It is a little odd now to think that when it was first published back in the early nineteen-fifties this poem probably seemed quite cutting edge and daring in its vision of a world after nuclear war. That was a time when apocalyptic visions were much in vogue, and the poem has a certain kinship with such prose works as Nevil Shute’s ‘On The Beach’, Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘The Birds’ and some of John Wyndham’s books. All worthy stuff and good reads in their day, but now a little dated, a little decorous – it’s not that the future has necessarily got any less apocalyptic, more that visions of it have got a lot nastier, as, for example, in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’. I think few now would take the line, as Muir does, ‘OK, that’s the end of civilisation as we knew it, but never mind, we can just go back to horse-drawn ploughs and be the better for it’. But this ties in with Muir’s perpetual yearning for a vanished agrarian Eden such as he knew in his Orkney boyhood. If his vision comes across now as dated and impracticable, and if it seems rather quaint that the humble tractor should be seen as the archetype of the evil Machine (shades of R.S.Thomas!), then I guess that such is the risk poets take when they try to build on the shifting sands of current affairs and current technology. Yet for all that I think the poem is interesting not just as a period piece but for a quality of wistful innocence that still has power to move.

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 listen, 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 moulder away and be like other loam.’
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs,
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 ploughs and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Edwin Muir (1952)

This week’s poem by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959) is a rather strange one, even cryptic. What exactly are these combatants? Did Muir have some specific allegorical intent? Could he be thinking, for example, of some smaller country being invaded by its more powerful neighbour, and simply refusing to surrender or die? And so ‘The killing beast that cannot kill/Swells and swells in its fury till/You’d almost think it was despair’. Remind you of anything? But I think it more likely that Muir, with his Christian faith, intended the poem simply as a parable of the eternal struggle between evil, which can seem to have on its side, in Auden’s phrase, ‘the mass and majesty of this world, all/That carries weight and always weighs the same’, and good which can sometimes seem able to offer no more than a passive endurance.

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.

Edwin Muir

I think that this poem by the Scots poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959) is in its way a fine, eloquent piece; the problem I have with it is that in the world as we observe it, more’s the pity, things don’t really work like that. The evil of the concentration camps, for example, was ended not by the patient, passive virtue of those who found themselves in those manmade versions of Hell, but by the application of superior lethal force from outside. But maybe Muir would have said that he was concerned with more than the world as we observe it.

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.

Edwin Muir