Lmst

Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,
The sun looks from the hill
Helmed in his winter casket,
And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky…

—Edwin Muir, “Scotland’s Winter”
from ONE FOOT IN EDEN (Faber, 1956)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #EdwinMuir #winter

Scotland’s Winter
by Edwin Muir

Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,
The sun looks from the hill
Helmed in his winter casket,
And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky.
The water at the mill
Sounds more hoarse and dull.
The miller’s daughter walking by
With frozen fingers soldered to her basket
Seems to be knocking
Upon a hundred leagues of floor
With her light heels, and mocking
Percy and Douglas dead,
And Bruce on his burial bed,
Where he lies white as may
With wars and leprosy,
And all the kings before
This land was kingless,
And all the singers before
This land was songless,
This land that with its dead and living waits the Judgment Day.
But they, the powerless dead,
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.

You that through all the dying summer
Came every morning to our breakfast table,
A lonely bachelor mummer,
And fed on the marmalade
So deeply, all your strength was scarcely able
To prise you from the sweet pit you had made…

—Edwin Muir, “The Late Wasp”
from One Foot in Eden (Faber, 1956)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #EdwinMuir #autumn

The Late Wasp
by Edwin Muir

You that through all the dying summer
Came every morning to our breakfast table,
A lonely bachelor mummer,
And fed on the marmalade
So deeply, all your strength was scarcely able
To prise you from the sweet pit you had made, –
You and the earth have now grown older,
And your blue thoroughfares have felt a change;
They have grown colder;
And it is strange
How the familiar avenues of the air
Crumble now, crumble; the good air will not hold,
All cracked and perished with the cold;
And down you dive through nothing and through despair.

Leave, leave your well-loved nest,
Late swallow, and fly away.
Here is no rest
For hollowing heart and wearying wing…

—Edwin Muir, “The Late Swallow”
first published in One Foot in Eden (Faber, 1956)

https://www.scottishpoetrylibrary.org.uk/poem/late-swallow/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thcentury #EdwinMuir #autumn

The Late Swallow
by Edwin Muir

Leave, leave your well-loved nest,
Late swallow, and fly away.
Here is no rest
For hollowing heart and wearying wing.
Your comrades all have flown
To seek their southern paradise
Across the great earth’s downward sloping side,
And you are alone.
Why should you cling
Still to the swiftly ageing narrowing day?
Prepare;
Shake your pinions long untried
That now must bear you there where you would be
Through all the heavens of ice;
Till falling down the homing air
You light and perch upon the radiant tree.

Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long
Through time and never found eternity,
Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,
You should have fled our ever-dying song…

—Edwin Muir, “To the Old Gods”
📷 Ballachulish Figure, c728–524 BCE

https://www.nms.ac.uk/discover-catalogue/a-mysterious-iron-age-figure-from-ballachulish

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #archaeology #IronAge #EdwinMuir

To the Old Gods
by Edwin Muir

Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long
Through time and never found eternity,
Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,

You should have fled our ever-dying song,
The mound, the well, and the green trysting tree.
They have forgotten, yet you linger still.

Goddess of caverned breast and channeled brow,
And cheeks slow hollowed by millennial tears,
Forests of autumn fading in your eyes,

Eternity marvels at your counted years
And kingdoms lost in time, and wonders how
There could be thoughts so bountiful and wise

As yours beneath the ever-breaking bough
And vast compassion curving like the skies.

An early Iron Age wooden carved figure of a woman or girl, standing in front of a wall of woven twigs and branches. The figure is blackened with age, and the wood has twisted and elongated due to the lack of proper preservation when it was discovered in a peatbog in 1880. Carved from a single block of alder, at the time of its discovery it stood 1.4 metres tall (just under 5 feet). The figure has a large, heavy head with inset quartz pebbles for eyes, large ears, a distinct nose and mouth and a round chin.

The Confirmation – Edwin Muir

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 seem 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.

by Edwin Muir (1887-1959)

#EdwinMuir #TheConfirmation

In favoured summers
These islands have the sun all to themselves
And light a toy to play with, weeks on end…

—Edwin Muir, “The Northern Islands”
published in The Complete Poems of Edwin Muir, ed. Peter H. Butter (ASLS, 1999)

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #Orkney #summer #EdwinMuir

Edwin Muir
The Northern Islands

In favoured summers
These islands have the sun all to themselves
And light a toy to play with, weeks on end.
The empty sky and waters are a shell
Endlessly turning, turning the wheel of light,
While the tranced waves run wavering up the sand.
The beasts sleep when they can, midnight or midday,
Slumbering on into unending brightness.
The green, green fields give too much, are too rank,
With beautiful beasts for breeding or for slaughter.
The horses, glorious useless race, are leaving.
Have the old ways left with them, and the faith,
Lost in this dream too comfortable and goodly
To make room for a blessing? Where can it fall?
The old ways change in the turning, turning light,
Taking and giving life to life from life.

“What is remarkable is that Muir did not become a social realist, like W.H. Auden, Cecil Day-Lewis, Stephen Spender, and other related British poets during the 1930s, who didn’t know anything close to what Muir knew directly about urban poverty”

—Andrew Frisardi on the life & work of Edwin Muir

@litstudies

9/8

https://www.sacredweb.com/volume-51/the-good-life-of-edwin-muir/

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thCentury #EdwinMuir #Orkney #modernism

“[Edwin Muir’s] travels in the 1920s immediately after the end of World War One, and again at the end of World War Two, tell a story of Europe itself at critical points in its history.”

—Dr Margery Palmer McCulloch, on the Oxford University Press blog

8/8

https://blog.oup.com/2017/05/edwin-muir-story-europe/

#Scottish #literature #history #Europe #20thCentury #EdwinMuir #Orkney

One foot in Eden still, I stand
And look across the other land.
The world’s great day is growing late,
Yet strange these fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate…

—Edwin Muir, “One Foot in Eden”

7/8

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thCentury #EdwinMuir #Orkney

One foot in Eden
Edwin Muir

One foot in Eden still, I stand
And look across the other land.
The world's great day is growing late,
Yet strange these fields that we have planted
So long with crops of love and hate.
Time's handiworks by time are haunted,
And nothing now can separate
The corn and tares compactly grown.
The armorial weed in stillness bound
About the stalk; these are our own.
Evil and good stand thick around
In the fields of charity and sin
Where we shall lead our harvest in.

Yet still from Eden springs the root
As clean as on the starting day.
Time takes the foliage and the fruit
And burns the archetypal leaf
To shapes of terror and of grief
Scattered along the winter way.
But famished field and blackened tree
Bear flowers in Eden never known.
Blossoms of grief and charity
Bloom in these darkened fields alone.
What had Eden ever to say
Of hope and faith and pity and love
Until was buried all its day
And memory found its treasure trove?
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.

Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long
Through time and never found eternity,
Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,
You should have fled our ever-dying song…

—Edwin Muir, “To the Old Gods”

6/8

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thCentury #EdwinMuir #Orkney

The houses stir and pluck their roofs and walls
Apart as if in play and fling their stones
Against the sky to make a common arc
And fall again. The conflagrations raise
Their mountainous precipices…

—Edwin Muir, “The River”

5/8

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thCentury #EdwinMuir #Orkney

Edwin Muir
The River

The silent stream flows on and in its glass
Shows the trained terrors, the well-practised partings,
The old woman standing at the cottage gate,
Her hand upon her grandson’s shoulder. He,
A bundle of clouts creased as with tribulations,
Bristling with spikes and spits and bolts of steel,
Bound in with belts, the rifle’s snub-nosed horn
Peering above his shoulder, looks across
From this new world to hers and tries to find
Some ordinary words that share her sorrow.
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,
Stones, planks and tiles and chips of glass and china
Strewn on the slope as by a wrecking wave
Among the grass and wild-flowers. Darkness falls,
The stream flows through the city. In its mirror
Great oes and capitals and flourishes,
Pillars and towers and fans and gathered sheaves
Hold harvest-home and Judgment Day of fire.
The houses stir and pluck their roofs and walls
Apart as if in play and fling their stones
Against the sky to make a common arc
And fall again. The conflagrations raise
Their mountainous precipices. Living eyes
Glaze instantly in crystal change. The stream
Runs on into the day of time and Europe,
Past the familiar walls and friendly roads,
Now thronged with dumb migrations, gods and altars
That travel towards no destination. Then
The disciplined soldiers come to conquer nothing,
March upon emptiness and do not know…

“On the second Friday of March 2020, before the first UK lockdown had begun… I was listening to the BBC news & boiling pasta for my children’s tea when a line of verse ran through my head…”

—Jeremy Noel-Tod on Edwin Muir’s “The Horses”

4/8

https://someflowerssoon.substack.com/p/we-would-not-have-it-again

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thCentury #EdwinMuir #Orkney #apocalypse #lockdown

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…

—Edwin Muir, “The Horses”

3/8

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thCentury #EdwinMuir #Orkney #apocalypse

The Horses
Edwin Muir

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, headed 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.

I never felt so much
Since I have felt at all
The tingling smell and touch
Of dogrose and sweet briar,
Nettles against the wall,
All sours and sweets that grow
Together or apart
In hedge or marsh or ditch…

—“A Birthday”, by poet, novelist & translator Edwin Muir (1887–1959) – born #OTD, 15 May

1/8

#Scottish #literature #poem #poetry #20thCentury #EdwinMuir #Orkney

"A Birthday"
by Edwin Muir

I never felt so much
Since I have felt at all
The tingling smell and touch
Of dogrose and sweet briar,
Nettles against the wall,
All sours and sweets that grow
Together or apart
In hedge or marsh or ditch.
I gather to my heart
Beast, insect, flower, earth, water, fire,
In absolute desire,
As fifty years ago.

Acceptance, gratitude:
The first look and the last
When all between has passed
Restore ingenuous good
That seeks no personal end
Nor strives to mar or mend.
Before I touched the food
Sweetness ensnared my tongue;
Before I saw the wood
I loved each nook and bend,
The track going right and wrong;
Before I took the road
Direction ravished my soul.
Now that I can discern
It whole or almost whole,
Acceptance and gratitude
Like travellers return
And stand where they first stood.

Read “Das nächste Dorf”, by Franz Kafka, in honor of the one-hundredth anniversary of his death (in German, English, French, Spanish, and Italian). #111Words #FranzKafka #DasNächsteDorf #Erzählung #Literature #TheNextVillage #WilmaMuir #EdwinMuir #ShortStory #LeProchainVillage #LaurentMargantin #LaAldeaMásCercana #JoséDelSolar #IlProssimoVillaggio #ErvinoPocar #Translation https://andrewjshields.blogspot.com/2024/06/read-das-nachste-dorf-by-franz-kafka-in.html

@scotlit a great poet. I love his poem The Combat too: https://poetryarchive.org/poem/the-combat/ #EdwinMuir #Poetry

I can’t claim a family acquaintance with many literary figures, but George Mackay Brown studied at Newbattle at the same time as my uncle Bill and they stayed friends for the next 40 years until George’s death in 1996. I met him several times at Bill’s house in Bathgate and the poetry, the stories, the songs…what great nights they were! #GeorgeMackayBrown #Orkney #NewbattleAbbey #BillDrysdale #EdwinMuir https://www.pressandjournal.co.uk/fp/past-times/3531963/george-mackay-brown-orkney/

THE VOYAGE

(For Eric Linklater)

That sea was greater than we knew,

Week after week the empty round

Went with us; the Unchanging grew,

And we were headed for that bound.

How we came there we could not tell.

Seven storms had piled us in that peace,

Put us in check and barred us well

With seven walls of seven seas.

FROM ‘THE VOYAGE’ BY EDWIN MUIR
#marineweek #EdwinMuir #poem
https://theorkneynews.scot/2023/07/24/the-voyage-marineweek/

#EdwinMuir

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