the die is cast; There will be time to audit The accounts later, there will be sunlight later And the equation will come out at last.

All of London littered with remembered kisses.

Spider, spider, spin Your register and let me sleep a little, Not now in order to end but to begin The task begun so often.

And the gods are absent and the men are still—Noli me tangere, my soul is forfeit. Some are now happy in the hive of home, Thigh over thigh and a light in the night nursery, And some are hungry under the starry dome And some sit turning handles.

It’s no go my honey love, it’s no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever, But if you break the bloody glass, you won’t hold up the weather.

It’s no go the merrygoround, it’s no go the rickshaw, All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow. Their knickers are made of crepe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python, Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with the heads of bison.

The little sardine men crammed in a monster toy Who tilt their aggregate beast against our crumbling Troy.

World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural.

Something of glass about her, of dead water, Chills and holds us, Far more fatal than painted flesh or the lodestone of live hair This despair of crystal brilliance.