Love Quote by Norman MacCaig

Norman MacCaig’s line catches its power from the friction it refuses to resolve: “very gregarious” pressed up against “on my own.” It’s not a confession of inconsistency so much as a neat self-portrait of a poet whose social ease never cancels his need for solitude. The syntax does the work. The “but” isn’t an apology; it’s a pivot, a hinge that admits two appetites without ranking them. MacCaig makes extroversion and aloneness feel like neighboring rooms, not opposing teams.

The second half sharpens the image into something distinctly Scottish and distinctly MacCaig: “the hills.” Not the abstract “nature,” not a picturesque pastoral, but a specific terrain that implies weather, distance, and a kind of moral clarity earned by walking. “On my own” lands with quiet finality, a phrase of chosen separateness rather than loneliness. The subtext is control: in company, you negotiate; on the hillside, you listen. For a poet, that’s not escapism; it’s a working method. The hills become a place where the self can be porous to the world without being interrupted by it.

Context matters here: MacCaig is often associated with the Highlands and with poems that prize precise observation over grand proclamation. This line frames that sensibility as temperament. He’s telling you how the poems happen: the sociable man returns to conversation, but the poet needs an elsewhere where language can settle, where thought isn’t performed but found.