darken my door (again), don’t/never

Go away and don’t come back. This expression, today indelibly affixed to Victorian melodrama in which a young woman is thrown out of the parental home for marrying, not marrying, or some other sinful deed, actually dates back much further. The darkening involved is that of one’s shadow across the threshold, a word occasionally substituted for “door.” Jonathan Swift used the term in Polite Conversation in 1738: “I never darkened his door in my life.” It has been a cliché since the nineteenth century, but may be dying out.