Louis MacNeice's "Conversation" describes the discrepancy between the outwardly ordinary appearance of some people and the secret "vagrancy" that sometimes surfaces mid-conversation. The secret, socially inappropriate vagrant in the minds of ordinary people typically disappears and hides during conversations, but can momentarily appear in the form of abandonment of common sense, inappropriate emotional intimacy, or swearing. The poem describes this vagrancy as undesirable to the ordinary person: they apologize for it with their eyes, rebuild the common sense in their conversations, and reject the possibility of intimacy that the emergence of the vagrant may have suggested.
MacNeice's poem utilizes an abacbc rhyme scheme in each stanza, and the image of the "vagrant" is an extended metaphor that lasts throughout the poem's three stanzas. The vagrant metaphor conveys the secret and socially unacceptable strangeness and honesty which seemingly ordinary people hide to maintain polite conversation. MacNeice argues that this forbidden "vagrancy" is kept secret but frequently comes out accidentally in polite conversation, only to be rejected and apologized for by the speaker.
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