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.