Since Edwin Muir’s death in 1959 at the age of 71, his poetry has slipped into the shadows, and he has become a somewhat neglected figure. Although he did much through his translations to promote the work of Franz Kafka, Muir is not obviously a modernist. His poetry tends to rely on traditional metres and rhymes and has a Latinate grammar. And yet it was Muir who wrote one of the greatest eco-poems of the 20th century. In fact, by virtue of his remote background and the retentive power of his memory, he was a born eco-poet.

Muir was born and brought up in the Orkney Islands before his family moved to Glasgow when he was 14, and his most resonant memories were all rooted in that wild landscape and the farm run by his father.

One of Muir’s most powerful recollections was watching his father’s horses coming in from the fields. In his autobiography, he recalls the moment when the horses passed by him: “Everything about them, the steam rising from their soft leathery nostrils, the distant rolling of their eyes … the waterfall sweep of their manes, the ruthless flicks of their cropped tails … the plunge of their iron-shod hoofs striking fire from the flagstones, filled me with a stationary terror and delight from which I could get no relief.”

Muir compared his response to an act of worship as understood in the Old Testament sense: a moment of fear and trembling. It is in no way surprising, then, to find in his first volume, published in 1925, a poem called ‘Horses’, in which he recreates that early childhood experience. He employs a religious language to evoke their physical aura. The hulks of their bodies are described as “seraphim of gold”. Their forms are “gigantic”, while their eyes are brilliant with “a cruel apocalyptic light”.

As his memory fades, Muir confesses to an irrepressible desire to return to his childhood Eden with “its bright and fearful presences”. And as the poet moves through his more cosmopolitan life, he constantly finds himself circling back to the images of his Orkney childhood, which have become, in his inner mind, ever more stationary, ever more archetypal and numinous.

At the beginning of his life, so at the end. One of Muir’s late poems in his last volume, significantly titled One Foot in Eden, is called simply ‘The Horses’. Unlike the earlier work, the mature poem is a culmination of his inner vision and has become one of the great eco-poems of our time. It casts his autobiographical memory on the largest possible canvas, that of global catastrophe, the near-extinction of human life through the supreme folly of unregulated technology and war.

The poem requires little explanation. It is set in a period nearly a year after a war has destroyed the industrial world. The bewildered survivors have experienced the sudden and ominous silence of the media; they have witnessed a warship pass covered with dead bodies and seen a single plane crash into the sea. Full of loathing for the old order, the survivors leave their tractors in the fields and once again use oxen to pull the ploughs. And then, in the last half of the poem, the unexpected moment comes. With an insistent tapping of hooves on the hard road, the beautiful wild horses return from the wilderness with the force of revelation. Their dramatic arrival announces another beginning, a new creative relationship between humankind and Nature.

‘The Horses’ is a remarkable ecological poem for our precarious Anthropocene age and, at the same time, the summation of Muir’s life with his desire to return to Eden but with a higher level of evolved consciousness. As he put it in one of his very last poems, “All things in their right place / An image of forever / One and whole.”

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 moulder 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’ first appeared in Edwin Muir: Collected Poems (Faber and Faber, 1960).

Peter Abbs is Poetry Editor for Resurgence & Ecologist. www.peterabbs.net