In Britain, as I write, over three million persons are unemployed. In Scotland, hearts are faint and spirits are low three years after the devolution referendum; the nation seems in limbo, with little will to seek Scottish solutions to Scottish problems. In Poland, social heroism and public virtue have once more been brutally assaulted; once more, an imposed communism has been shown to be morally and politically misshapen. And in every corner of the world, more insistently than at any time since the nineteen-fifties, people are haunted by fears of the violent destruction of all civilisation.

These issues have been with us in one form or another for more than half a century. And they were the concern, far more vividly and more profoundly than with any other writer featured in this book, of that most cosmopolitan of northerners, the Orkney-born Edwin Muir (1887-1959). It is a fact that seems quite extraordinary in view of Muir's reputation as a bookish symbolist and dreamer of mythical dreams, remote from the world of the senses: a writer whose sensitivity has been suspect as alien to the hopes and struggles of ordinary people. Yet a fairly large part of Muir's output can be described as, broadly speaking, political with social overtones. Muir often touches on the ‘burning issues’ already mentioned: unemployment, the plight of Scotland and other small nations, the anti-humanism of modern tyranny,the threat to man's future and the continuance of life on earth. He wrote political poetry from the very beginning of his literary career. Thus some of his contributions to the periodical The New Age between 1913 and 1916 were ‘versified propaganda on current politics, much what any clever young angry man might write.’¹ As late as the nineteen-thirties he could find release from the frustrations of those dismal years in experiments in modish political satire, like the two untitled, deliberately crude and almost Brechtian pieces about the contrast between the undernourished workless and the well-fed bourgeoisie and Church of Scotland ministers, which he published in 1935 in Scottish Journey (100, 152).

These two pieces on unemployment were not included in Collected Poems.² There was, however, a third poem in the travel book, the lines now entitled ‘Scotland's Winter’ (CP, 229), which rises far above the propaganda level. It was published again twenty-one years later in One Foot in Eden (1956) with the change only of one word from the 1935 text; and what marks it off from the two polemical pieces, apart from details of poetic technique, is the degree of aesthetic distancing involved. As Muir himself tells us, the poem had its origins in his ‘impressions of Edinburgh, or rather of historical Scotland, my feeling of the contrast between its legendary past and its tawdry present’ (Scottish Journey, 38). That contrast is made stronger and more significant by the trick of removing the present itself back some distance into the past. The winter season is symbolic of Edinburgh's and Scotland's political spirit because it is cold and frozen; it is rendered poetic by being personalised in a heroic, feudal way. The sun is ‘helmed in his winter casket’ like a warrior of the olden time ‘and sweeps his arctic sword across the sky’ (ll. 2-3). The ‘tawdry present’ is not, in the poem, embodied in ‘the tastelessness and vulgarity’ of the tearooms which are so mercilessly described in the Edinburgh chapter of Scottish Journey (20-22), or in the women who frequent them, whether bourgeois customers or proletarian waitresses, but in a slattern whom Muir has deliberately archaised. She was born, we feel, long after Percy and Douglas and Bruce (introduced into the poem as symbols of a vanished glory), yet she still belongs to the preindustrial world:

The miller's daughter walking by
With frozen fingers soldered to her basket.

(ll 7-8)

The dead heroes of Scotland, the bards and singers of feudal times

Listening can hear no more
Than a hard tapping on the sounding floor
A little overhead
Of common heels that do not know
Whence they come or where they go
And are content
With their poor frozen life and shallow banishment.

(ll. 22-8)

At first the miller's daughter seems an inappropriate symbol for what is keeping down the almost mythical heroes who stand for Scotland's spirit. That one word ‘common’ (l. 25) is surely a blemish: there is a trace of snobbery, of the arrogance of that Nietzscheanism which once dominated Muir's thinking.³ Yet even so the girl cannot help her commonness. She is not herself responsible for what makes her jeer: she is ignorant, but has not herself chosen her ignorance, her ‘frozen life’ that is banishment from everything genuine and true in the polis, the nation and the tribe. Judged by purely technical canons—rhythm, versification, handling of assonance and alliteration, the manipulation of syntax and imagery, ‘Scotland's Winter’ is a triumph. Its dominant emotions are not anger and contempt, but sorrow and an aching heart for a land that is kingless and songless and whose people are spiritually dead. The fine last line (‘With their poor frozen life and shallow banishment’) shows that the poem has worked through to compassion for the miller's daughter and all she stands for. In the poem, distancing is achieved by the operation of what I can only call the cultural imagination—by the same order of insight shown in a remarkable prose passage that likens the psychological condition of the unemployed to the mood of the Cave of Despair in The Faerie Queene (Scottish Journey, 140-4). The ice in ‘Scotland's Winter’ is a heraldic beast that would not be out of place in Spenser; it has claws; the sun's helm and casket call up Arthurian associations; Percy, Bruce and Douglas are epic figures; the miller's daughter also fits into such a world. But the community about which the political statement is made remains particular; it is unmistakably Scotland; no explicit comparison is made with towns like Trieste or Stettin, as is done in the expository prose of the volume in which it first appeared (Scottish Journey, 27-8); the pity and sorrow in the author's voice are for his own country, fallen from a high estate. And the cultural imagination at work is at almost the opposite pole from the archetypes of dream which are generally thought to be Muir's special creative medium.

I use the word ‘fallen’ advisedly, for it touches a concept central to Muir's mental life, that of a cultural and historical Fall, present much more explicitly in ‘Scotland 1941’ (The Narrow Place, 1943; CP, 97). Here Scotland in the Middle Ages before the Reformation lives in an agrarian golden age, an age of folk balladry (conveyed by ‘the green road winding up the ferny brae’, l. 7, with its allusive reference to the ballad of ‘Thomas Rymer’, Child No. 37). It is the coming of Calvinism, to which Muir devoted an entire book, his prose biography John Knox (1929), that constituted the cultural Fall in Scotland:

But Knox and Melville clapped their preaching palms
And bundled all the harvesters away,
Hoodicrow Peden in the blighted corn
Hacked with his rusty beak the starving haulms.
Out of that desolation we were born.

(ll. 8-12)

If there is perhaps something of a sneer in the hoodicrow image for Alexander Peden, one of the covenanting martyrs of South West Scotland in the seventeenth century, Muir nevertheless saw that those very qualities of heroic endurance, that ‘courage beyond the point and obdurate pride’ which ‘made us a nation’ in the days of Wallace and Bruce, were the very same ones that ‘robbed us of a nation’ (ll. 13-14) in the epoch of the Reformation and its seventeenth-century aftermath:

Defiance absolute and myriad-eyed
That could not pluck the palm plucked our damnation.

(ll. 15-16)

To respond to the full emotional resonance of these lines one must be aware of a creative allusiveness in the poem reaching back to Books I and II of Paradise Lost, identifying Satan and his host of rebel angels with the revolutionary energy of Knox and the Covenant, and equating both with a Fall that has to be condemned and mourned at the same time as the positive bravery of devils and covenanters is admired. In ‘Scotland 1941’ Calvinism is indissolubly linked to the rise of capitalism, an idea that was commonplace in Labour and Communist party branches in the nineteen thirties and forties. The bravery of Montrose, Mackail, Argyle produced, says Muir's poem, ‘this towering pulpit of the Golden Calf’ (l. 34), which in its turn gave rise to cities like Glasgow ‘burning in their pit’ (l. 23) for profit, ‘spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches’ (l. 31). Behind the concentrated poetic expression of these lines lie the horrors of Muir's years in Greenock and Glasgow, so memorably described in An Autobiography (90-150), and the poem ends with compassion for those Adams who wrought Scotland's historic Fall, the heroes of the Covenant themselves. But its backward-looking regret does not descend to the sentimental:

Such wasted bravery idle as a song,
Such hard-won ill might prove Time's verdict wrong,
And melt to pity the annalist's iron tongue.

(ll. 39-41)

What saves the concluding lines is the witty conceit, the pun that blends together the ideas of melting emotions and white-hot metal, making the historian into an inexorably tolling bell and turning his organ of speech into a sonorous metal pendant.

The title poem of the 1943 volume, The Narrow Place (CP, 101), is the crystallisation of Muir's poetry of small nations and communities. Though the place is not named, one feels that Muir's experience of Orkney, Scotland and pre-war Czechoslovakia is profoundly and weightily present. The ground is ‘parsimonious’ (l. 22) and is ‘so proud and niggardly and envious’ (ll. 26-7) that it will allow

Only one little wild half-leafless tree
To straggle from the dust.

(ll. 28-9)

If the landscape of ‘The Narrow Place’ is a dream landscape, the cultural imagination, fed by Muir's historical reading and by his experience of more than one polis, has been at work in the vision, side by side with forces from the unconscious mind and from religious myth. Just as in ‘Scotland 1941’ there was a positive—the ambivalent heroism of the Calvinist martyrs—so in ‘The Narrow Place’ there is a positive, a more complex one. It has three aspects. First, under the stunted tree

          we sometimes feel such ease
As if it were ten thousand trees
And for its foliage had
Robbed half the world of shade.

(ll. 30-3)

Second, it is only when we sleep beneath the tree that we are truly able to see (ll. 38-42). And third, when we finally awaken we will behold

          the club-headed water-serpents break
In emerald lightnings through the slime,
Making a mark on Time.

(ll. 45-7)

Long before we have reached its threefold positive the poem has moved completely away from politics. The last image is one from the unconscious, fortified by memories of ‘The Ancient Mariner’, on to which has been grafted a metaphysical concept not completely integrated into the rest of the poem.

Another kind of poetry which Muir sometimes attempts is the poetry of imagined political experience, where the historical imagination is at work alongside the cultural, and where the poet identifies with individuals and groups in a political context. All the poems of this type feature ‘man's inhumanity to man’. In ‘Troy’, for example (CP, 71), an old man has been left behind in the sewers after the sack of the city, his arms now meagre as a boy's with famine, scouring for scraps and fighting the rats in his delirium, taking them for Greeks. At last he is dragged to the surface by ‘some chance robber’ (l. 21):

They stretched him on a rock and wrenched his limbs,
Asking: ‘Where is the treasure?’ till he died.

(ll. 28-9)

The poem speaks powerfully to an age where torture is the reward of the defeated and an instrument of policy. In ‘A Trojan Slave’, also from the 1937 volume (CP, 72), the speaker gives voice to the plight of many a nation whose ruling classes drag the whole community down with them because they refuse to recognise that the ‘lower orders’ are also part of the nation (ll. 26-9, 45-6). It is the paradigm of a folly that has been repeated again and again throughout history: yet it is more than a historical ‘model’, it is also a kind of analogue for the Fall. The slave is not, and therefore was not, completely innocent. There is a degree of meanness about his anger against his present Greek masters and against the dimly remembered ruling classes of Troy which is, for all its pettiness, the manifestation of an absolute evil.

Muir returns to the theme in ‘The Castle’, in the 1946 volume The Voyage (CP, 128). The citadel has been betrayed: ‘The wizened warder let them through’ (l. 20). As in ‘A Trojan Slave’, there is a twist provided by the character of the speaker:

I will maintain until my death
We could do nothing, being sold;
Our only enemy was gold,
And we had no arms to fight it with.

(ll. 27-30)

The first of the lines just quoted (l. 27) is a signal that all is not what it seems on the surface: the speaker doth protest too much. And in his description of the town before it is taken (ll. 1-15), he unconsciously reveals another cause of the debacle: the garrison's crass and ignorant complacency, a ‘flaw’ whose role is similar to that of ‘spite’ in ‘A Trojan Slave’. Once again, the reverberations of Adam's fall can be felt throughout a basically political poem. It is a point made much more explicitly in ‘The Refugees’ (CP, 95), from the 1943 volume The Narrow Place:

A crack ran through our hearthstone long ago,
And from the fissure we watched gently grow
The tame domesticated danger,
Yet lived in comfort in our haunted rooms …
                                                  The good fields sickened
By long infection. Oh this is the taste
Of evil done long since and always, quickened
No one knows how
While the red fruit hung ripe upon the bough
And fell at last and rotted where it fell.

(ll. 1-4, 38-43)

It was not until after the second world war, during and after his period as British Council representative in Prague (1945-8), that Muir wrote his most original political poems. Even ‘The Labyrinth’ (CP, 163), a difficult poem about psychic unrest, seems in places to forecast the claustrophobic years ahead in central Europe. There are ‘deceiving streets’, ‘rooms that open into each other’, and Kafkaesque ‘stairways and corridors and antechambers’, which at one level are images of mental disturbance, at another connect with the spiritual blight of past fascism and stalinism to come, and at still another are linked to the more general plight of fallen man and fallen woman:

                              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.

(ll. 66-70)

‘The Usurpers’ (CP, 187), also printed in the volume titled The Labyrinth (1949), ironically presents us with another kind of freedom, that of a materialist protagonist, who thinks he has conquered both superstition and the unconscious:

There is no answer. We do here what we will
And there is no answer. This our liberty
No one has known before, nor could have borne,
For it is rooted in this deepening silence
That is our work and has become our kingdom …
It was not hard to still the ancestral voices …
And the old garrulous ghosts died easily …
                                                                                                                        In this air
Our thoughts are deeds; we dare do all we think,
Since there's no one to check us, here or elsewhere.
                                                                                We are free.

(ll. 1-5, 7, 9, 11-12, 49)

It seems that Muir was consciously thinking of the Gestapo and SS (An Autobiography, 260-1), but the poem might equally have been written of stalinist ‘apes of God’.

Another poem in The Labyrinth volume, ‘The Interrogation’ (CP, 182), conveys the reverberations of some sort of spiritual inquest, though at the purely literary level it is a finely imagined rendering of one of the stock confrontations of international revolutionary politics. But the major political poem from the Czech years is undoubtedly ‘The Good Town’ (CP, 183), which, as Muir himself put it in a broadcast on 3 Sept. 1952, ‘is not really about Prague or any other place, but about something that was happening in Europe. Stories of what was occurring in other countries to whole families, whole communities, became absorbed into the poem, which I tried to make into a symbolical picture of a vast change’ (quoted in Butter, 223). The ‘I’ of the poem, one of the old men of the place, asks why his good town has turned into a bad one. Was it because of external events, such as the two wars, or because good rulers were fortuitously followed by evil ones? The protagonist in ‘The Castle’, discussed above, would have answered ‘yes’ and postulated a wicked warder to let the bad men in. Not so this speaker. He asks point blank ‘Could it have come from us?’ (l. 77), and puts part of the blame on the tendency of ordinary humdrum citizens to ape the moral style of those in power.

Say there's a balance between good and evil
In things, and it's so mathematical,
So finely reckoned that a jot of either,
A bare preponderance will do all you need,
Make a town good, or make it what you see.

(ll. 89-93)

Good ends perverted by bad means, the tragedy of the whole communist experience, of the God that failed—of any merely secular God, perhaps—is compressed into these lines:

                                                                                                              We have seen
Good men made evil wrangling with the evil,
Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds.
Our peace betrayed us; we betrayed our peace.

(ll. 99-102)

Yet these same ordinary men can themselves be the vehicles of salvation, as in ‘After 1984’ (CP, 267) where they ‘drove the murdering lies away’ (l. 6) after the ‘twisting chaos’ within their apparently completely conditioned minds had ‘turned on itself’ (ll. 29-30).

The problem of how the ordinary man can preserve his humanity in a world of lies and Newspeak, where peace means war, love hate, and freedom tyranny, is posed more pessimistically in two pieces on which Muir seems to have been working just before his death, ‘Ballad of Everyman’ (CP, 290) and ‘Nightmare of Peace’ (CP, 291): they are clearly different versions of the same poem. Everyman goes as delegate to some peace conference, perhaps one of those that used to be staged by the World Peace Council. A ‘battle-plated dove’ (? Picasso's) swings from the roof ‘in menacing love’ (‘Nightmare’, ll. 8-9; ‘Ballad’, st. 2), but all is falsehood:

Two days he listened patiently,
          But on the third got up and swore:
“Nothing but slaves and masters here:
          Your dove's a liar and a whore.
“Disguised police on the high seats,
          In every corner pimps and spies.”

(‘Ballad’, st. 3, 4)

Everyman leaves in disgust. There is a search for him in a contraption as old and rickety as Icarus' chariot. From aloft a playing field is seen on which two sides are locked in combat. The players change into a beast that ravages the land; then the beast is entirely covered with staring eyes, which in ‘Nightmare’ are ‘all dissolved in a common ring’ (l. 43):

And the beast is gone, and nothing's there
          But murderers standing in a ring,
And at the centre Everyman.
          I never saw so poor a thing.
Curses upon the traitorous men
          Who brought our good friend Everyman down
And murder peace to bring their peace,
          And flatter and rob the ignorant clown.

(‘Ballad’, st. 10-11)

In any selection of poems about the atomic threat, Edwin Muir's would occupy a place of great distinction. In ‘The Day Before the Last Day’ (CP, 300), the second last poem he ever wrote, he contemplates the worst of all possible outcomes, the total destruction of the human race and perhaps of life itself. He writes of the similarities and dissimilarities between men about to perish utterly after a nuclear exchange, and men awaiting the Last Judgment. At first, ‘the dark ancestral dreams’ (l. 25) tell them that what has happened is the Judgment, and they expect to see the dead arise, as in the traditional myth. ‘And then a stir and rumour break their dream’ (l. 34): it is not God's last day after all, but one they have brought about themselves, through their own technology and their own volition:

Mechanical parody of the Judgment Day
That does not judge but only deals damnation.

(ll. 15-16)

They can get no ‘sanctuary from grass and root’ (l. 37); vegetable nature is expiring (l. 38); there is universal alienation; lovers are estranged; ‘the generous do not try to help their neighbours’ (l. 44); all ‘think only of themselves and curse the faithless earth’ (l. 49):

                                                            But all are silent, thinking:
‘Choose! Choose again, you who have chosen this!
Too late! Too late!’
And then: ‘Where and by whom shall we be remembered?’

(ll. 55-8)

Mankind's total self-destruction is also envisaged in ‘The Last War’ (CP, 282) when we will all

          founder on common earth and choke in air,
Without one witness.

(ll. 37-8)

The cause of the holocaust is ordinary, petty everyday evil—our inhumanity towards our fellows (the smile of the psychologically maimed, ‘splintering a face’, l. 45) and our malignity towards nature (the mistreatment even of a single tree, l. 44). If there is an atomic war it will be because we did not take the action necessary

To untwist the twisted smile and make it straight
Or render restitution to the tree.

(ll. 74-5)

Such action is certainly personal and moral, but it is also political, involving the restructuring of the commonwealth. In the poem annihilation came because

We who were wrapped so warm in foolish joys
Did not have time to call on pity
For all that is sick, and heal and remake our city.

(ll. 76-8)

The personal and moral action open to us, craftsmanship and planting and reaping by which we know

The simply good, great counterpoise
To blind nonentity

(ll. 70-71)

are not enough. It will not do merely to assert them in the face of evil. The only solution is an extra-mundane one, available even to those who die the atomic death, which Muir adumbrates in a vision of the entire human race passing before ‘spirits of earth and heaven’ around ‘the well of life where we are made’ (ll. 79-80). That all the persons in this procession are ‘loaded with fear’ as well as ‘crowned with every hope’ (l. 88) saves the ending from trite religiosity, though even so the vision has not been conveyed concretely or forcefully enough to make ‘The Last War’ a total success.

The second possible outcome of nuclear war—that there will be survivors—forms the background to ‘After a Hypothetical War’ (CP, 265) and ‘The Horses’ (CP, 246). In the first of these, anarchy prevails with no sort of social order; it is a world of mud and weeds, murder and obscene mutations, where harmful radiation from beyond the atmosphere can enter more easily than before:

Even the dust-cart meteors on their rounds
Stop here to void their refuse, leaving this
Chaotic breed of misbegotten things,
Embryos of what could never wish to be.

(ll. 12-15)

‘After a Hypothetical War’ reaches a negative conclusion which, though its content is arguably more limited than the positive ending of ‘The Last War’, makes it artistically more satisfying. There is an element of distancing at the end which is just right, a detached pity for the human race that is the perfect comment on what has gone before:

                                        Poor tribe so meanly cheated,
Their very cradle an image of the grave.
What rule or governance can save them now?

(ll. 24-26)

In ‘The Horses’, the emphasis is solidly on the positive. ‘The seven days' war that put the world to sleep’ (l. 2)—seven days of destruction corresponding to the seven days of creation (Butter, 259)—is in the past. A small community has survived, living by some coast. They would refuse to have anything to do with ‘that bad old world that swallowed its children quick’ (l. 19) if that were at all possible; even if there were oil for their tractors they presumably wouldn't use them. They have gone back to ploughing with oxen, ‘far past our fathers' land’ (l. 30). And then, as suddenly as the outbreak of the seven days' war itself, ‘the strange horses came’ (l. 32), seeming as

                                                                                strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights

(ll. 39-41)

because in the machine age even this farming community had grown out of touch with animals. But they are not heraldic beasts only, nor are they purely symbolic; they are real animals, ‘creatures to be owned and used’ (l. 47). The coming of the horses is utterly unexpected; it has the force of a miracle, and is an objective correlative for the power of miracle in the temporal, fallen world. The most miraculous of all, the ‘half-a-dozen colts … new as if they had come from their own Eden’, are paradoxically the most material, the most earthy; the choice of the monosyllabic verb ‘dropped’, with its four strongly articulated consonants, three of them vigorous plosives, perfectly conveys the physical reality of their birth—‘dropped in some wilderness of the broken world’ (ll. 48-50). The parallel with the messy, material side of Christ's birth is not necessary for our aesthetic understanding of the poem. The horses offer freely to serve the survivors (l. 52). For once, the last line is perfect:

Our life is changed; their coming our beginning,

making a similar point in the context of atomic survival to one Muir had earlier made when writing of fascist and communist tyranny:

                                                                                No: when evil comes
All things turn adverse, and we must begin
At the beginning, heave the groaning world
Back in its place again, and clamp it there.
Then all is hard and hazardous.

(‘The Good Town’, ll. 95-9)

The difference is that in ‘The Good Town’ the beginning is to come solely from the survivors' own actions; in ‘The Horses’ there is help from outside.

A study of the political element in Muir's poetry forces us to reject or at least seriously to qualify the view that sees him as primarily an escapist poet, immersed in an arcane subjectivism. The poems we have examined deal with particular and general aspects of man's inhumanity to man, than which nothing could be muddier or bloodier. (A good example is the image of the rats skipping about in the sewers in ‘Troy’, ll. 7-8). More specifically, Muir comments on problems that are still among the most insistent facing western man—what unemployment does to the human spirit, the tyranny of right and left, the threat of nuclear war. The remoteness his critics sometimes complain of is the effect of concentrated poetic thought producing its objective correlatives through a type of imagistic generalisation (e.g. ‘The Narrow Place’, discussed above), and partly of that necessary aesthetic distancing without which political poetry is liable never to rise above the occasional and the ephemeral. Three types of imagination are at work in Muir's poetry—or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that his single imagination has three facets: the cultural, the historical and the archetypal. Myths, symbols and dreams which Jungians would see as coming from the collective unconscious are integrated by the historical and cultural imagination to make statements about the moral and political life of man. These statements from a northerner are addressed to all mankind; and their value, like that of all artistic statements, comes from their beauty: ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’, though not quite in the sense meant by Keats, or by his urn.

Notes

1. Peter Butter, Edwin Muir: Man and Poet (Edinburgh, 1966), 56.

2. Collected Poems (London, 1952); expanded 1960, 1963. Cited as CP, and all references are to the 1963 edition unless otherwise stated.

3. An Autobiography (London, 1964), 121 and passim.