Louis MacNeice

“The sunlight on the garden / Hardens and grows cold, / We cannot cage the minute / Within its nets of gold.”

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

“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.”

“I am not yet born; O hear me. / Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the / club-footed ghoul come near me.”

“It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw, / All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.”

“Let the dog see the rabbit.”

“Down the road someone is practising scales, / The notes like little fishes vanish with a wink of tails.”

“A city built upon mud; / A culture built upon profit.”

“By a high star our course is set, / Our end is Life. Put out to sea.”

“Why do we like being Irish? Partly because / It gives us a hold on the sentimental English.”

“Poetry in my opinion must be honest.”

“And I envy the birds of the air, who are not so trapped in their ego.”

“The poet is a maker, not a retail trader.”

“Good-bye, now, Plato and Hegel, / The shop is closing down.”

“A smell of petrol in the street, a smell of rotting cabbage.”