SOURCE: Hixson, Allie Corbin. “The Natural Poet.” In Edwin Muir: A Critical Study, pp. 137-76. New York: Vantage Press, 1977.

[In the following essay from a scholarly book on Muir's life and work, Hixson suggests that reading First Poems (1925), which Muir published at age thirty-five, alongside The Labyrinth (1949), written after the Second World War, provides an understanding of the development of Muir's “exceptional poetic imagination.”]

                                        … since I came out that day,
There have been times when I have heard my footsteps
Still echoing in the maze. …

—Muir, “The Labyrinth” (1947)

Edwin Muir took up the craft of poetry when he was thirty-five and established himself as an English poet in the interim between his Nietzschean period, which ended with psychoanalysis in 1921, and his divergence from the Lallans poets in the 1930s. He began writing poetry out of a personal need to halt the forward rush of Time:

As if I had no more choice than time, I had walked with my face immovably set forward, as incapable as time of turning my head and seeing what was behind me.

[An Autobiography, p. 193]

He ended as a poet writing out of every person's need to question the heedless propulsion into the nuclear age:

Was it chaos that set us straight,
The elements that rebelled, not we?
Or the anguish never to find
Ourselves, somewhere, at last, and be?

[“After 1984,” 1956]

Time was a major theme in Muir's early poetry and remained important to him in his late development, but the early abstract “enemy” gave way in the major poetry to a preoccupation with its more specific aspects.

His “obsession” with Time and the journey, or the road, may have made it appear to some critics¹ that he was writing the same poem all these years, but the Autobiography and the poetry viewed together reveal otherwise. His experiences from Orkney to Cambridge continue the major poetic theme of the “Story” and the “Fable”—yet his views about the story and his preoccupations as a poet concerned with the fabled history of mankind changed with the changing world. He came close to Wordsworth's ideal poet “who looks before and after.”² After he began work for the British Council in 1942, his poetry became both less personal and freer in technique; and, most noticeably, it grew darker and more pessimistic in theme after his crucial years in Prague from 1945 to 1948. From his first journey to Prague in 1921 until the time of his second residence there, Muir struggled to know himself and to reconcile his memory of Orkney with his anguish in Scotland. After 1948, the primary concern in his poetry is not with himself (or his reputation as a poet) but with the future of the race itself:

No rule nor ruler: only water and clay,
And the purblind peasant squatting, elbows out
To nudge his neighbour from his inch of ground.

[“After a Hypothetical War,” 1956]

In addition to being aware of the impact of external events on the development of Muir's poetry, we should know something of his inner development as well. In We Moderns (1918), the incipient poet in Muir recognized the truth in Nietzsche's tragic vision of life, while the lost Orkney youth in him grasped at the will to power. But the Superman image required that he discount all possible redemption of the present generation, and to dissociate himself from his four family deaths in Glasgow. Psychoanalysis was required to show him that he could not continue to shove to the back of his mind the loss of his family, or to shut out the poverty and misery all around him. But psychoanalysis could not provide a philosophy to fill the void left by the expulsion of the Superman. Muir was looking for such a philosophy when he began to survey contemporary writers in Transition (1926), and in his conclusion he indicates that, for a time, he embraced Wordsworth's vision of science as a potential “inmate of the household of man.”³

It is the measure of the mere intellectuality of the evolutionary theory of creation that it has never become a picture. It is hypothesis, not imaginative reality. Yet ‘the remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, the Mineralogist,’ to quote Wordsworth again, ‘will be as proper objects of the poet's art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.’ The discoveries of modern science are certainly ‘material to us as enjoying and suffering beings.’ They have revolutionized our conception of the three problems which chiefly concern poetry and mankind: the problems of creation, destiny and the nature of life: how we came to be, whither we go, and what we are. The reason why the poet has not taken these discoveries as the objects of his art can only be because they are not really familiar to him, because while he accepts them intellectually, his unconscious has not accepted them.

[Transition: Essays on Contemporary Literature, pp. 196-97]

When Muir wrote in Transition that it was the task of the poet to make “the universe of science … as real to us as the universe of the Bible was to our predecessors,” he was closer to a humanist philosophy than to anything else, since he thought in terms of the development of natural man in a material world. But a decade later, his disillusionment with Scottish provincialism and his fears engendered by prewar tensions in Europe made him less certain that the universe of science could be evoked by the poet, or even that it was desirable to do so. The “remotest discoveries of the Chemist” prophesied by Wordsworth did not include chemical warfare, or the possibility of a nuclear holocaust, revealed in the Second World War. Like Wordsworth's, Muir's childhood was “fostered” by “beauty and fear,” and he could have been another in a long line of nature poets celebrating the “solitary hills” of youth and the kinship with animals. But World War II and postwar Prague blotted out this tendency. Muir was much too intellectual a poet to envelop himself in a communion with nature when mass destruction of traditional cultures, and perhaps of all humanity itself, seemed to be the inevitable result of the advance of dehumanized science.

He had been turned down for service in the First World War and was too old for the second, but through his British Council lectures to soldiers in Edinburgh during the war, and in his associations with contemporary poets and writers (particularly Stephen Spender), he kept alive his hope for the return of universal harmony. The desire to be more actively involved in restoring normal life to the people of Prague (for whom he had special admiration) led him to request transfer there by the British Council in 1945. It was an assignment which brought personal disaster but also determined the major turning in his career as a poet. This can only be illustrated by a close reading of the poetry, particularly that written in the decade 1939 to 1949, along with the Autobiography (1954).

A brief summary of this transitional phase here will indicate that the major change began in The Narrow Place (1943), continued in The Voyage (1946), and reached a striking climax in The Labyrinth (1949). This was the most important decade in the development of Muir's poetry since it covers the period in which he found the natural shape his poetry should take.⁴

In The Present Age (1940), he wrote that in all the great ages of poetry there had been a balance between two kinds—the natural and the artificial:

The natural poet writes out of his direct experience of life; the artificial poet out of that and his knowledge of poetry. There is a balance so long as his knowledge of poetry illumines and penetrates his experience of life; the balance is lost when poetry, or the mental and emotional habit which his acquaintance with it has produced in him keeps him from seeing and expressing his experience freely.

[The Present Age from 1914, p. 48]

He judged much of the poetry then being written as “artificial,” with Eliot, Pound, and Yeats producing a great deal of both kinds and the lesser poets (imitators of Eliot) turning out the artificial type. Although he recognized that a poet must write from whatever inspires him, he defined the “original” poet as one who shows genuine development in poetry which is both derivative and independent. In 1940, Muir thought Eliot's poetry bore this “double character” and I find it characteristic of Muir's poetry as a whole if we qualify the adjective “derivative.”

Although we are reminded frequently when reading his poems of particular traditional or contemporary associations, Muir belonged to no movement and cannot be limited to any one dominating influence. The “derivative” nature of his poetry is not that which requires references to the Golden Bough or some other specific source. Nor is there any transference of vocabulary or phrases from foreign literatures (I am considering the major poetry, not the early experiments in Scots such as “Ballad of the Flood”⁵). His verse is derivative indirectly from Greek and Hebraic myths, from Norse and Celtic legends, from English literature, and from German writers. Directly, it derives from contemporary European culture and from personal experiences extending from Orkney to Boston. Muir does not give us poetic versions of obscure myths but chooses the well-known figures—Odysseus, Oedipus, Theseus, Prometheus—and transforms the narrative or conflict into a contemporary realization. The mythical Theseus, for instance, in “The Labyrinth” becomes “I,” the poet who is also modern man looking for a way out of the maze.

Although he began writing poetry from an inner psychological need, Muir believed with Eliot that poetry should be of some “use”:

                                                                                I have picked up wisdom lying
Disused about the world, available still,
Employable still, small odds and scraps of wisdom
A miscellaneous lot that yet makes up
A something that is genuine, with a body,
A shape, a character, more than half Platonic
(Greek, should I say?), and yet of practical use

[“Soliloquy,” 1949]

In 1934, along with other practicing English poets, he was asked to respond to a questionnaire concerning the methods of modern poetry. To the question, “Do you wait for spontaneous impulse before writing a poem; if so, is this impulse verbal or visual?” Muir replied:

There is always an impulse, but the writing of the poem generally comes a good while later with me, and so is in a sense deliberate. I generally start from some visual image, and I think that when that happens my poetry is likely to be better than when I elaborate some phrase that has caught my fancy.⁶

Nor was it often a visual image “recollected in tranquility,” but the other way around: an inner vision set up a perturbation of spirit which brought tranquillity only when the impulse was given external shape. In most instances the stimulus to Muir's poetry came from immediate experience. “The Combat” (frequently selected for anthologies by C. Day-Lewis and others after its first appearance in The Listener in 1947⁷) is a good illustration. It originated in a disturbance of spirit brought on by a contemporary conflict that must be related in some detail. It shows that Muir is a “natural” poet, in the sense that he writes primarily out of personal experience transmuted by an exceptional poetic imagination.

“The Combat” was written in postwar Prague. During his work for the British Council in Edinburgh, beginning officially in 1942, Muir established a reputation as a successful cultural administrator (he had persuaded Sir Herbert Grierson, T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, John Betjeman, Hugh Kingsmill, among others, to speak to audiences in the international houses run by the Council). As soon as the war ended in 1945, he was given the post of director of the British Institute in Prague. Perhaps remembering his impulse to write poetry on his first visit to Prague in 1921, he anticipated an even more rewarding visit among friendly people with constructive work to do. But such was not to be the case. For the first two years, he did find satisfaction in working freely with everyone connected with the Council and with citizens of the war-torn city in general. He was invited to organize English literature classes for the Charles University in Prague. Even though he had to prepare texts for use by the students (the German occupation had destroyed many libraries), Muir found his students eager to learn about Milton and other great English writers. He was greatly handicapped by the lack of books and had to depend largely on his own knowledge of these writers for the content of the courses. The Charles University showed its appreciation by awarding him an honorary Ph.D. in 1947, on his sixtieth birthday.

Since their arrival, political tensions had been apparent, but Edwin and Willa, who valued personal relations above political programs—therefore often finding themselves counter to the mainstream—ignored as long as possible the cold-war buildup which had begun immediately upon the cessation of fighting and which culminated in the Communist Putsch of 1948. The Muirs had made friends in all quarters of the city⁸ and were particularly intimate with Lumir Soukup (secretary, later executor of Jan Masaryk's papers) and his Scottish wife, both of whom they had met in Edinburgh. For Edwin, it all added up, ultimately, to another controversy, but this time with far more serious consequences. When he returned to England in August, 1948, he lapsed into a state of depression which exceeded anything suffered since “Fairport.”⁹

A knowledge of Muir's second residence in Prague is necessary not only to an understanding of the “Combat,” but to an appreciation as well of a great many of the poems in The Labyrinth (1949) and One Foot in Eden (1956). Although he received his first honorary degree in Prague and felt successful at the outset in his Council work, he was totally unprepared for the sudden outbreak, the presence of “spies” in his classes, a shakeup in the staffing of the British Council itself, and for the atmosphere in general which brought his usefulness as a goodwill ambassador of culture to an abrupt end.

The putsch came in February of 1948. In the fall of 1947 when the “Writers Circle” (students and friends) was still meeting regularly in the Muirs' living room, and its members spending more time debating the necessity of supporting or opposing the Communists than in creative writing, Muir wrote and read “The Combat,” which he had composed for the group:

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.
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
This was the very end of the bout,
But that the creature would not die.
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.(10)

We know, only because we are told so by Willa, who says they drew comfort from the reminder that the armored “killing beast” could not kill humanity “humble and battered as that might be,”¹¹ that this poem was prompted by tensions in Prague; but it is in Muir's autobiographical account of a dream (he does not mention the poem associated with it) that we recognize the images. Furthermore, the dream itself took Muir back to Wyre when, as a child of “five or six” out walking with his aunt, he was frightened by the sudden flight of a heron which had just been pointed out to him:

We went towards it, but as we came nearer it spread its tail like a peacock, so that we could see nothing else. As the tail grew I saw that it was not round, but square, an impenetrable grey hedge of feathers; and at once I knew that its body was not a bird's body now, but an animal's, and that behind that gleaming hedge it was walking away from us on four feet padded like a leopard's or a tiger's. Then, confronting it in the field, there appeared an ancient, dirty, earth-coloured animal with a head like that of an old sheep or a mangy dog. Its eyes were soft and brown; it was alone against the splendid-tailed beast; yet it stood its ground and prepared to fight the danger coming towards it, whether that was death or merely humiliation and pain. From their look I could see that the two animals knew each other, that they had fought a countless number of times and after this battle would fight again, that each meeting would be the first meeting, and that the dark, patient animal would always be defeated, and the bright, fierce animal would always win. I did not see the fight, but I knew it would be ruthless and shameful, with a meaning of some kind perhaps, but no comfort.

[An Autobiography, p. 65]

To appreciate the “shock” that he was now reacting to in a poem which uses dream material thrown up by the psychoanalysis twenty-five years earlier, one must briefly recall his first optimistic impression of Prague in 1921 and 1922. As “Edward Moore,” he had written “Prague Letter” for The Dial,¹² an article which praised the “enterprising” Prague theater as the center of a culture which “distinguishes the capital of Czechoslovakia most clearly from the larger capitals of Europe.” It promised, he wrote, “a real culture in the classical sense—a tradition of intellectual and artistic style” which would “in a decade or so be created in Bohemia.” It is conjectural, of course, that three decades later, Muir, despite wholesale destruction by the war, had hoped to have a share in continuing the cultural program he had glimpsed on his earlier visit. But it is certain that he was unsuited to cope with the environment which he found himself forced to deal with. “The Combat” is only one of several poems which grew from the dark cloud gathering in his mind just before the putsch. He writes in the Autobiography (1954):

The change was felt as a calamity,¹³ rather than a human error, because it did not ‘recognize’ the human being or take into account his ordinary qualities: kindness, intelligence, frankness, suspicion, cheerfulness, gloom. So it seemed both irresistible and unnatural, for it is unnatural for human beings to act impersonally towards one another. … The stories about the Nazis¹⁴ when I first came to Prague, and those I heard now about the Communists, called up a vast image of impersonal power, the fearful shape of our modern inhumanity.

[P. 271]

As we have seen, Muir was stimulated by a specific situation to write a poem, but it was characteristic of his method to put distance between himself and the disaster by means of a myth or dream. His reason for recording the dream in the Autobiography, he says, was to “show how early impressions may grow and take on the form of myth.” It is clear that he wrote the poem to express a personal fable with emotional intensity, and also clear to us now that “myths” entered his poetry long after original dreams or visions about them had occurred. In a sense, one may say that his notebook of dreams served as “metaphors” for his poetry in the same way that Yeats's A Vision served him. Yet one feels that there was a great difference in the emotional prompting behind the use of these “metaphors.” In “The Song” (1955), he wrote:

I was haunted all that day by memories knocking
At a disused, deaf, dead door of my mind
Sealed up for forty years by myself and time.
They could not get to me nor I to them,
And yet they knocked. And since I could not answer,
Since time was past for that sole assignation,
I was oppressed by the unspoken thought
That they and I were not contemporary,
For I had gone away. Yet still in dreams
Where all is changed, time, place, identity,
Where fables turn to beasts and beasts to fables,
And anything can be in a natural wonder,
These meetings are renewed, dead dialogues
Utter their antique speech.

And in one of the last poems:

I have been taught by dreams and fantasies
Learned from the friendly and the darker phantoms. …

[“I Have Been Taught,” Collected Poems, p. 302]

One or two other conclusions may be drawn from the genesis of “The Combat.” The poem has been judged a good one by critics without knowing its history, but, knowing it, one may be supposed to be better able to state a “meaning,” whether it is the one suggested by Willa Muir or something in general which has to do with savagery inherent in our animal kinship. All that one can really say, or needs to say, however, is that Muir did not write the poem for paraphrasing. The Prague students must have been greatly puzzled by his choice of imagery; but the Autobiography reveals the close relationship between men and animals which Muir grasped not primarily through a study of Darwinian evolution but through his dreams and visions. To evoke the eternal element of “battle” in dissension-ridden Prague, he turned naturally to the dream images. The second stanza, omitted above, suggests that these images had full contemporary representations:

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.

“The Combat” presents an age-old conflict in an appropriately traditional meter, but the imagery of leopard's body, eagle's whetted beak, and lion's mane carries the burden of savagery (the “impersonal power”) which even psychoanalyzed modern man has yet been powerless to overthrow.

Critics have called attention to the sadness in Muir's poetry.¹⁵ Like many other poets in the first half of this century, Muir dealt with life “between the tiger's paws”—hemmed in between two wars. That there should be “sadness” in such poetry is not surprising, but that is not the whole story. Muir's experiences extended beyond those of most poets: his life spanned in an extraordinary way the gap between the communal culture of Orkney and the industrial age in its worst form in Scotland. That he was an “enigma” even to himself we know from the impulse which led him to write the first autobiography, The Story and the Fable, in 1940, and to complete his story with a different approach in 1954. This same need to know himself in time and to pierce the veil of mystery connecting him—and all humankind—with the past also prompted his verse.

The period of continental travel and translation work added wisdom to experience, and Muir's vision at length penetrated farther into the nuclear age than one ordinarily likes to look. He wrote not out of the “boredom” but from the “horror” (treachery) and the “glory”:

                                                                                                                        … I knew at last
The sight you saw there, the terror and mystery
Of unrepeatable life so plainly given
To you half wrapped still in eternity,
Who had come by such a simple road from heaven;
So that you did not need to have the story
Retold, or bid the heavy world turn again,
But felt the terror of the trysting place,
The crowning test, the treachery and the glory.

[“To J. F. H. (1897-1934)”, Collected Poems, pp. 91-92]

Having lived and worked among peoples of diverse cultures and having seen the wholesale destruction of the traditional way of life, as well as the slaughter of a minority race, Muir did not need to be told by Eliot that great poetry comes only through suffering: his problem was to transcend personal anguish in the universal “pity”—and in Wilfred Owen's famous phrase, much of the poetry was in the “pity.” But Muir did make his “story” a part of the “fable” in his acceptance of the human condition:

                    Set up the bleak worn day to show our sins,
                    Old and still ageing, like a flat squat herd
                    Crawling like sun on wall to the rim of time,
                    Up the long slope for ever.
                                                                                                                        Light and praise,
Love and atonement, harmony and peace,
Touch me, assail me; break and make my heart.

[“Soliloquy,” Collected Poems, pp. 196-97]

Sadness there is in Muir's poetry, yes—but lament no, as what follows will show. The “Supreme duties of a poet,” according to Theodore Roethke,¹⁶ are “to question and to affirm.” Muir has done both. His questioning began with “Horses” in First Poems (1925). Here he struck the twin notes of fear and wonder which we hear throughout his work, even in the Prague poems when the “horror” dominates the “beauty.”

Those lumbering horses in the steady plough,
On the bare field—I wonder why, just now,
They seemed so terrible, so wild and strange,
Like magic power on the stony grange.
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.

[“Horses,” 1924]

It is the child's fear and mystery which we read in the “Horses” of 1924, but after seeing what man could do to man in still another world war, with inexpressible atrocities still possible, the poet in the 1955 “Horses” remembers the fearful presences of childhood now only as his father's faithful ploughhorses. They have become symbols of a long-missed companionship. The second poem should be quoted in its entirety, but these excerpts will illustrate Muir's new handling of the theme:

          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.
.....          Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
          Curled blindly in the 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:
          … 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.
.....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.

[“Horses,” 1955]

The characteristic which did not change in Muir's development from first to last is that writing poetry was the “healing act” of turning “man” into “word.”¹⁷ A brief examination of the “First Poems” preserved in the 1960 collected edition will reveal first soundings of the main themes which Muir was to master after his “backward look” that began in Prague in the early twenties and continued into the mid-thirties. Besides “reveries” of his Orkney home in “Childhood” and “Horses,” we find the most commonly discussed metaphysical theme of “unpitying Time”¹⁸ in the poem “Betrayal”; Greek mythology in “Ballad of Hector in Hades”; and the combination of dream material and Biblical legend in “Ballad of the Soul” and “Ballad of the Flood.” The missing theme in First Poems (1925) is the human condition, which is not clearly indicated, although Journeys and Places (1937) touches it lightly now and then, until The Narrow Place (1943) in “The Human Fold”:

Here penned within the human fold
No longer now we shake the bars,
Although the ever-moving stars
Night after night in order rolled
Rebuke this stationary farce.
There's no alternative here but love. …(19)

There is also in First Poems (1925) a semi-“imagistic” poem, “Autumn in Prague,” which contrasts strikingly with “The Combat”:

The gossamers forge their cables
Between the grasses,
Secure,
So still the blue air hangs its sea,
That great sea, so still!
The earth like a god,
Far withdrawn,
Lies asleep.

It also suggests the “Georgians,” and is the best of the three of this type retained in the 1960 edition.²⁰ It indicates another direction Muir's poetry could have taken had not his life, along with that of the “romantics” of the second decade, been changed by the First World War and its aftermath.

Another poem which critics²¹ rarely discuss, “Ballad of Hector in Hades,” retained from the first volume, foreshadows Muir's psychological rendering of the myth of Theseus in “The Labyrinth” (1947) to which I have previously alluded. It is doubly characteristic of Muir that he should choose Hector²² over Achilles as the subject of one of the few good ballad-monologues which he wrote. Even more than in “The Combat,” we see the autobiographical relation to “Ballad of Hector in Hades.” It reflects a personal defeat and it indicates Muir's most important poetic impulse: to “hang the apple on the tree,” to restore Adam to innocence and do away with Original Sin, to “lock Time in its tower,” and to evoke the world “once caught sight of in a dream.” In the poem, Hector's spirit returns from Hades to run the race over again:

Yes, this is where I stood that day,
          Beside this sunny mound.
The walls of Troy are far away,
          And outward comes no sound.
I wait. On all the empty plain
          A burnished stillness lies,
Save for the chariot's tinkling hum,
          And a few distant cries.
His helmet glitters near. The world
          Slowly turns around,
With some new sleight compels my feet
          From the fighting ground.
I run. If I turned back again
          The earth must turn with me,
The mountains planted on the plain,
          The sky clamped to the sea.
The grasses puff a little dust
          Where my footsteps fall
I cast a shadow as I pass
          The little wayside wall.
The strip of grass on either hand
          Sparkles in the light;
I only see that little space
          To the left and to the right,
And in that space our shadows run,
          His shadow there and mine,
The little flowers, the tiny mounds,
          The grasses frail and fine.
The sky with all its clustered eyes
          Grows still with watching me,
The flowers, the mounds, the flaunting weeds
          Wheel slowly round to see.
Two shadows racing on the grass,
          Silent and so near,
Until his shadow falls on mine,
          And I am rid of fear. …(23)

One notes the similarity to Wordsworth's “guilt complex” in “The Prelude” in “The sky with all its clustered eyes / Grows still with watching me. …”

This poem failed to attract attention (although it was published in Adelphi and Literary Digest in 1924) mainly because the early psychological approach was not clear to critics. The reason lies in the transferral in the poem of the cowardice of a boy of seven (Muir himself) to the “noble” Trojan: without the Autobiography, who would suspect that this ballad helped Muir rid himself of guilt over a terrified flight thirty years before? Knowing this, despite the discrepancies in age and situation of hero and boy, we can admire Muir's insight in grasping the universal psychological truth behind the Hector-Achilles legend as applied to his own experience. No one has ever really rejoiced in the picture of Achilles dragging Hector around Troy—but here Muir has taught us what it is like to be Hector afraid, and how much one needs to have the chance to run the race over again. In the Autobiography, he writes:

The day I remember best was the day when Freddie Sinclair chased me home: it was after we had gone to Helye, and his road lay in the same direction as mine. He was the boy I had fought over the knife, and this day he wanted to fight me again, but I was afraid. The road from the school to Helye lay on the crown of the island, and as I ran on, hollow with fear, there seemed to be nothing on either side of me but the sky. What I was so afraid of I did not know; it was not Freddie, but something else; yet I could no more have turned and faced him than I could have stopped the sun revolving. As I ran I was conscious only of a few huge things, monstrously simplified and enlarged: Wyre, which I felt under my feet, the other islands lying round, the sun in the sky, and the sky itself, which was quite empty. For almost thirty years afterwards I was so ashamed of that moment of panic that I did not dare to speak of it to anyone, and drove it out of my mind. I was seven at the time, and in the middle of my guilty fears. On that summer afternoon they took the shape of Freddie Sinclair, and turned him into a terrifying figure of vengeance. I felt that all the people of Wyre, as they worked in their fields, had stopped and were watching me, and this tempered my fear with some human shame. … I got rid of that terror almost thirty years later in a poem describing Achilles chasing Hector round Troy. … In the poem I imagined Hector as noticing with intense, dreamlike precision certain little things, not the huge simplified things which my conscious memory tells me I noticed in my own flight.²⁴

Besides its quality, “Ballad of Hector in Hades” is important largely because it leads to Theseus and to Oedipus, subjects of myths uniquely interpreted by Muir. (I will return to “The Labyrinth” and “Oedipus” near the end of this [essay] as examples of his mastery of form and content in his middle period.)

In his second series of poems, Variations on a Time Theme (1934), Muir adopted an impersonal stance slightly reminiscent of Eliot's “Wasteland” tone, yet all ten of the sections are related to the central theme of a journey through Time—that of the individual and of the race—with the emphasis on existential life in a time of transition. There is the bewilderment of the lost tribe, wandering between the rejected world and the “promised” one not yet in sight (a state also illuminated by Matthew Arnold); there is the poet's own “wilderness,” and the bewilderment of the individual who distrusts his feelings in a rapidly changing society:

Packed in my skin from head to toe
Is one I know and do not know.
He never speaks to me yet is at home
More snug than embryo in the womb.
.....His name's Indifference.
Nothing offending he is all offence;
Can stare at beauty's bosom coldly
And at Christ's crucifixion boldly
.....If I could drive this demon out
I'd put all Time's display to rout.
Its wounds would turn to flowers and nothing be
But the first Garden. The one tree
Would stand for ever safe and fair
And Adam's hand stop in the air.
Or so I dream when at my door
I hear my Soul, my Visitor.

[IX, “The Dilemma”]

In Variations on a Time Theme (1934), Muir caught up with the technique of his contemporaries and demonstrated his depth of vision. He reveals in this volume an expansion of most of the First Poems themes, and also shows that he is on the way to the mastery of appropriate forms. These may be studied more fully in Journeys and Places (1937), The Narrow Place (1943), The Voyage (1946), and, exceeding all in structural achievement, The Labyrinth (1949). Although the Variations are not uniformly masterful, they laid the foundation for the major development:

It is not I but Time that is the fisher.
Me he will catch and stuff into his net
With mortal sweepings, harp and banneret.
He'll dredge the very heavens; dull stars will rust
Among my own and miscellaneous dust,
Light dust of fame that floats, heavy that sinks
Into this drunken sea that drinks and drinks.

[VIII, “Threefold Time”]

Perhaps Muir would have liked to be a balladeer with a popular audience, but he knew his age and audience. As his subject matter grew in complexity, his verse forms began to progress from the ballad stanza to free verse. His most familiar poems, however, follow a syllabic pattern; they range from songs to sonnets, from sestets to irregular stanzas containing fragments which tease the mind. But the poems in the transition period which best indicate his psychological intensity and philosophical direction are the free-flowing forms in “The Labyrinth” (1947); “Soliloquy” (1947); “Oedipus” (1947); and the other Prague-inspired poems, “The Interrogation,” “The Usurpers,” “The Good Town,” or “The Transfiguration” (all 1948).

In addition to these major poems, Muir composed short, obscure ones, of which “The Road” in Journeys and Places (1937) is the outstanding example both in form and in symbolism. This poem, with its singsong rhythm and sudden stops, is not really “allegory”²⁵ but an exercise in the metaphysical reconciliation of opposites: the road that turns always but “cuts off the country of Again”; the “busy clock” which shows no hours; the hunter shooting no quarry; the old bones which “rise and go”; the beginning in the end; the starting and the finishing tree; the doom-carrying womb; the small in the great in a predestined by “blind seed all” pattern. Such a poem is not for teaching a moral but for evoking wonder and mystery, for stimulating imagination that makes all things in Time timeless, for acceptance in bewilderment—it is Muir's chief theme and the “road” which he must take to merge the individual “story” with the legendary “fable” of the “budding and the fading tree.” Beneath the nihilistic tone of the last line (“For small is great and great is small, / And a blind seed all”) there sounds, though faintly, the affirmation which we must wait to get in the near-prose statement of the conclusion of “The Difficult Land” (1955):

This is a difficult country, and our home.

The twenty-year journey which turned Muir from the metaphysical symbolism of “The Road” (1937) to prose poetry in “The Difficult Land” (1955) is the road taken by a “natural poet” whose sensibility kept pace with his experience. His “road” in Scotland in 1936, it will be recalled, took him into dead ends and over gulfs of despair. The poetry that he wrote in the mid-thirties allowed him to plumb the depths of despair vicariously in the wanderings of legendary and historical figures—in the journeys of Tristram and Hölderlin and in the vehemence of the mad old man fighting the rats in the sewers of “Troy.”

The best example in the 1937 volume, “Tristram's Journey,” begins on a true, simplified, and ominous ballad note, but winds its way through bitterness to a resolution that is the hallmark of Muir's poetry:

He strode across the room and flung
          The letter down: ‘You need not tell
Your treachery, harlot!’ He was gone
          Ere Iseult fainting fell.
He rode out from Tintagel gate,
          He heard his charger slowly pace,
And ever hung a cloud of gnats
          Three feet before his face.
He left his horse, left sword and mail,
          And went into the woods and tore
The branches from the clashing trees
          Until his rage was o'er.
And now he wandered on the hills
          In peace. Among the shepherd's flocks
Often he lay so long, he seemed
          One of the rocks.
The shepherds called and made him run
          Like a tame cur to round the sheep.
At night he lay among the dogs
          Beside a well to sleep
And he forgot Iseult and all.
They came to Mark and told him how
          A madman ruled the hinds and kept
The wandering sheep. Mark haled him to
          Tintagel while he slept.
None knew him. In the garden once
          Iseult walked in the afternoon,
Her hound leapt up and licked his face,
          Iseult fell in a swoon.
There as he leaned the misted grass
          Cleared blade by blade below his face,
The round walls hardened as he looked,
          And he was in his place.

[Collected Poems, pp. 64-66]

Franz Kafka has taught us how thin is the line between nightmare and reality; the most crucial moment, he said, came when one woke in the morning—if everything was still in its place, the day was won. Muir reflects the same focus on “things” and “names” by which we know ourselves in Time.

In the 1937 volume, also, there are nine “Place” poems which vary and repeat the previous themes of the “journeys”:

All this I have seen
Twice over, there and here,
Knocking at dead men's gates
To ask the living way. …

[“The Unfamiliar Place”]

In “The Unattained Place” the poet recalls that

We could have leapt straight from the womb to bliss
And never lost it after,
Been cradled, baptized, bred in that which is
And never known this frontier laughter,
But that we hate this place so much
And hating love it,
.....Yet from that missing heaven outspread
Here all we read.

Then comes the affirmation in

… Here all's sufficient. None
That comes complains, and all the world comes here,
Comes, and goes out again, and comes again.
This is the Pattern, these the Archetypes,
Sufficient, strong, and peaceful. … Yet
These roads do not turn in here but writhe on
Round the wild earth for ever. …

[“The Sufficient Place”]

Since here is only a “summer silence,” the last poem of the volume ends with an unanswered question about the “day after the Last Day” when the “hissing lake” will be still and all the “fiends … fled”:

And heaven was filled and moving. Every height
On earth was thronged and all that lived stared upward.
I thought, This is the reconciliation,
This is the day after the Last Day,
The lost world lies dreaming within its coils,
Grass grows upon the surly sides of Hell,
Time has caught time and holds it fast for ever.
And then I thought, Where is the knife, the butcher,
The victim? Are they all here in their places?
Hid in this harmony? But there was no answer.

[“The Dreamt-of Place”]

Muir had no use for any vision of a heaven that excluded the cowardly and the guilty—the murderer along with the victim. We are reminded in this excerpt of his fight with Freddie Sinclair over a knife and, perhaps related to it, of that nightmare sequence previously alluded to in Florence in 1923. There, for three nights running, he dreamed he struck a dagger into the heart of a man he wanted desperately to kill.²⁶ The poem also makes use of one of the “millennial” dreams Muir had during his psychoanalysis in 1920-21:

As we passed the last houses I saw a dark, shabby man with a dagger in his hand; he was wearing rags bound round his feet, so that he walked quite soundlessly; there was a stain as of blood on one of his sleeves; I took him to be a robber or a murderer and was afraid. But as he came nearer I saw that his eyes, which were fixed immovably on the figure beside me, were filled with a profound, violent adoration such as I had never seen in human eyes before. Then, behind him, I caught sight of a confused crowd of other men and women in curious or ragged clothes, and all had their eyes fixed with the same look on the man walking beside me. … Presently we came to the field, which as we drew near changed into a great plain dotted with little conical hills a little higher than a man's head. All over the plain animals were standing or sitting on their haunches on these little hills; lions, tigers, bulls, deer, elephants were there; serpents too wreathed their lengths on the knolls, and each was separate and alone, and each slowly lifted its head upward as if in prayer … as if they knew, like the sun, that a new day was about to begin, and were giving the signal for its coming.

[An Autobiography, pp. 55-56]

By the time we come to “The Wayside Station” in The Narrow Place (1943), we are glad of a change in pace, just as Muir himself must have welcomed this new turning on the road which was eventually to lead him to the British Council. Willa says the poem was composed about Leuchars Junction, where Muir had a long, cold wait every morning for the train to take him from St. Andrews to his job in the Dundee Food Office. She says also that it “was unlike any of his recent poems in being an immediate impression of a recognizable local scene, not removed into an imaginary setting, but fitted into its actual place, related to the present world around it, as we too were finding ourselves related.”²⁷ The poem is a quiet “pastoral” and yet a vignette a little disturbing as the poet watches the “smoke turn from the fumy engine / Crawling across the field in serpent sorrow.” The “sad cattle” wake in “byre and stall,” the “ploughboy stirs in the loft,” and the farmer “feels the day like a familiar ache” and

The lovers part
Now in the bedroom where the pillows gleam
Great and mysterious as deep hills of snow,
An inaccessible land. The wood stands waiting
While the bright snare slips coil by coil around it,
Dark silver on every branch. The lonely stream
That rode through darkness leaps the gap of light,
Its voice grown loud, and starts its winding journey
Through the day and time and war and history.

[Collected Poems, pp. 92-93]

Here there is more than a little resemblance in tone to the lonely mood of the early verses Muir sent to The New Age while he was at Greenock (1912-1914). It furnishes evidence also of his kinship with the Romantic poets in general.

Almost any poem in The Narrow Place (1943) rewards study, but the most difficult one, and probably the strangest poem Muir wrote, is “Then”:

There were no men and women then at all,
But the flesh lying alone,
And angry shadows fighting on a wall
That now and then sent out a groan
Buried in lime and stone,
And sweated now and then like tortured wood
Big drops that looked yet did not look like blood.
.....Came, fought and left a blood-mark on the wall;
And that was all; the blood was all.
If there had been women there they might have wept
For the poor blood, unowned, unwanted,
Blank as forgotten script.
The wall was haunted
By mute maternal presences whose sighing
Fluttered the fighting shadows and shook the wall
As if that fury of death itself were dying.

[Collected Poems, pp. 94-95]

Stephen Spender has said that this poem “fixes the attention on the achievement of human generations which is a stain of blood on a wall.”²⁸ C. Day-Lewis²⁹ has said that Muir's poetry shows the use of scientific knowledge, and this may be one of Muir's few poems in which one gets the suggestion of scientific concepts, in this case of “flesh” yearning to become “human” but doomed to “shadows” in a time before there were “mute maternal presences” required to make the blood “human.” The last line speaks of some kind of “becoming” or immortality in the suggestion of “death itself … dying.”

“The Grove” in the same volume picks up the theme:

There was no road at all to that high place
But through the smothering grove,
Where as we went the shadows wove
Adulterous shapes of animal hate and love
.....This was, we knew, the heraldic ground,
And therefore now we heard our footsteps fall
With the true legendary sound,
Like secret trampling behind a wall,
As if they were saying: To be: to be.

And continues by incorporating the “road” metaphor:

We trod the maze like horses in a mill,
And then passed through it
As if in a dream of the will.
How could it be? There was the stifling grove,
Yet here was light; what wonder led us to it?
… We know
There was no road except the smothering grove.

[Collected Poems, pp. 108-109]

And in “The Prize” there is again the question of what brought us here:

We hurried here for some such thing and now
Wander the countless roads to seek our prize,
That far within the maze serenely lies,
While all around each trivial shape exclaims:
‘Here is your jewel; this is your longed for day’,
And we forget, lost in the countless names.

[Collected Poems, p. 112]

Two poems which stand out in the 1943 volume because they are joyous affirmations of the journey and what happens on it are “The Confirmation” and “The Bird.” The first is a love poem greatly cherished by Willa, and the second is one which Gerard Manley Hopkins would have appreciated for its nearly perfect union of sound and form and, particularly, for the triumphant “upward springing” of the last line. But first “The Confirmation”:

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a place
Of welcome suddenly amid the wrong
Valleys and rocks and twisting roads. But you,
What shall I call you? A fountain in a waste,
A well of water in a country dry,
Or anything that's honest and good, an eye
That makes the whole world bright. Your open heart,
Simple with giving, gives the primal deed,
The first good world, the blossom, the blowing seed,
The hearth, the steadfast land, the wandering sea,
Not beautiful or rare in every part,
But like yourself, as they were meant to be.

[Collected Poems, p. 118]

And in more objective delight, the contemplation of the

Adventurous bird walking upon the air,
Like a schoolboy running and loitering, leaping and springing,
Pensively pausing, suddenly changing your mind
To turn at ease on the heel of a wing-tip. …
The wide-winged soul itself can ask no more
Than such a pure, resilient and endless floor
For its strong-pinioned plunging and soaring and upward and upward springing.

[Collected Poems, p. 120]

In contrast to the lilting exultation of “The Bird,” an exceptional moment in Muir's poetry, many of the poems in the slender volume of The Voyage (1946) settle into a pensive mood of quiet acceptance. Many are reflections of wartime: poems about the “sleep-wandering” return of the Greeks, the Scottish reformation theme of betrayal in “The Castle,” and the contemporary frontier line between right and wrong in “The Escape.” Other poems, familiar because of appearances in anthologies, are “Reading in Wartime,” “The Rider Victory,” and “In Love for Long.” One of the best is “For Ann Scott-Moncrieff (1914-1943),” a fine, modern elegy to a young Orkney writer of children's stories featured on the BBC:

Dear Ann, wherever you are
Since you lately learnt to die,
You are this unsetting star
That shines unchanged in my eye;
So near, inaccessible,
Absent and present so much
Since out of the world you fell,
Fell from hearing and touch—
So near. But your mortal tongue
Used for immortal use,
The grace of a woman young,
The air of an early muse,
The wealth of the chambered brow
And soaring flight of your eyes:
These are no longer now.
Death has a princely prize.
You who were Ann much more
Than others are that or this,
Extravagant over the score
To be what only is,
Would you not still say now
What you once used to say
Of the great Why and How,
On that or the other day?
For though of your heritage
The minority here began,
Now you have come of age
And are entirely Ann.
Under the years' assaults,
In the storm of good and bad,
You too had the faults
That Emily Bronte had,
Ills of body and soul,
Of sinner and saint and all
Who strive to make themselves whole,
Smashed to bits by the Fall.
Yet ‘the world is a pleasant place’
I can hear your voice repeat,
While the sun shone in your face
Last summer in Princes Street.

[Collected Poems, pp. 156-57]

The title poem, “The Voyage” (dedicated to a fellow Orkneyman, Eric Linklater, whom the Muirs visited frequently during their brief stay in Orkney in 1935), charts the course which the speakers have steered in a sea “greater than we knew” and sometimes as bewildering as the experiences of the “Ancient Mariner.” It is a voyage through twenty-four quatrains, a few of which I quote here:

What thoughts came then! Sometimes it seemed
We long had passed the living by
On other seas and only dreamed
This sea, this journey and this sky
The soft sea-sounds beguiled our ear.
We thought we walked by mountain rills
Or listened half a night to hear
The spring wind hunting on the hills.
And faces, faces, faces came
Across the salt sea-desert air,
And rooms in which a candle flame
Made everything renowned and rare.
Delusion and dream! Our captain knew
Compass and clock had never yet
Failed him; the sun and stars were true.
The mark was there that we should hit.
And it rose up, a sullen stain
Flawing the crystal firmament.
A wound! We felt the familiar pain
And knew the place to which we were sent.

[Collected Poems, pp. 137-38]

Unmistakably, this “place” was out of childhood, out of order and harmony, and eventually out of life itself, connected with that “legendary land” which the next poem, “The Fathers,” puts even more tersely with its Yeatsian overtones:

Archaic fevers shake
Our healthy flesh and blood
Plumped in the passing day
And fed with pleasant food.
The fathers' anger and ache
Will not, will not away
And leave the living alone,
.....Nightmare of blackened bone,
Cellar and choking cave.

[Collected Poems, pp. 139-40]

But one of the last poems in The Voyage (1946) celebrates the poet's fiftieth birthday:

I never felt so much
Since I have felt at all
The tingling smell and touch
Of dogrose and sweet briar
.....I gather to my heart
Beast, insect, flower, earth, water, fire,
In absolute desire,
As fifty years ago.

[“A Birthday,” 1963; Collected Poems, pp. 157-58]

Muir was nearer to sixty than to fifty when he began his next volume, The Labyrinth (1949), the only one to be preserved intact in the final edition. Most of these poems were written in Czechoslovakia between the summer of 1946 and the fall of 1948. In the first year that he was in Prague, however, he was “too distracted” to write much poetry. “The Labyrinth” was one of several intended as “Symbols”:

They all deal with symbolical human situations and types; and I hope this will give the volume a sort of unity, and at the same time that it won't cause the contents to be monotonous.

Of “The Labyrinth” itself, he says:

I felt that this was an image of human life with its error and ignorance and endless intricacy. … But I wanted also to give an image of the life of the gods, to whom all that is confusion down here is clear and harmonious as seen eternally.³⁰

Another important poem is “Oedipus.” Both mark the peak of Edwin Muir's achievement. They also mirror his “journey” from confusion to wisdom and look forward to the serenity of One Foot in Eden (1956). I am aware that most critics and biographers (including Professor Butter and Willa Muir) would perhaps have chosen “The Transfiguration” or “Soliloquy” or “The Usurpers” as superior to “Oedipus.” But “Oedipus” seems to me better because it transcends personal experience at the same time that it challenges the mind and moves the heart in profound enough a way to be compared to Sophocles.

But first “The Labyrinth.” J. C. Hall praised this poem as a tour de force structure of thirty-five opening lines “without metrical support and without forfeiting our attention—surely a remarkable achievement!”³¹ It is more. It represents Muir's hard-gained distance from the Eglinton Street slum. To climb above the twisting roads in Glasgow and “Fairport,” he had had to look straight ahead to the future promised by Socialism. Then he started beyond the misted peak on which stood the Superman and “man as he was yet to be.” After this, came the “real world” in his psychoanalytically prompted dream of the gods, of the animals and man reconciled, in a vision which gave him what he needed to walk the maze: the perspective which set him on the road past the bitterness of “no exit.” Theseus “stumbles in sudden blindness” as he finds himself of two minds: to

… hasten, almost run,
As if the maze itself were after me
And soon must catch me up. But taking thought,
I'd tell myself, ‘You need not hurry. This
Is the firm good earth. All roads lie free before you.’
But my bad spirit would sneer, ‘No, do not hurry.
No need to hurry, Haste and delay are equal
In this one world, for there's no exit, none,
No place to come to, and you'll end where you are,
Deep in the centre of the endless maze.’

And here is the crux of the “enigma” of Edwin Muir as Poet:

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 harvesting and life and death,
And all permissible, all acceptable,
Clear and secure as in a limpid dream.

[“The Labyrinth,” Collected Poems, pp. 164-65]

In this poem, as in “The Combat,” Muir has had recourse to a “dream or trance” to achieve transcendence over a contemporary condition—in this case, however, not so much a personal “labyrinth” of the Glasgow slums kind the poet seeks to elude as the impersonal spider web of political intrigue in which he was just beginning to become entangled in Czechoslovakia during the mid-1940s.

The symbolic dilemma of Theseus leads us to the still more baffling predicament of Oedipus. In discussing it, Richard Eberhart³² has said that Muir put something between us and the poem. What that “something” was he did not hazard to guess and the reader will have to conjecture for himself. But we know by other examples that Muir's interest in myths stemmed from their universal—and therefore inevitably personal—attributes. In “Oedipus,” he stays closer to the classical narrative than in his version of the Theseus, or even of the Odysseus, myth; yet there are clues to the autobiography and to the thematic significance which we are accustomed to look for in his poetry:

                    I, Oedipus, the club-foot, made to stumble,
.....                                                                                                                                                      … I am one
Who as in innocent play sought out his guilt,
And now through guilt seeks other innocence
.....Strangers laid on one bed, as children blind,
Clear-eyed and blind as children—did we sin
Then on that bed before the light came on us
Desiring good to each other, bringing, we thought,
Great good to each other? But neither guilt nor death.

[Collected Poems, p. 189]

For this poet, Oedipus is as “innocent” and as fit as Adam to illustrate the “fall”—or to act the role of the “clear-eyed” children who seek out their “guilt” in “innocent play.” The autobiographical notes already considered in connection with “Ballad of Hector in Hades,” and numerous scattered passages elsewhere, have revealed Muir's own difficult adolescent period. But there is more here than a first acquaintance with “Original Sin” or even the patricidal Freudian wish; there is the stubborn questioning of human values, of the nature of absolute good and evil which one finds so much of in this poetry:

Yet if that darkness had been darker yet,
Buried in the endless dark past reach of light
Or eye of the gods, a kingdom of solid darkness
Impregnable and immortal, would we have sinned,
Or lived like the gods in deathless innocence?
For sin is born in the light. …
… And when in memory now,
Woven of light and darkness, a stifling web,
I call her back, dear, dreaded, who lay with me,
I see guilt, only guilt, and I can scarcely breathe
Here in the guiltless guilt-evoking sun.

In “Oedipus,” there is also a dichotomy in the necessity to act against fear—

Fear that, the wise men say, is father of evil,
And was my father in flesh and blood, yet fear,
Fear only, father and fear in one dense body,
So that there was no division, no way past:
Did I sin then, by the gods admonished to sin,
By men enjoined to sin? For it is duty
Of god and man to kill the shapes of fear.

But, Oedipus answers himself, these are “vain thoughts”:

… The gods see all,
And will what must be willed, which guards us here.
… And I have learned,
Though blind, to see with something of their sight,
Can look into that other world and watch
King Oedipus the just, crowned and discrowned,
As one may see oneself rise in a dream
Distant and strange.

Still the insistence on the paradox:

                                                                                                                                                      … Innocent
And guilty. I have wrought and thought in darkness,
And stand here now, an innocent mark of shame,
That so men's guilt might be made manifest
In such a walking riddle—their guilt and mine,
For I've but acted out this fable.

Here, finally, Muir, as Oedipus, gives us his unusual explanation for evil in the world: the necessity of mortal man to share the “immortal burden” of the gods:

                                                                                                                        … [I] have learnt
That all must bear a portion of the wrong
That is driven deep into our fathomless hearts
Past sight or thought; that bearing it we may ease
The immortal burden of the gods who keep
Our natural steps and the earth and skies from harm.

The Greeks made the gods in their own image, and in this poem, man is made to share in the “burden” of his own mythical creation. “Oedipus,” written in 1947, indicates at least one reason why it was the “Incarnation” rather than the “Resurrection” in Rome in 1949 (discussed below) which impressed Muir so strongly. It is a primary distinction in his religious awareness, and clearly in “Oedipus” he has made the Greek gods suffer the “human” burden. The world which is bounded by Oedipus and Christ and us is a rounded world indeed.

But, however unintentionally, Edwin Muir is an elusive poet, and just as one rests satisfied with the first “Oedipus,” he gives us “The Other Oedipus,” in One Foot in Eden (1956). In the second poem, he pulls out all the stops in the Muir “variations” from the beautiful blank verse, chant-like notes of light and darkness of the first “Oedipus” to the free-verse wisdom of the “fool” in the second version. We find that Oedipus is not led about the mountainside by his daughter, as in the Sophoclean poem, but is

Remembered on the Peloponnesian roads,
He and his serving-boy and his concubine,
White-headed and light-hearted, their true wits gone
.....They were so gay and innocent, you'd have thought
A god had won a glorious prize for them
In some celestial field, and the odds were gone,
Fate sent on holiday, the earth and heaven
Thenceforth in endless friendly talk together.

It is as if, in presenting a mindless Oedipus, the poet gives us our choice in another paradox: wisdom with “guilt” of soul, or innocence with freedom of body:

If anyone spoke a word of other guilt
By chance before them, they stamped their feet
In rage and gnashed their teeth like peevish children.
But then forgot.

[“The Other Oedipus,” Collected Poems, pp. 217-18]

But “Oedipus” remains the masterpiece—a chant of light and darkness in counterpointed blank verse at its best.

From The First Poems (1925) to The Labyrinth (1949), we read the story of the development of an exceptional poetic imagination which first opened in Prague, was frostbitten in Scotland, declined in the return to Prague, but finally flowered gloriously in the sun of Rome. The attainment of Edwin Muir's much discussed “serenity” which rendered him in his last years immune to chilling winds, whether they came from Scotland, Boston, or Cambridge (where he spent his last days), is the story of his efforts to break away from the mold of “translator” and “journalist” and find himself—a poet. It is the story also of his theories about the nature and use of poetry—and his divergence from the theories of his contemporaries—the subject of the next chapter.

Notes

1. Tom Scott in “That Warld Is All Away” in Lines Review (1956), cited by Hollander, “A Textual and Bibliographical Study of the Poems of Edwin Muir,” p. 200.

2. Originally from Shakespeare, cited by Wordsworth in 1802 Preface to “Lyrical Ballads.” Also used by Shelley in “To A Skylark.”

3. Wordsworth, 1802 Preface to “Lyrical Ballads.”

4. He says in the Autobiography (p. 250) that he wrote more poetry in his three years in Edinburgh than in twice that many in St. Andrews.

5. Scottish Chapbook 4 (July, 1923): 339-43. See Hollander, “A Textual and Bibliographical Study of the Poems of Edwin Muir,” p. 46. This was the only “Scots” poem which Muir preserved in the Collected Poems, 1921-1958. (I did not know all the painful associations this poem would evoke when I asked Willa Muir during my visit with her in 1967 to read some stanzas for the sake of the dialect. She broke off the reading with the judgment that it was a “bad” poem. See Belonging, pp. 71-72.)

6. Questions formulated by Geoffrey Grigson and published in New Verse. See Hollander, “A Textual and Bibliographical Study of the Poems of Edwin Muir,” p. 203.

7. I am indebted to Hollander for the dating of individual poems.

8. Professor Peter Butter says that a Czech Communist (Clementis), a prominent “sensitive, intelligent man, interested in literature and painting,” whom Muir sat with at a reception and later met “once or twice,” was executed. The Institute had also made the mistake of housing summer students in “the hotel which seemed the cleanest and best run. Without knowing it they had chosen a Communist hotel, and found they had slighted the Socialist, Social Democratic and People's Party hotels. Football, he discovered, was political too, the great sporting event of the year in Prague being the encounter between two teams supported by the Socialist and Communist Parties. By early 1948 the great success of the Institute as the representative of Western civilisation was beginning to attract the open hostility of the Communists, who would gather at the door when people were coming for evening lectures and try to keep them from entering.” (Butter, Edwin Muir: Man and Poet, p. 212). After the putsch, Butter also says: “The atmosphere of hostility and fear was shattering to him [Muir]. Many of his friends left the country; others were imprisoned; for those that remained and were at large he could do nothing since contact with him would be dangerous to them. One friend used to come to see the Muirs sometimes at night; they would leave the flat door ajar so that he could come and go quietly without attracting attention. Disharmonies within the Council, which were not at all his fault, made the nervous strain worse. He could do nothing effective by staying, so he asked to be transferred, and at the end of July he and his wife left the country” (ibid., p. 213).

9. See Muir's chapter, “Prague Again,” pp. 251ff., for his understanding of the situation and his emotional state. Also see Belonging, pp. 244ff., for an account of Muir's depression, which was so severe at one point that he could not talk with E. M. Forster when he came to call.

10. Listener 33 (September 4, 1947): 386; The Labyrinth, 1949; Collected Poems, pp. 179-80. Also see Hollander, “A Textual and Bibliographical Study of the Poems of Edwin Muir,” p. 131, for list of appearances in anthologies from 1950 to 1960.

11. Belonging, pp. 238-39.

12. Edwin Muir (Edward Moore), “Prague Letter,” The Dial 72 (April 1, 1922): 406-11.

13. See “Impersonal Calamity,” London Magazine 5 (August, 1958): 11-12; Collected Poems, p. 280.

14. One of the stories Muir heard concerned the sacrifice of Kafka's favorite sister Ottilia in the gas chambers of Auschwitz, after she had separated herself from her “Gentile” husband and daughters; Muir became acquainted with Kafka's nieces just before the coup. (An Autobiography, p. 270)

15. M. L. Rosenthal says: “What makes this poetry so difficult to contemplate for very long at a time is its infinite sadness, and the repressed hysteria that underlies it.” See M. L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), pp. 136-39.

16. Cited in The Structure of Verse: Modern Essays on Prosody, ed. Harvey Gross (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, Inc., 1966), p. 225.

17. See discussion of the “modern sensibility” of poets in general in Claude Vigee, “Metamorphosis of Modern Poetry,” Comparative Literature 7 (1955): 112.

18. Hollander says that one of the consistent revisions in Muir's poetry is that of changing the capitalized allegorical entities like Time and Eternity to uncapitalized words in the later poems. Hollander also says: “This same revision is present in An Autobiography, where Muir changes every ‘Time’ of The Story and the Fable, written fourteen years earlier, to ‘time.’” See “Introduction,” “A Textual and Bibliographical Study of the Poems of Edwin Muir,” p. 16.

19. One hears simultaneously Auden's “We must love one another or die”: Willa has given an interesting account of Auden's visit to Muir in Rome (1949) when they had a “gay and free” discussion, Auden arguing for the “resurrection of the body” and Muir for the “immortality of the soul.” See Belonging, p. 255.

20. The others are “When the Trees grow bare on the High Hills” and “October at Hellbrunn,” Collected Poems, pp. 22-24.

21. Reviews of First Poems (1925) called attention to a ballad much revised in the 1969 Collected Edition: “Ballad of Eternal Life” (“Ballad of the Soul” in the late edition), which the TLS criticized for being too much like “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (See Hollander, “A Textual and Bibliographical Study of the Poems of Edwin Muir,” p. 150); Louis Untermeyer remarked about the overtones of Hofmannsthal in “Ballad of Eternal Life” (Hollander, “A Textual and Bibliographical Study of the Poems of Edwin Muir,” p. 152).

22. Babette Deutsch wondered why one of Muir's poems had to do with “a defeated Trojan when there are figures close at hand about whose plight he could speak with authority.” See “Poetry and the Compassionate Spirit,” NYHTBR, April 26, 1953, p. 41.

23. Collected Poems, pp. 24-26; for extensive revisions, see Hollander, “A Textual and Bibliographical Study of the Poems of Edwin Muir,” pp. 51-52.

24. An Autobiography, pp. 42-43. In my visit to Wyre (July, 1972), I was struck by the number of long-time residents who had read or heard about Muir's inclusion of this incident in his account of his childhood. Freddie Sinclair, who died of an illness at age eighteen, left relatives who still live in the house down the road from the schoolhouse where the encounter between the boys took place.

25. See “Symbol, Parable, and Allegory” in Reading Poetry, ed. Joseph Satin (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1964), pp. 1137-1138.

26. An Autobiography, p. 213; Belonging, p. 90.

27. Belonging, p. 205.

28. Stephen Spender, Poetry Since 1939 (London: Longmans, Green and Company, 1946), p. 25. Note: Ernest Marwick says that Muir told him the poem was about the “genesis” of the human race, and that the first line was the initial stimulus for it. (Conversation with me, June 22, 1972, in Kirkwall, Orkney.)

29. Cecil Day-Lewis, The Poet's Way of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957), p. 17. (Incidentally, I am grateful to C. Day-Lewis for this particular statement which first led me to study Muir's poetry.)

30. In July, 1946, Muir wrote a friend (Joseph Chiari) in Edinburgh: “I shall not be able to write unless I succeed in putting my affairs in order during the next year. … I've been trying for some time to write the poetry that was both simple and unexpected. …” Cited by Butter, Edwin Muir: Man and Poet, pp. 214-215.

31. Harvey Gross in “Modern Poetry in the Metrical Tradition,” The Structure of Verse: Modern Essays on Prosody, pp. 68-70, has argued that the poem has a blank verse base although he agrees with Hall that syntax undergirds its structure.

32. Richard Eberhart, “The Middle Way,” Poetry 75 (January, 1950): 239-42.