Louis MacNeice

In the first taxi he was alone tra-la, No extras on the clock. He tipped ninepence But the cabby, while he thanked him, looked askance As though to suggest someone had bummed a ride. In the second taxi he was alone tra-la But the clock showed sixpence extra; he tipped according And the cabby from out his muffler said: ‘Make sure You have left nothing behind tra-la between you’. In the third taxi he was alone tra-la But the tip-up seats were down and there was an extra Charge of one-and-sixpence and an odd Scent that reminded him of a trip to Cannes. As for the fourth taxi, he was alone Tra-la when he hailed it but the cabby looked Through him and said: ‘I can’t tra-la well take So many people, not to speak of the dog.’

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay-window was Spawning snow and pink roses against it Soundlessly collateral and incompatible: World is suddener than we fancy it. World is crazier and more of it than we think, Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion A tangerine and spit the pips and feel The drunkenness of things being various. And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes— On the tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands— There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

It is patent to the eye that cannot face the sun The smug philosophers lie who say the world is one; World is other and other, world is here and there, Parmenides would smother life for lack of air Precluding birth and death; his crystal never breaks— No movement and no breath, no progress nor mistakes, Nothing begins or ends, no one loves or fights, All your foes are friends and all your days are nights And all the roads lead round and are not roads at all And the soul is muscle-bound, the world a wooden ball. The modern monist too castrates, negates our lives And nothing that we do, make or become survives, His terror of confusion freezes the flowing stream Into mere illusion, his craving for supreme Completeness means be chokes each orifice with tight Plaster as he evokes a dead ideal of white All-white Universal, refusing to allow Division or dispersal—Eternity is now And Now is therefore numb, a fact he does not see Postulating a dumb static identity Of Essence and Existence which could not fuse without Banishing to a distance belief along with doubt, Action along with error, growth along with gaps; If man is a mere mirror of God, the gods collapse. No, the formula fails that fails to make it clear That only change prevails, that the seasons make the year, That a thing, a beast, a man is what it is because It is something that began and is not what it was, Yet is itself throughout, fluttering and unfurled, Not to be cancelled out, not to be merged in world, Its entity a denial of all that is not it, Its every move a trial through chaos and the Pit, An absolute and so defiant of the One Absolute, the row of noughts where time is done, Where nothing goes or comes and Is is one with Ought And all the possible sums alike resolve to nought. World is not like that, world is full of blind Gulfs across the flat, jags against the mind, Swollen or diminished according to the dice, Foaming, never finished, never the same twice. You talk of Ultimate Value, Universal Form— Visions, let me tell you, that ride upon the storm And must be made and sought but cannot be maintained, Lost as soon as caught, always to be regained, Mainspring of our striving towards perfection, yet Would not be worth achieving if the world were set Fair, if error and choice did not exist, if dumb World should find its voice for good and God become Incarnate once for all. No, perfection means Something but must fall unless there intervenes Between that meaning and the matter it should fill Time’s revolving hand that never can be still. Which being so and life a ferment, you and I Can only live by strife in that the living die, And, if we use the word Eternal, stake a claim Only to what a bird can find within the frame Of momentary flight (the value will persist But as event the night sweeps it away in mist). Man is man because he might have been a beast And is not what he was and feels himself increased, Man is man in as much as he is not god and yet Hankers to see and touch the pantheon and forget The means within the end and man is truly man In that he would transcend and flout the human span: A species become rich by seeing things as wrong And patching them, to which I am proud that I belong. Man is surely mad with discontent, he is hurled By lovely hopes or bad dreams against the world, Raising a frail scaffold in never-ending flux, Stubbornly when baffled fumbling the stubborn crux And so he must continue, raiding the abyss With aching bone and sinew, conscious of things amiss, Conscious of guilt and vast inadequacy and the sick Ego and the broken past and the clock that goes too quick, Conscious of waste of labour, conscious of spite and hate, Of dissension with his neighbour, of beggars at the gate, But conscious also of love and the joy of things and the power Of going beyond and above the limits of the lagging hour, Conscious of sunlight, conscious of death’s inveigling touch, Not completely conscious but partly—and that is much.

Time was away and somewhere else, There were two glasses and two chairs And two people with the one pulse (Somebody stopped the moving stairs): Time was away and somewhere else. And they were neither up nor down; The stream’s music did not stop Flowing through heather, limpid brown, Although they sat in a coffee shop And they were neither up nor down. The bell was silent in the air Holding its inverted poise— Between the clang and clang a flower, A brazen calyx of no noise: The bell was silent in the air. The camels crossed the miles of sand That stretched around the cups and plates; The desert was their own, they planned To portion out the stars and dates: The camels crossed the miles of sand. Time was away and somewhere else. The waiter did not come, the clock Forgot them and the radio waltz Came out like water from a rock: Time was away and somewhere else. Her fingers flicked away the ash That bloomed again in tropic trees: Not caring if the markets crash When they had forests such as these, Her fingers flicked away the ash. God or whatever means the Good Be praised that time can stop like this, That what the heart has understood Can verify in the body’s peace God or whatever means the Good. Time was away and she was here And life no longer what it was, The bell was silent in the air And all the room one glow because Time was away and she was here.

If we could get the hang of it entirely It would take too long; All we know is the splash of words in passing And falling twigs of song, And when we try to eavesdrop on the great Presences it is rarely That by a stroke of luck we can appropriate Even a phrase entirely. If we could find our happiness entirely In somebody else’s arms We should not fear the spears of the spring nor the city’s Yammering fire alarms But, as it is, the spears each year go through Our flesh and almost hourly Bell or siren banishes the blue Eyes of Love entirely. And if the world were black or white entirely And all the charts were plain Instead of a mad weir of tigerish waters, A prism of delight and pain, We might be surer where we wished to go Or again we might be merely Bored but in brute reality there is no Road that is right entirely.