Skip to content

Upon the decks they take beef-tea
Who are so free, so free, so free,
But down the ladder in the engine-room
(Doom, doom, doom, doom)
The great cranks rise and fall, repeat,
The great cranks plod with their Assyrian feet
To match the monotonous energy of the sea.

— Louis MacNeice Poems (1937)

Another quote →

More quotes by Louis MacNeice

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

Poems (1937)

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.

Poems (1937)

Under the coffered gilt the court historian
Turns the mothy silks that time has left him.

Poems 1925–1940 (1940)

Holidays should be like this,
Free from over-emphasis,
Time for soul to stretch and spit
Before the world comes back on it.

Letters from Iceland (1937)

In my childhood trees were green
And there was plenty to be seen.

Plant and Phantom (1941)

All Louis MacNeice quotes →

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Louis MacNeice (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.