The Horses - Edwin Muir Context Flashcards
Outline Muir’s personal life
• Born on the Orkney island of Wyre in 1887, Edwin Muir spent his early years in the idyllic setting of his father’s farm, ‘The Bu’, until increasing farm rents forced the family to move, first to Orkney’s mainland and then, in 1901, to Glasgow. This move from the peaceful, agricultural setting of Orkney to industrialised Glasgow was extremely traumatic for Muir, and he would later describe it as a descent from the innocence of a rural Eden into Hell. Conditions in Glasgow were hard and, within a few years of their arrival, two of his brothers and both his parents were dead. The remaining siblings chose to go their separate ways and Muir found himself adrift in a large city with little education or prospects.
Explain the themes of the poem
• In its imagery and its contained events, “The Horses” focuses upon communication, both failed and successful. At least initially, silence represents the former. The war itself starts with stillness and silence without the violence and clangor normally associated with major conflicts.
o Its first result, moreover, is added silence: The radios fall quiet. The passage of the warship and the falling of the plane seem noiseless events in Muir’s emotionally muted, or numbed, lines. By the time the horses arrive, the survivors have already made a “covenant with silence” and have reached the point of preferring that the radios do not speak again.
o Muir conveys the anxiety with which they regard the notion of working radios and, by extension, the return of the technological world in emphatic lines of repetition: “But now if they should speak,/ If on a sudden they should speak again,/ If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,/ We would not listen.” No sounds are mentioned in the poem before the arrival of the horses except for a few words, presumably spoken by one farmer to another.
o The words relate to the return to soil. People are returning to the soil as farmers, and their old machinery is doing likewise in a more literal way: “’They’ll moulder away and be like other loam,’” one says of the old tractors. Sound returns forcefully with the horses, beginning with an insistent tapping, followed by drumming and then the “hollow thunder” of their hooves.
Explain the poem’s meaning
• In discriminating between the failed and the successful, Muir suggests there may be two kinds of communication. One kind, which relates to intellectual and technical knowledge, is represented by the radios, now fallen silent.
o This kind of speaking, and this kind of knowledge, has let down the survivors. War has transformed it to silence. The second kind, relating to the communication between people and their world, is, ironically, also represented by silence, even though it is ushered in by the stamping of hooves.
o The farmers do not, and cannot, speak with the strange horses, after all. The ancient relationship between humankind and horses restores itself without words. A new silence replaces the old. In this silence, however, the people are no longer alone.
Give an analysis of the poem
• Edwin Muir’s “The Horses,” a free-verse narrative poem of fifty-three lines, opens to the reader a future that may have seemed all too possible at the time of its composition in the 1950’s.
o In the opening lines, “Barely a twelvemonth after/ The seven days war that put the world to sleep,” Muir ushers the reader out of the realm of the everyday. Brief wars have occurred in the past, but have such wars put the entire world to sleep? The notion seems outrageous.
o Yet that sense of outrage in itself helps to color the passages that follow and put them into perspective. The reader learns, line by line, that things in the world have gone seriously awry. Technology has reached an impasse. “On the second day,” Muir’s narrator says, in chronicling the war, “The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.” The nature of the calamity comes gradually clear. “On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,/ Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day/ A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter/ Nothing.” An enormous but quiet disaster has overcome the world.
o In a dreamlike state, the weapons of war appear to the survivors less as machines than as mysterious signs of new times. When the warship appears, no pursuing ships follow. No enemy planes land to disgorge conquerors. The survivors of the “seven days war” emerge into a world in which only defeat is visible.
