Just getting back from Scotland, I thought it would be nice to feature some Scottish poets (besides Don Paterson...)

Edwin Muir (1887-1959), was born in Deerness, Orkney. At 14, he and his family moved to industrial Glasgow, where he worked at a series of menial jobs, and his prelapsarian childhood in remote and rural Orkney figures large in his poetry. He believed Scottish poetry needed to be written in English to be a national literature. He was an important translator as well as poet and critic, and was largely responsible, with his wife, Willa, for bringing Kafka to the English-speaking world. T.S. Eliot edited his Selected Poems. Muir, although a Modern, was not experimental in his methods, and generally worked in traditional rhyme and meter.

Here are two:

The Animals

They do not live in the world,
Are not in time and space.
From birth to death hurled
No word do they have, not one
To plant a foot upon,
Were never in any place.

For with names the world was called
Out of the empty air,
With names was built and walled,
Line and circle and square,
Dust and emerald;
Snatched from deceiving death
By the articulate breath.

But these have never trod
Twice the familiar track,
Never never turned back
Into the memoried day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here
Of the fifth great day of God,
That shall remain the same,
Never shall pass away.


(The above reminds me a little, in its theme, of James Dickey's "The Heaven of Animals")

And this (much-anthologized) poem has long been a favorite of mine. I wanted to compare it to an earlier (rhymed) poem of his, The Horses, but I cannot find it... This sort of plays in and out of loose ip.


The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listn, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
"They'll molder away and be like other loam."
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

We've not discussed Muir before, and it's a great way of returning to your duties, Aliki! Welcome back. I know that Eliot thought him in the front rank of the moderns, as do I. But between the fascinations with MacDiarmid and Sorley Maclean (sp?), Scotland seems not much to celebrate him today.

Dear Alicia

Here is the poem you were seeking. Below I have posted another poem by Muir which uses the image of the horse in yet another way.

It is perhaps interesting that Eliot omitted both from his posthumous Selected Poems.

Incidentally, I think Muir might have preferred to have been referred to as an Orcadian rather than as a Scottish poet.

Kind regards

Clive

Horses

Those lumbering horses in the steady plough,
On the bare field - I wonder why, just now,
They seemed terrible, so wild and strange,
Like magic power on the stony grange.
Perhaps some childish hour has come again,
When I watched fearful, through the blackening rain,
Their hooves like pistons in an ancient mill
Move up and down, yet seem as standing still.
Their conquering hooves which trod the stubble down
Were ritual that turned the field to brown,
And their great hulks were seraphim of gold,
Or mute ecstatic monsters on the mould.
And oh the rapture, when, one furrow done,
They marched broad-breasted to the sinking sun!
The light flowed off their bossy sides in flakes;
The furrows rolled behind like struggling snakes.
But when at dusk with streaming nostrils home
They came, they seemed gigantic in the gloam,
And warm and glowing with mysterious fire
That lit their smouldering bodies in the mire.
Their eyes as brilliant and as wide as night
Gleamed with a cruel apocalyptic light.
Their manes the leaping ire of the wind
Lifted with rage invisible and blind.
Ah, now it fades! it fades! and must I pine
Again for that dread country crystalline,
Where the blank field and the still-standing tree
Were bright and fearful presences to me.

Edwin Muir

The Toy Horse

See him, the gentle Bible beast,
With lacquered hoofs and curling mane,
His wondering journey from the East
Half done, between the rock and plain,

His little kingdom at his feet
Through which the silver rivulets flow,
For while his hoofs in silence beat
Beside him Eden and Canaan go.

The great leaves turn and then are still.
Page after page through the deepening day
He steps, and from each morning hill
Beholds his stationary way.

His lifted foot commands the West,
And, lingering, halts the turning sun;
Endless departure, endless rest,
End and beginning here are one.

Dumb wooden idol, you have led
Millions on your calm pilgrimage
Between the living and the dead,
And shine yet in your golden age.

Edwin Muir


[This message has been edited by Clive Watkins (edited May 20, 2004).]

Alicia,
These animal poems have a great deal of meaning for me in these dreadful times. I think of Swift who used horses in Gulliver to contrast with human behaviour. I will need to read them slowly but the long Horses poem that you posted moved me more than I can say.
I find that the simplicity of animals is almost like a message. Muir has received the message and passes it on in a poignant but strong way.

That goes too for the longer Horses poem posted by Clive.

Thank you so much for all of the poems. I find he is the right poet for me tonight.
best wishes,
Janet

In some of his theological lectures--perhaps the famous one he gave on the BBC during World War II--CS Lewis offers animals in illustration of the cosmic effects of Adam's Fall: unfallen themselves, they nonetheless suffer from human sinfulness. And I have a vague recollection that Lewis actually quotes some lines of Muir on the point.

Animals play a similar role in Lewis's science-fiction novel about a Edenic planet poised on the moment of deciding whether or not to eat the forbidden fruit. Muir certainly captures the same insights about the out-of-timeness of animal life.

Thanks so much, Clive, for posting those. The early Horse poem and the later horse poem seem thematically very related. ("Apocalyptic," and the horses first compared to machines, whereas later farm machines are compared to sea monsters, etc.) I searched in Edinburgh and in London bookshops for either the collected or selected and could not find them. I think they must be out of print. Could this be true?

I'm sure you are right about his preferring the epithet "Orcadian" (I wasn't sure about the adjective)-- I think TS Eliot makes the same distinction.

Alicia,

Amazon.co.uk advertises the Faber Collected (£20 paperback) on a print-on-demand basis. The Complete Poems are advertised on Whitaker's British Books in Print (2003) at £40. I daresay secondhand copies of both could be tracked down (in fact there is reference to this on the Amazon site) but I'm fairly ignorant of the second-hand poetry book trade.

Here is Edwin Muir's The Annunciation (which I originally posted,when Campoem, on last year’s ekphrastic thread) together with his account of its origin:
'I remember stopping for a long time one day to look at a little plaque on the wall of a house in the Via degli Artisti [Rome], representing the Annunciation. An angel and a young girl, their bodies inclined towards each other, their knees bent as if they were overcome by love, 'tutto tremante', gazed upon each other like Dante's pair; and that representation of a human love so intense that it could not reach farther seemed the perfect earthly symbol of the love that passes understanding.'

The angel and the girl are met,
Earth was the only meeting place,
For the embodied never yet
Travelled beyond the shore of space.
The eternal spirits in freedom go.

See, they have come together, see,
While the destroying minutes flow,
Each reflects the other's face
Till heaven in hers and earth in his
Shine steady there. He's come to her
From far beyond the farthest star,
Feathered through time. Immediacy
of strangest strangeness is the bliss
That from their limbs all movement takes.
Yet the increasing rapture brings
So great a wonder that it makes
Each feather tremble on his wings.

Outside the window footsteps fall
Into the ordinary day
And with the sun along the wall
Pursue their unreturning way
That was ordained in eternity.
Sound's perpetual roundabout
Rolls its numbered octaves out
And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.

But through the endless afternoon
These neither speak nor movement make,
But stare into their deepening trance
As if their gaze would never break.


Whatever truth-value one attaches to the story from Christian scriptures, this is (I think) a powerful and affecting piece - which owes much to its strong first line.
Margaret.

Have now fixed the layout,
M.

Yes, Muir considered himself Orcadian more than Scottish. The Orcadian imagination is haunted by time: they have such a history, with the Vikings and all. I don’t have the entire poem, but this fragment is quoted in a wonderful book, An Orkney Tapestry by George Mackay Brown, another distinguished Orcadian poet and writer.


Long since we were a family, a people,
The legends say; an old kind-hearted king
Was our foster-father, and our life a fable.

Nature in wrath broke through the grassy ring
Where all our gathered treasures lay in sleep —
Many a rich and many a childish thing.

She filled with hoofs and horns the quiet keep.
Her herds beat down the turf and nosed the shrine
In bestial wonder, bull and adder and ape,

Lion and fox, all dressed by fancy fine
In human flesh and armed with arrows and spears;
But on the brow of each a secret sign....

Alicia,

We have two copies of the Faber & Faber "Collected Poems, 1921-1951", one soft cover and one hardcover. The harcover is a First British Edition, it's a tad pricey. If you're interested in either let me know in PM.

(robt)

Margaret, thank you so much for posting "The angel and the girl are met." What a magnificent poem! I have read only the anthology pieces, but this more than confirms my enormous regard for Muir.

Henry

Here is the complete text of the fragment you posted:

THE RING

Long since we were a family, a people,
The legends say; an old kind-hearted king
Was our foster father, and our life a fable.

Nature in wrath broke through the grassy ring
Where all our gathered treasures lay in sleep –
Many a rich and many a childish thing.

She filled with hoofs and horns the quiet keep.
Her herds beat down the turf and nosed the shrine
In bestial wonder, bull and adder and ape,

Lion and fox, all dressed by fancy fine
In human flesh and armed with arrows and spears;
But on the brow of each a secret sign

That haughtily put aside the sorrowful years
Or struck them down in stationary rage;
Yet they had tears that were not like our tears,

And new, all new, for Nature knows no age.
Fatherless, sonless, homeless haunters, they
Had never known the vow and the pilgrimage,

Poured from one fount into the faithless day.
We are their sons, but long ago we heard
Our fathers or our fathers’ fathers say

Out of their dream the long-forgotten word
That rounded again the ring where sleeping lay
Our treasures, still unrusted and unmarred.

This was first published in The Spectator (26 Dec 1941) and collected in ‘The Narrow Place’ (1941).

According to an article he published on the politics of 'King Lear' (extracted in the annotations to the scholarly edition of his Complete Poems) Muir saw its theme as the loss of communal values and the emergence of individualism.

Tim,
The poem I posted is one of two poems by E.M. on the theme of the annunciation - and, I think, by far the better. I'm no Muir scholar, but get the impression that his work was very uneven. No wonder, I suppose, in view of his early hardships and severe recurrent depression.

Margaret.

I thought I'd send this one back up.
Janet

Thanks for bringing this back up, Janet.

Do you know this one?

The Child Dying
BANNED POST

Unfriendly friendly universe,
I pack your stars into my purse,
And bid you so farewell.
That I can leave you, quite go out,
Go out, go out beyond all doubt,
My father says, is the miracle.
You are so great, and I so small:
I am nothing, you are all:
Being nothing, I can take this way.
Oh I need neither rise nor fall,
For when I do not move at all
I shall be out of all your day.
It's said some memory will remain
In the other place, grass in the rain,
Light on the land, sun on the sea,
A flitting grace, a phantom face,
But the world is out. There is not place
Where it and its ghost can ever be.
Father, father, I dread this air
Blown from the far side of despair
The cold cold corner. What house, what hold,
What hand is there? I look and see
Nothing-filled eternity,
And the great round world grows weak and old.
Hold my hand, oh hold it fast-
I am changing! - until at last
My hand in yours no more will change,
Though yours change on. You here, I there,
So hand in hand, twin-leafed despair -
I did not know death was so strange.

Mark,
I find him a deep and human poet who always is aware of the larger question. That's a fine example of what I mean.
Janet

Yes, it is a fine poem.

But out of the child's "Nothing-filled eternity" came the world, and us.

And who's to say such miracles only happen once?

Whoops! - this comment probably belongs on the other thread. Sorry.



------------------
Mark Allinson

I've been thinking about Edwin Muir, and I was happy to find this thread in the archives. The poem I am adding to it comes from his later work--from the 1940s or 1950s, I forget exactly.

Does anyone else here know his autobiography? It's unforgettable, and I wish I had it with me here to quote something from it. Muir's profoundly introverted, interior way of seeing permeates it, while at the same time there are some fabulous descriptions of life in the Orkneys and in Glasgow in the early 20th c.


The Incarnate One

The windless northern surge, the sea-gull's scream,
And Calvin's kirk crowning the barren brae.
I think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd's dream,
Christ, man and creature in their inner day.
How could our race betray
The Image, and the Incarnate One unmake
Who chose this form and fashion for our sake?

The Word made flesh here is made word again
A word made word in flourish and arrogant crook.
See there King Calvin with his iron pen,
And God three angry letters in a book,
And there the logical hook
On which the Mystery is impaled and bent
Into an ideological argument.

There's better gospel in man's natural tongue,
And truer sight was theirs outside the Law
Who saw the far side of the Cross among
The archaic peoples in their ancient awe,
In ignorant wonder saw
The wooden cross-tree on the bare hillside,
Not knowing that there a God suffered and died.

The fleshless word, growing, will bring us down,
Pagan and Christian man alike will fall,
The auguries say, the white and black and brown,
The merry and the sad, theorist, lover, all
Invisibly will fall:
Abstract calamity, save for those who can
Build their cold empire on the abstract man.

A soft breeze stirs and all my thoughts are blown
Far out to sea and lost. Yet I know well
The bloodless word will battle for its own
Invisibly in brain and nerve and cell.
The generations tell
Their personal tale: the One has far to go
Past the mirages and the murdering snow.

One of the things I love about Muir is that he often succeeds in universalizing his subject. He sets it against a metaphysical absolute, which gives his writing an unusual breadth and depth.

Coleridge says somewhere that true Imagination is simultaneously familiar and strange, even weird in the old sense of the word: touching on the supernatural, casting a spell. Muir’s poetry often bears that out.

Editing back to copy the following passage from the English poet Kathleen Raine, who was a friend of Muir and wrote some astute essays about him:

When Bush’s war in Iraq started, Peter Davison at the Atlantic Monthly (who has died since), reprinted the following Muir poem.


The Combat

It was not meant for human eyes,
That combat on the shabby patch
Of clods and trampled turf that lies
Somewhere beneath the sodden skies
For eye of toad or adder to catch.

And having seen it I accuse
The crested animal in his pride,
Arrayed in all the royal hues
Which hide the claws he well can use
To tear the heart out of the side.

Body of leopard, eagle's head
And whetted beak, and lion's mane,
And frost-grey hedge of feathers spread
Behind -- he seemed of all things bred.
I shall not see his like again.

As for his enemy there came in
A soft round beast as brown as clay;
All rent and patched his wretched skin;
A battered bag he might have been,
Some old used thing to throw away.

Yet he awaited face to face
The furious beast and the swift attack.
Soon over and done. That was no place
Or time for chivalry or for grace.
The fury had him on his back.

And two small paws like hands flew out
To right and left as the trees stood by.
One would have said beyond a doubt
That was the very end of the bout,
But that the creature would not die.

For ere the death-stroke he was gone,
Writhed, whirled, into his den,
Safe somehow there. The fight was done,
And he had lost who had all but won.
But oh his deadly fury then.

A while the place lay blank, forlorn,
Drowsing as in relief from pain.
The cricket chirped, the grating thorn
Stirred, and a little sound was born.
The champions took their posts again.

And all began. The stealthy paw
Slashed out and in. Could nothing save
These rags and tatters from the claw?
Nothing. And yet I never saw
A beast so helpless and so brave.

And now, while the trees stand watching, still
The unequal battle rages there.
The killing beast that cannot kill
Swells and swells in his fury till
You'd almost think it was despair.

Andrew, your reference to Coleridge's view of imagination being both familiar and strange reminds me of Freud's idea of the "uncanny":

"The Uncanny (Ger. Das Unheimliche-- literally, "un-home-ly") is a Freudian concept of an instance where something can be familiar, yet foreign at the same time, resulting in a feeling of it being uncomfortably strange.

Because the uncanny is familiar, yet strange, it often creates cognitive dissonance within the experiencing subject due to the paradoxical nature of being attracted to, yet repulsed by an object at the same time. This cognitive dissonance often leads to an outright rejection of the object, as one would rather reject than rationalize." - Wiki.

One of my favourite poems by Muir is "The Labyrinth", from the collection of the same name (1949). Here is a passage from that poem:

From "The Labyrinth"

- Edwin Muir (1887-1959)


Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth,
Dazed with the tall and echoing passages,
The swift recoils, so many I almost feared
I’d meet myself returning at some smooth corner,
Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal
After the straw ceased rustling and the bull
Lay dead upon the straw and I remained ...

I could not live if this were not illusion.
It is a world, perhaps; but there’s another.
For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods
Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle,
While down below the little ships sailed by.
Toy multitudes swarmed in the harbours, shepherds drove
Their tiny flocks to the pastures, marriage feasts
Went on below, small birthdays and holidays,
Ploughing and harvestingand life and death,
And all permissible, all acceptable,
Clear and secure as in a limpid dream.
But they, the gods, as large and bright as clouds,
Conversed across the sounds in tranquil voices
High in the sky above the troubled sea,
And their eternal dialogue was peace
Where all things were woven, and this our life
Was as a chord deep in this dialogue,
As easy utterance of harmonious words,
Spontaneous syllables bodying forth a world.

That was the real world; I have touched it once,
And now shall know it always. But the lie,
The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads
That run and run and never reach an end,
Embowered in error – I’d be prisoned there
But that my soul has birdwings to fly free.

Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.
Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth,
And woke far on. I did not know the place.

Andrew, thanks for digging this thread out of the archives, and thanks, Mark, for helping to keep it going. What an amazing poet. The only poems I knew were "The Horses" and "The Combat", which I read ages ago in some anthology, and for some absurd reason I had never searched beyond these. I will have to get hold of The Collected Poems. It seems to me there are very few modern poets who use mythology so powerfully. I get the sense that it is real to him, and not just a literary device.

Thanks, Mark and Gregory. “The Labyrinth” is one of my favorites, too. And that’s an interesting connection, between Coleridge’s comment about imagination and the Freudian concept of “the uncanny.” When I get a chance I am going to do some digging in Hillman to see what he says about it--he must comment on it somewhere. The royal road of dreams is something that Muir knew a lot about.

I’ll come back to this later--Muir for me is one of the most appealing and wonderful poets of the twentieth century, and I find myself returning to his poetry over and over again.

Gregory, I’m really glad you like him. I recommend trying to find his Complete Poems, edited by Peter Butter, rather than the Faber Collected. It is more, well, complete, and has a good notes section as I recall (it is with my books in Boston, unfortunately, not here).

And if you are up for a magnificent read, moving and intellectually stimulating, I suggest Muir’s autobiography. The original edition of it was called The Story and the Fable (hence the K. Raine quote above), but now it is simply called Autobiography. His depiction of the Orkneys, the traditional life his family lived there, and his later move to Glasgow and industrialized Europe, is unforgettable. As are his observations about philosophy (from Nietzsche to Plato), his description of his experience in Jungian analysis, and much else. He was a rare human being as well as a gifted writer. And his autobiography gives a lot of insight into why, as you point out, mythology was real to him. It really was.

Before this thread sinks back into the archives again, I wanted to add one little bit of Muir’s criticism, plus another poem.

Somebody in this thread said that Muir was nothing special as a critic. I was surprised at the comment, since for me Muir’s criticism is always worthwhile, if humanity and imagination have anything to do with it. Which I suppose is asking for a lot.

Muir’s best book of criticism is The Estate of Poetry, which came from his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in the 1950s.

This passage is from “Criticism and the Poet,” where he discusses a bit the New Criticism at that time, in particular Cleanth Brooks:

Imagine what he’d have thought of the deconstructionists!

And this is from “The Public and the Poet.”


The Good Man in Hell

If a good man were ever housed in Hell
By needful error of the qualities,
Perhaps to prove the rule or shame the devil,
Or speak the truth only a stranger sees,

Would he, surrendering quick to obvious hate,
Fill half eternity with cries and tears,
Or watch beside Hell's little wicket gate
In patience for the first ten thousand years,

Feeling the curse climb slowly to his throat
That, uttered, dooms him to rescindless ill,
Forcing his praying tongue to run by rote,
Eternity entire before him still?

Would he at last, grown faithful in his station,
Kindle a little hope in hopeless Hell,
And sow among the damned doubts of damnation,
Since here someone could live, and live well?

One doubt of evil would bring down such a grace,
Open such a gate, and Eden could enter in,
Hell be a place like any other place,
And love and hate and life and death begin.

Thank you, Andrew, and you, Alicia, for bringing Muir back to our attention. Too many current critics (including Edna Longley, whose reason for being apprars at times to be to promote her husband's verse) have damned him.