The Horses – a poem by Edwin Muir

One of the first times I heard of Orkney was when I read Edwin Muir’s poetry. It was so strong, so vivid and so compassionate that I can still feel the thrill of reading my favourites, The Combat, The Castle and The Horses. His poem The Horses describes a post nuclear holocaust world and is a meditation on communication. Muir describes the strangeness of the arrival of horses as, “Strange to us As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield. Or illustrations in a book of knights.” That’s how I felt seeing these wonderful horses in the field at Einar.

The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days’ war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
‘They’ll molder away and be like other loam.’
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers’ land.
                    And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half-a-dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

The Horses - a poem by Edwin Muir - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the)

I still treasure my copy of Edwin Muir’s Selected Poems. Here’s a link:

More Edwin Muir

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Owlfly - Italy - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the) Bewitched We're exploring the scrub and woodland verges and fields of an abandoned farmhouse in Apulia in the south of Italy.… read more
Noltland Castle - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the) The Castle – a poem by Edwin Muir I've always felt a close connection to the poetry of Edwin Muir. His themes include loss and betrayal, life and… read more
Alone on the rocky shore - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the) Childhood – a poem by Edwin Muir I find Orcadian poet Edwin Muir's poetry so rich in symbols, metaphors and similes that it's a constant joy to… read more
Fledging Swallow - The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) 2016 David Bailey (not the) The Late Swallow – a poem by Edwin Muir Orcadian poet Edwin Muir is a favourite of mine. As I watched the Swallows at Einar I remembered his wonderful… read more
The Hall of Einar - photograph (c) David Bailey (not the) ‘The refugees born for a land unknown’ – a poem by Edwin Muir 'I have fled through land and sea, blank land and sea, Because my house is besieged by murderers And I… read more


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