A clear, cold winter morning dawns and London’s pigeons, night-shift workers, breakfast cookers, and babies are all up and moving. “O what a busy morning,” abuzz with engines, wires, machines, and butchery: “The housewife . . . Watches the cleaver catch the naked / New Zealand sheep between the legs.” Amid the commerce and commotion, MacNeice finds his mind turning back to his breakup, to lost love no longer recognizable as the love into which he had fallen. Time and busyness and the slow erosion of routine have moved him from the excitement of September and the fresh heartbreak of October to a complacent December chill: “The hypnosis is over and no one / Calls encore to the song. / When we are out of love, how were we ever in it?”
A clear, cold winter morning dawns and London’s pigeons, night-shift workers, breakfast cookers, and babies are all up and moving. “O what a busy morning,” abuzz with engines, wires, machines, and butchery: “The housewife . . . Watches the cleaver catch the naked / New Zealand sheep between the legs.” Amid the commerce and commotion, MacNeice finds his mind turning back to his breakup, to lost love no longer recognizable as the love into which he had fallen. Time and busyness and the slow erosion of routine have moved him from the excitement of September and the fresh heartbreak of October to a complacent December chill: “The hypnosis is over and no one / Calls encore to the song. / When we are out of love, how were we ever in it?”