In the Faber and Faber 1988 version of Louis MacNeice Selected Poems, Michael Longley uses the poem ‘Thalassa’ as an epigraph, writing “it makes in any case as fit an epigraph as a finale”. The poetic moment is captured by MacNeice himself in his unfinished autobiography The Strings Are False: after coming back to their home in the West, Connemara, MacNeice’s father exclaims “The sea!’” to which MacNeice states “And something rose inside me and shouted ‘The sea!’ Thalassa! Thalassa! To hell with all the bivouacs in the desert; Persia can keep our dead but the endless parasangs have ended” (111). In reference to the Anabasis, the march of ten thousand Greek soldiers fleeing from the Persian King shout ‘The sea!’ or ‘Thalassa’ upon spotting the Black Sea at the end of the long journey home (Rood). MacNeice’s poem then, as Longley realizes, encompasses many of the themes and qualities of MacNeice’s work: the interweaving of classical myth and memories of home. This resonates with Longley as he also studied and incorporates Classics into his work. The Greek soldiers shout ‘Thalassa!’ upon their return home, as Stephen Dedalus does in his return to Ireland in the beginning of Joyce’s Ulysses, offering a similar interpretation for MacNeice’s account with his father and succeeding poem. The same sense of homecoming is found in Longley’s poetry, specifically in the Greek translation poems that distinguish Gorse Fires from his previous work. Louis MacNeice and Michael Longley undoubtedly share similar backgrounds, but their approach to the past and representations of home and family differs through the techniques of parable and translation. MacNeice ends ‘Thalassa’ with “By a high star our course is set, / Our end is Life. Put out to sea.” The all-encompassing ‘our’ is indicative of a universal commonality in the particular, as it becomes a recurring metaphor in his last book of poetry, The Burning Perch, to which MacNeice comments: “I would venture the generalization that most of these poems are two-way affairs or at least spiral ones: even in the most evil picture the good things, like the sea in one of these poems, are still there round the corner” (MacNeice). In both Michael Longley and Louis MacNeice’s works, the sea is constantly reappearing as an image of home, Ireland, where the local and particular is informed by their worldly views. This broader perspective, achieved by modes of translation and parable, allow the past, home, and family to reappear with new significance and re-shape the poetic sense of identity- their attention to detail, naming, and Classic parallels ultimately weave their sense of identity and home with their place in the world, forming their own sense of homecoming. 

Gorse Fires and The Burning Perch appeared after a significant period of time from the preceding collections. Both poets’ returning collections embrace a new, unique style that provides an obscure lens to questions of location, family, and identity. Michael Longley’s contemporary, Paul Muldoon, addresses the treatment of location and family in one of his longer poems, “Immram”, stating ‘My grandfather hailed from New York State’. Introducing his lineage in the beginning of the poem and the following search for his Father provides the outline for a personal journey, one that is also implicitly seen in Longley and MacNeice’s works (Muri 44). They share an Ulster and Protestant background that gives shape to their early poetry, probing their imaginative flee to the West and adoption of English connections (Corcoran keeping 60). The type of self-homecoming seen in the later works serves as an undercurrent to the temporal, abstract subjects of the poetry. This essay will discuss the evolving expressions of family and home from earlier works, characterized by a sense of displacement and alienation from ‘home’ to the imaginative reunion in The Burning Perch and Gorse Fires. Home simultaneously shapes the imagination, and is shaped by the imagination, and these perceptions change once filtered through a worldly perspective. The role of memory in shaping one’s identity, through displacement and reunion, is seen in both poets’ lyrical intensity and acute observation, highlighting the significance of the local, particular from a broader, worldly lens. 

Location is an important aspect in the poets’ works, often building upon memories of, and revealing perceptions of home. In Longley’s earlier collections, “Carrigskeewaun”, addresses the West of Ireland, and although it contains admiration for the landscape, the poem is balanced with somber diction. He appears to be alone and enveloped by the dream-like quality of the place, on the border of memory and fantasy, that invokes a sense of loneliness or erosion: “I am left with only one swan to nudge/ To the far side of its gradual disdain” and “Reducing to sand” which places an emphasis on what was, rather than what is, filling his spot in the place of “all the men who have squatted here”. The corrosion of the landscape matches his receding fantasy and memories: “Steam from a kettle, a tablecloth and/ A table she might have already set” produces an illusory image of home, one that is as unstable and fleeting as the smoke that forms the image. His displacement from home in Belfast is echoed through the separation of past and present, experiencing his ‘home from home’ in the West through the medium of memory and imagination, as the lake’s reflection can “duplicate at any time”. Longley did not produce works from 1979-1991, coming back with “Remembering Carrigskeewaun” in Gorse Fires (McDonald Mistaken 112). This poem rekindles the element of memory in displacing home: “Home is a hollow between the waves...And memory no longer than a day” (McDonald Mistaken 112). While the sense of longing remains for something he cannot fully attain as his own, his idea of home becomes ever-changing. As the Ocean is unstable and shifting, so are the memories and ideas that capture and maintain the idea of ‘home’ in his own mind. His ending encompasses his love for the West, while displacing his home in Northern Ireland: “When the animals come back to me/ From the townland of Carrigskeewaun, / From a page lit by the Milky Way”. The animals, much like his memories of the place, seem to form more of a ‘home’ for Longley than his real home in Belfast. His adoption of the space is reinforced by juxtaposing the small town with the Universal. While they seem to be at odds, the Universal highlights the particular through recognizing the ordinariness that comprises the extraordinariness of the place. 

The role of the parochial and specific in defining a place and creativity is highlighted in Patrick Kavanagh’s “Epic” as he equates first world war to a local farm dispute. Kavanagh writes: 

Was most important? I inclined

to lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin

Till Homer’s ghost came whispering to my mind

He said: I made the Iliad from such

a local row. Gods make their own importance. 102 

It is a sonnet, a conventional a love poem, that becomes a form of adoration for the particular and parochial, weighing it with the same significance as “the Munich bother”. The poem allows one’s narrative to construct its ‘own importance’, especially the importance of a place as distinguished by his name references. Both Kavanagh and Longley possess the vividness of local detail, and also ability to mythologize the local. This allows them to contrast private and public life, validating the importance in the parochial through a broader World perspective. Also it lines with a long tradition of naming places, seen in Kavanagh and Longley, where tremendous affection for a place is shown through the act of naming. Naming a place testifies to its importance as well as imagines it into being. The act of naming is most pronounced in Longley’s poem “The Ice-Cream Man” in Gorse Fires. Here, the ‘local row’ is the murder of “the ice-cream man on the Lisburn road” (102). The adherence to names, starting with a list of ice cream flavors and ending with a list of “all the wild flowers of the burren”, he sheds light on the importance of the particular- things that may be lost or forgotten during the overarching World War. Longley constructs his ‘own importance’ by the act of naming, giving life to the mundane (ice cream and flowers) while recognizing the traumatic effects of war that still infiltrate the ordinary world. The private sphere is not completely safe, yet through lists and names the parochial regains importance and shifts the perception of home. 

On the other hand, MacNeice’s “Carrickfergus” functions differently from “Carrigskeewaun” but also relates to displacement from home. “Carrickfergus” expresses an antagonistic view of home in shaping MacNeice’s identity: “I was the rector’s son, born to the Anglican order/ Banned for ever from the candles of the Irish poor” (24). MacNeice’s sense of displacement arises from the separation from the defined class identities. He views the town from a psychological distance: “I went to school in Dorset, the world of parents/ Contracted into a puppet world of sons/ Far from the mill girls, the smell of porter, the salt mines/ And the soldiers with their guns” (25). His education in England provided a psychological as well as physical distance from the North, seen in his illusory descriptions of ‘puppet world of sons’ and ‘soldiers {growing} from the ground’ that add the child-like, unreal quality to the narrative that evokes the sense of distance. While England gives MacNeice a new perspective on “Carrickfergus”, it also allows him to recognize and pinpoint his displacement in a divided community. Therefore, MacNeice says in The Strings Are False: “From a very early age I began to long for something different, to construct various dream world which I took were on the map… the first of these dream worlds was “The West of Ireland...” (216). Similar to Longley’s “Carrigskeewaun”, MacNeice prized his ‘home from home’ on the West in Connemara. MacNeice could identify with the Nationalist values in the West of Ireland, as well as the removal from conflict and war. Yet, it appears that the West was merely the beginning of ‘the various dream worlds’ MacNeice would use to escape from home. The worlds he entered were not dream-like, but a separate reality from the confined spaces of the North. He traveled to America to teach poetry, then back to England during WWII to work as a broadcaster for the BBC in order to partake in the war effort (MacNeice Strings). When returning to Ireland, in “Carrick Revisited”, he appears to be perturbed by the fact nothing has changed, starting the poem: “Back to Carrick, the castle as plumb assured/ As thirty years ago - which war was which?” (104). The place is lost in time and space, unchanging and unaware of reality, reinforced by the question ‘which war was which?’. His experience elsewhere provides a new view of his home, one that is static and enveloped in its own world. He writes: 

Time and place- our bridgeheads into reality

But also its concealment! Out of the sea

We land on the Particular and lose

All other possible bird’s-eye views, the Truth

That is of Itself - but not for me. 104

Here, the ‘particular’, like “a belated rock in the red Antrim clay”, becomes monotonous and confining, threatening to other perspectives that MacNeice alludes to in ‘all other possible bird’s eye views”. Jon Curley argues that “he discovers nothing certain in the poetic revisiting of homeland” (51). Yet, as MacNeice separates himself, ‘but not for me’, he does discover a major flaw- he is more aware of the other views or worlds that his homeland seems to exclude by existing in its own vacuum. Therefore, in his ‘topographical frame’ he is able to distinguish between the two separate spaces and the inherent fault in the immutability of the place, and define what is missing. In a section from Letters from Iceland, MacNeice writes “In short we must keep moving to keep pace Or else drop into Limbo, the dead place” (MacNeice). This sense of ‘Limbo’ can be defined as a place, but is also reminiscent of Carrickfergus, therefore motivates his escape from stagnation in order to ‘keep moving’. The same aversion to stagnation is carried over into his newer poems in The Burning Perch through the form of parable. 

MacNeice’s later work in Solstices and The Burning Perch dives into the ever-changing flow, an undefined temporality that allows time and place to disappear. This is seen in “Variation on Heraclitus” where “even the walls are flowing, even the ceiling” (137). The poems take on a physical quality, where “reappearance presumes disappearance” and “it may not be nice / Or proper or easily analysed not to be static”. The poem itself is a sequence of flowing clauses marked by dashes rather than periods, encompassing the ‘flow’ he references. He ends the poem by a declaration: “Since the room and I will escape for I tell you flat:/ One cannot live in the same room twice” (137). It is the essence of movement that allows him to ‘escape’- as seen in “Carrick Revisited”. In The Strings Are False, MacNeice states that “Life is like water and water must always be on the move, it is the only way it can realise its value...For pattern is value and a static pattern dies on you” (127). The embodiment of movement is seen in his writing, for example the poem “The Taxis” uses parable to illustrate flow and change. The poem is marked by repetition of the first line in each stanza, as well as “tra-la”, which displays the constant shifting and moving quality of the taxi. Additionally, the man in the taxi is alone, yet “the tip-up seats were down and there was an extra/ Charge of one-and-sixpence” suggesting the presence (or absence) of other people throughout the various rides (150). Here, ‘reappearance presumes disappearance’ as the space is marked by what is not there, what is noticeably missing. The parabolic treatment of space and time, of things lost in the midst of movement, testifies to MacNeice’s interest in the geometric quality of life, and the necessity of change in life and writing. “The Taxis” suggests a realm lost in a repetitive cycle time, simultaneously defined by loss and the need to move on. The seemingly contradictory ideas, both alone and not alone, comprise the element of “oxymoron” and “irony” that MacNeice defines himself in speaking about the collection (MacNeice writes). The disappearance of time and place, and set of paradoxes destabilize any sense of reality, allowing location to become irrelevant, and the past to infiltrate the present through parable. The world then, portrayed through MacNeice’s own imagination, possesses the spiral-like quality and flow that keeps moving, incorporating his own experience through a broader lens. 

MacNeice himself discusses the use of “Dialectic, oxymoron, irony” in The Burning Perch that holds the two views of self and world in conflict. The Burning Perch, published in 1963 after MacNeice’s death, is reminiscent of his nightmares and fears from childhood, as expressed in his autobiography The Strings Are False (Longley Intro xxi). The “dreamlike” and “parabolic” poems continue throughout his later works, and Alan Gillis comments on ‘All Over Again’: “In many of MacNeice's last poems, the future recedes and the present breaks down into a mortuary of empty signs and the labyrinthine phantoms of the past” (Gillis 119). In “Birthright” MacNeice writes “The minutes, hours, and years went past, / more chances missed than I could count” (154). This relates back to an obscured temporality inducing feelings of loss, which is also seen in the first poem of The Burning Perch, ‘Soap Suds’. This poem focuses on MacNeice’s childhood nightmares and vacuum of lost time. The poem acts as a flashback, beginning with a “brand of soap” and divulging into childhood memories of home, then reverting back to “the hands under the running tap that are not the hands of a child” (145). The sentences run on, mirroring the pace of the ball rolling through the hoops. This represents the time lapsed in a lifetime, as the memories and time become unstoppable, running on and on, the lack of control induces anxiety and feelings of loss, mirrored in “Birthright”. MacNeice’s circular, perplexing style transfers from one poem to the next, as the past overlaps into the present and the self becomes alienated. This is seen in “Deja Vu” as the substance of the poem consists of mundane moments, following “the same bean of coffee” and “selfsame pencil” that comprise the present’s “mortuary of empty signs” (146). MacNeice’s emphasis on the particular, in the succession of ordinary moments, appears to entrap the reader in an indeterminate space that is perplexing, yet predictable and monotonous like the sound of a train on tracks, hence repeating itself without recognition. The repetition of the phrase “It does not come round” produces the spiraling effect MacNeice references himself: “So this double vision must pass and past and future unite”. In this indeterminate space, an undefined temporality, MacNeice is haunted by the “phantoms of the past” Gillis references, but also offers a way out of the labyrinth, as MacNeice himself claims about the poems, “the sea... is still there round the corner”. He exercises control by inserting himself into the narrative, “I will take this selfsame pencil and write”, which becomes a refuge in of itself, offering authority over the endless cycle and ‘phantoms of the past’. His following poem, “Round the Corner” connects his childhood home with the allusion to Greek Mythology. It also mirrors “Soap Suds” and “Deja Vu” by its subtle repetition from the beginning to the end of the poem, neatly tying the two ends together. Beginning with a memory, “tipping the sand from its shoes” and towards the end returning to “when the sand falls out on the carpet” along with the refrain “Round the Corner” matches the circular patterns of the poetry collection. He uses ongoing clauses and changes tenses to “is” rather than “was” at the end of the poem, returning to the present while accompanying the past. Memory functions as a vehicle to carry the past into the present, “Which we remember as we remember”, inviting the negative as well as positive aspects. The sea acts as a refuge, a separate “realm” where “we are all vicarious/ Citizens” and memory and world is unimportant, washed away. The spiral-like quality of his poetry is evident in this subtle repetition and transition of tenses, offering a type of continuum throughout the collection. 

The sense of displacement from his home in Belfast is also traced in MacNeice’s early work with his relationship with his father and religion. Like Longley, MacNeice’s work was influenced by his father’s role as a clergyman and a soldier in the war. In The Strings Are False he mentions his fear of his Father’s communion with God, which reappears in poems such as “The Blasphemies”, and the politics of the house also appeared to influence his view of home and family (MacNeice Strings 38; Longley Intro xiv). In the Field Day review, David Fitzpatrick makes an argument that “the Father that Louis MacNeice put behind him as a rebellious adolescent, and re-embraced as a tormented adult, was not in my view the liberal, non-sectarian nationalist with whom MacNeicians have become so familiar. During Louis’s early childhood, Frederick remained a conventional all-Ireland unionist and Orangemen” (160). In light of Fitzpatrick’s argument, Louis MacNeice’s early poetry, such as Carrickfergus, which reflects a resistance to, and alienation from Protestant Unionists views, shifts in his later collections and post-war period. A familiar sense of detachment is seen in earlier poems such as ‘Valediction’ and ‘Belfast’ where he becomes “holiday visitor” in his own Country (Gillis 13). In later poems MacNeice shifts from fear and displacement to acceptance, adopting a fluid, repetitive style that counteracts the stagnation that haunts his idea of ‘home’. This is noticeable in the poem “The Truisms” from Solstices. MacNeice begins the poem with: “His father gave him a box of truisms/ shaped like a coffin, then his father died” (140). The first part of the poem reflects the aversion to his Father’s religion while growing up, as he uses the metaphorical and geometrical, ‘shaped like a coffin’, to represent the dark feelings he had as a child as stated in his autobiography. The parable reflects his real life experience in leaving home and leaving “the truisms behind him” to meet the outside world:

Till through disbeliefs he arrived at a house

He could not remember seeing before, 

And he walked straight in; it was where he had come from

And something told him the way to behave. 

He raised his hand and blessed his home; 

The truisms flew and perched on his shoulders

And a tall tree sprouted from his father’s grave” (141). 

In opposition to his earlier fear and revulsion, his experience in the outside world marked by ‘love’ and ‘war’ and “Sodor, disappointment, defeat, betrayal” comprised the ‘disbeliefs’ that led him back to the house. Although this analysis cannot fully encompass the complexity of MacNeice’s relationship with his father, as Fitzpatrick points out that many aspects of the story MacNeice omitted, it can be concluded from his parabolic style that his relationship with his father later in life was more secure. His experiences while away became part of the reason he returned, but also gave him a new perspective on his home and father, as seen in the blessing and Truisms flying on his shoulder in a welcomed reunion. The “Truisms” act as birds, and the reference to a tree sprouting is indicative of the healthier relationship and connection to father, as with nature (Grennan 157). The tree specifically can represent new life, or in MacNeice’s case an adoption and continuation of his father’s beliefs, as Fitzpatrick suggests may be the ‘different self’ that MacNeice appears to reject and displace himself from in earlier works. “The Strand” also navigates coming to terms with his deceased father and the flux in identity seen in “The Truisms”. MacNeice writes about his father’s West: 

It was sixteen years ago he walked this shore

And the mirror caught his shape which catches mine

But then as now the floor-mop of the foam

Blotted the bright reflections- and no sign

remains of face or feet when visitors have gone home. 105

His “steps repeat” his father’s, using the image of a “mirror of wet sand” to reiterate his reunion with his father. Like the tree in the “The Truisms” the metaphor of footprints aligning and the shore reflecting is used to convey a reunion of past and present. Again, returning to the idea of reappearance presuming disappearance, and the present holding a “mortuary of empty signs”, the past overlaps into the present through MacNeice walking in his father’s place, yet the disappearance of his reflection upon the shore, like his father’s, points back to the ambiguity and pessimism seen in “The Taxis”. Repetition is apparent through the image of a mirror and footsteps, showing movement and offering a type of continuum. Yet, as ‘no sign remains’ on the shore, the end of the poem is tainted by a sense of loss. Now that he is in the perspective of his father, proposed by the space of the West, his “metaphysical” imagination may propose the death of his father in the last lines (Longley Intro xvi). The place carries the memory of his father, but it is not sufficient, therefore meaning is lost as the cycle continues in MacNeice’s mind. 

In his poetry, Longley’s relationships with others are in connection to the land and all it represents. Similar to MacNeice’s representation of his father, “In Memoriam” and “Wounds”, focus on Longley’s father’s experience in war and death. In “In Memoriam” memory and history become tangible or moldable features: “These words I write in memory. Let yours/ And other heartbreaks play into my hands” (18). Scholar Peter McDonald points out in Longley’s poetry that “Home both is and is not private in this respect: it is a place where past and present are liable to fold into one another, and into which death can enter” (McDonald Mistaken 133). By including ‘other heartbreaks’ Longley extends ‘home’ beyond the private sphere, becoming a voice for his father and the “broken soldiers” (Longley 18). His father’s experience in the war pulls the outside world inside of the private sphere, which affects Longley’s imagination seen through his multiple heartbreaks. Also, to show how the outside influences invaded his home life he personifies death as “a visitor who hung about” (Longley 19). Here, external forces, represented by the war and his father’s death, threaten the comfort and safety of home- while his father was in “No Man’s Land” he “was held secure”. He creates a psychological distance between the self and the space, divided by the physical and mental barrier of ‘home’. This relates to MacNeice’s treatment of Carrickfergus and mental separation from the location. This sense of distance continues in “Between Hovers” in Gorse Fires between himself and others (McDonald Mistaken 123). This poem also ruminates on death, in the form of a neighbor, badger, and otter, so that the space is marked by deaths, creating an absence, or psychological distance for Longley. For his neighbor, he places an emphasis on naming the burial place and “the townlands he’d wandered tending cows and sheep” which expresses the connection “Joe O’Toole” had with the land, as well as highlights his own alienation: “I watched a dying otter gaze right through me/ At the islands in Clew Bay, as though it were only/ between hovers and not too far from the holt” (87). This indeterminate space, “between hovers”, forms a sense of alienation from the land, where as his neighbor is deeply connected to the land, to the point his identity is informed by it. Therefore, home for Longley is not defined by the land, and like MacNeice, it is separation from home that informs their sense of identity. 

Longley’s choices in the Selected poems also sheds light on his own resonance to MacNeice’s versions and perversions of family and home. He includes “The Once-in-Passing” from “A Hand of Snapshots” where MacNeice writes “Born here, I should have proved a different self” (127). It may be that Longley resonates with the sense of ‘Limbo’ and displacement that MacNeice wants to escape, choosing excerpts and poems that revolve around the central theme of home and identity. He also includes a section from “Day of Returning” that takes on the perspective of Odysseus on Circe yearning for his return home: “Aye, it is time/ I heard the bleat of my goats and smelt the dung of my cattle” (117). He is done with his journey, and wishes to return to the ordinary aspects of home. While MacNeice seems to resist ideas of ‘home’, he develops his own sense of homecoming later on, as seen in the adoption of Odysseus’s first person narrative. It is also indicative of “Thalassa”, writing “Here could never be home, / No more than the sea around it. And even the sea/ Is a different sea around Ithaca” (117). The different sea is suggestive of MacNeice’s life in London and America, where the experiences teaching, then working amidst the brutality of war influenced his perception of home. Now he longs for the ‘sea’ of his home, which is inevitably different after the years away. Longley would identify with this passage’s classical allusion and translation that mirrors his own, suggestive of his own ‘returning’. 

 In Gorse Fires, Longley uses translation of Homer’s Odysseus to represent aspects of his own family and home, to which he comments: “Homer enabled me to write belated lamentations for my mother and father” (Longley One 324). In “Laertes”, his new style is captured by the translation of Odysseus’s Homecoming into modern, vernacular verse. Longley’s attention to detail describing Laertes as “patched and grubby, leather gaiters protecting his shins” adds to the colloquial, personal nature of the poem, as if it were Longley’s own story (94). His attachment to and use of the classics can also serve as a parable for his own life. In Odysseus’s return he writes: “So he waited for images from that formal garden, / Evidence of a childhood spent traipsing after his father” Longley may identify with this aspect of Odysseus’s journey in context of his father’s absence at war (94). Longley’s attachment to, and use of the Classics is the intersection of the local and universal aspects that were separated in his earlier works. While “Carrigskeewaun”, “In Memoriam”, and “Between Hovers” all touch on the subject of loss and may be defined by separation or displacement, the translation poems serve as a union between Longley and the past, loss, and homecoming as the Greek allusions resonate with his own sense of homecoming. Specifically, in the poem “Homecoming” the universal is highlighting the particular, as he adds uniquely local elements such as “moorings”, “cove”, “a footpath for the Gods”. These compose a local vernacular that prompts the aspect of self-recognition. Therefore, Longley identifies with the ‘homecoming’ he writes about, not only returning to poetry in his new collection but also to a past that finds new meaning and light through the Universal story. MacNeice also shares this sense of Homecoming, expressed in his recollections of his father and precarious, perplexed style in his later poetry.  

The ‘journey’ seen in Longley and MacNeice’s work is shaped by their classics background, as well as childhood home in Northern Ireland. At the end of The Strings Are False, MacNeice gives a parable about a “seventh son of a seventh son” that leaves his home and Father, the only place he’s ever known, finding himself “in the country of prisms and fountains in the middle of which there is a lake of ice and figure skating in the middle of the lake” (205). When he returns, MacNeice concludes: “He was back in his father’s house where everything had always been the same. But now everything was different” (206). MacNeice identifies with this story as it appears in “The Truisms” and courses throughout his poetry. Both Longley and MacNeice were shaped by their outside experiences, but their return to ‘home’ like the seventh son, like Odysseus, gives them a new perspective on aspects of home they may have resented or felt displaced from before. Through translation, parable, naming, and repetition, Longley and MacNeice find their own way to return to home through the imagination. As the past resurfaces, family and the particular take on new meaning by encompassing a broader world view. Yet, MacNeice’s persistence on movement disables him from remaining home, therefore he pursues more of the world outside of home at the end of his autobiography: “At the New Year I crossed to London, then went on to America. I wanted to see if the fountains were still working and the skater still skating on the lake” (215). 

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