[In the following review of Muir's Collected Poems, Friar provides an overview of the major themes of Muir's poetry: the tension between time and eternity, the horror of the first and second world wars as symbols of “life at its most material and unreal,” and life-long the journey from childhood to old age and death.]

Although at the age of sixty-seven Edwin Muir is one of the best poets writing in English today, we in America have known his work only by scattered pieces, for not a single volume of his poetry has ever been published here before. We have known him hitherto by an autobiography of singular charm, The Story and the Fable, and of course by the works of Franz Kafka which he and his wife have so admirably translated. His early childhood was spent in the mist-laden, twilit regions of the Orkney Islands off the northeast coast of Scotland, where in a land of myth and fable he first became aware of the constantly shifting duality between a world of eternity and imagination and of time and materiality.

All authors, if read closely, will be seen to have but few themes, and Edwin Muir's obsessive single theme, though an all-inclusive and wide-ranging one, was tersely announced by the title of one of his early books: Variations on a Time Theme. He is a poet obsessed by the relationship between time and eternity: Time as we know it in this moving, decaying, changing world of materiality, and Eternity as represented by the unmoving, undecaying, unchanging realm of perfectability. All experiences in the moving world of time are set against the background of imperturbable eternity, whether those of childhood, of manhood, of good or evil, of love or war, or of the circular journey through the deceptive lands of life, symbolized again and again in his poems by the road on which we travel on many levels of fact and imagination.

Muir writes of this journey from childhood to the grave and beyond the grave with a radiant Platonic mysticism which never drifts into the obscure, but which, on the contrary, is stated with almost classic clarity: a feat surprising in this day of difficult verse, and more astonishing still if we consider the metaphysical depth of his speculations. Perhaps we may best look upon this journey through a poem entitled “The Window.” The poet and his love, like Adam and Eve, are found within the enclosures of eternity, where there is endless change but on a never-changing foundation, where past and present and future are bound together into a single pattern. As they gaze out of the window (one of his recurring images), like Tennyson's Lady of Shalott watching the world reflected in her mirror, they see the destructions in life—forests falling, ships sinking, towers toppling—and when the lover turns in horror to his beloved, feeling the tight cap of time on his head like a gripping helmet, he sees the wrinkles beginning to form and writhe across her brow, and knows now that he and she are doomed to take part in the disasters, victories, and festivals of decaying life. In a much later poem entitled “The Usurpers” occurs a very striking line which Blake might have written: “I lean my face far out from eternity / For time to work its work on: time, oh time, / What have you done?”

In “The Gate” we find the two lovers, now become children, sitting in the quiet and lambent landscape of childhood before the Gate of another towering stronghold; but this time, by a reversal of imagery, it guards the enclosure of mature life, which to enter means to depart from the innocent days of “angel infancy” of which Henry Vaughan has written, an entrance into the tribulations of maturity. Muir describes the nostalgic sweetness of brief childhood, and suggests the fears and apprehensions which attend admittance into adolescence, into the town of our elders where all we have been taught—honor, duty, love, trust—have also other, opposite, and perverted meanings. Mankind is now launched on the turning, twisting road of life, or, as Muir concludes in one of his sonnets, “I in the middle blind, as Homer blind, / Dark on the highway, groping in the light.” In “The Wayside Station” he watches the lonely stream at dawn, its voice grown loud, begin “its winding journey / Through the day and time and war and history.” In “The River” “The stream flows on / And shows a blackened field, a burning wood, / A bridge that stops half-way, a hill split open / With scraps of houses clinging to its sides … The stream / Runs on into the day of time and Europe … Then / The disciplined soldiers come to conquer nothing.”

There are now several poems on the horror of the first and second world wars, dramatic symbols of life at its most material and unreal. In “The Good Town” he wonders how the familiar well-known town of friendly neighbors could suddenly change to evil, and concludes that humanity in the mass always must copy the good or evil intentions of its leaders. But the relentless force of Muir's diagnosis strikes us most when he declares that the one drop of evil which has poisoned an entire civilization cannot be cured by an equal drop of virtue, only by hard and hazardous katharsis. Yet, in another poem, “The Good Man in Hell,” he says: “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 could live well?” Perhaps Muir's contrast between the promised land of our dreams and our land as it actually is finds its most vigorous expression in the poem “Moses” in which he contrasts the beatific vision of Moses with the actual facts which the mass of Jewish immigrants beheld then and in subsequent migrations and tribulations.

But as Muir continues on the journey of life within time as we know it daily, he begins to envisage again that early Paradise which children know. In moments of mystical illumination granted by the imagination, in moments of exaltation which we have all experienced, he catches glimpses of the gods sitting on Olympian peaks contemplating all of life whole and healed. In The Labyrinth, where this vision occurs, Muir describes himself as having killed the Minotaur yet as being lost in the labyrinth of life even when he had exited, until he was granted the imaginative and healing vision of the gods: “That was the real world; I have touched it once / And now shall know it always. But the lie, / The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehoods, roads / That run and run and never reach an end, / Embowered in error—I'd be prisoned there / But that my soul has birdwings to fly free. / Oh these deceits are strong almost as life. / Last night I dreamt I was in the labyrinth, / And woke far on. I did not know the place.” And now that Edwin Muir has taken the downward sunset slope in his old age toward the grave, he casts an agitated backward glance on the road he has traveled, and in a dramatic dialogue entitled “The Way,” realizes that there is no tarrying:

Friend, I have lost the way.
The way leads on.
Is there another way?
The way is one.
I must retrace the track.
It's lost and gone.
Back, I must travel back!
None goes there, none.
Then I'll make here my place,
(The road runs on),
Stand still and set my face,
(The road leaps on),
Stay here, for ever stay.
None stays here, none.
I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.
Oh places I have passed!
That journey's done.
And what will come at last?
The road leads on.

The road leads on, says Mr. Muir, yet it leads by a circular route into the closed sphere of eternity where all is blessedness. And in the fifth section of a long poem, “The Journey Back,” he exclaims: “Blessing upon this time and place, / Blessing upon the disfigured face / And on the cracked and withered tongue / That mouthing a blessing cannot bless, / Blessing upon our helplessness / That, wild for prophecy, is dumb. / Without the blessing cannot the kingdom come.” And in one of his last poems, “Transfiguration,” Muir envisages the second coming of Christ: “In our own time, / Some say, or at a time when time is ripe. / Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified, / Christ the discrucified, his death undone, / His agony unmade, his cross dismantled— / Glad to be so—and the tormented wood / Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree / In a green springing corner of young Eden, / And Judas damned take his long journey backward / From darkness into light and be a child / Beside his mother's knee, and the betrayal / Be quite undone and never more be done.”

Thus we have taken the circular Journey with Edwin Muir, from the childhood before eternity to that beyond eternity, where the total vision is one of ultimate blessedness, where Christ, both temporal and immortal, is no longer crucified between the dead wood and the flower. Only Eliot in Four Quartets and Yeats in his later poems have touched upon similar resolutions of time in ultimate peace and joy; and Muir, who echoes both his masters at times, must take his place among those to whom total vision has been granted, to whom tragedy has been wrought to its uttermost and purified by exaltation and joy.