scotlit, 13 days ago

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…

—Edwin Muir, “The Horses”
#Scottish #literature #poetry #Orkney #Modernism #20thcentury #postapocalypse
2/6

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.

scotlit, 13 days ago

“Edwin Muir (1887–1959) is a mysteriously neglected, gorgeous, and emotionally penetrating poet. Of all the many pieces of writing spurred by the Cold War and the threat of nuclear apocalypse, and of the other kinds of 20th century apocalyptic writing, his poem ‘The Horses’ may be the most effective, perhaps because it is the most calm and gentle.”
—Robert Pinsky

#Scottish #literature #poetry #Orkney #Modernism #20thcentury #postapocalypse
3/6
https://slate.com/culture/1999/01/the-horses.html

scotlit, 13 days ago

Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long
Through time and never found eternity,
Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,
You should have fled our ever-dying song…

—Edwin Muir, “To the Old Gods”
#Scottish #literature #poetry #Orkney #Modernism #20thcentury
4/6

scotlit, 13 days ago

One foot in Eden still, I stand
And look across the other land.
The world’s great day is growing late,
Yet strange these fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate…

—Edwin Muir, “One Foot in Eden”
#Scottish #literature #poetry #Orkney #Modernism #20thcentury
5/6

scotlit, 13 days ago

Edwin Muir and a Story of Europe

“Muir’s contact with Europe is significant, however, not only in a personal and literary sense, but also in a wider political context which resonates with our own early twenty-first century times. His travels in the 1920s immediately after the end of World War One, and again at the end of World War Two, tell a story of Europe itself at critical points in its history.”

#Scottish #literature #poetry #Orkney #Modernism #20thcentury
6/6
https://blog.oup.com/2017/05/edwin-muir-story-europe/