The Horses by Edwin Muir

Edwin Muir’s poem, the horses uses a variety of techniques to attract the attention and appeal to the audience. The point he is trying to get across is a serious one and he makes the audience consider it in a new and eye-opening way.

The poem discusses the use of horses and how we have held them in servitude for so long. It discusses the idea of karma, which, though now widely known, was not common in Muir’s time. It allows us to see another side to the humble creature so often used to symbolize beauty and human victory. It allows us to see that a horse is something in itself, that when we are gone they will still roam and the world will be freer. It compares modern technology with horse, showing use how cold and hard it is and how much we have lost in hope for efficiency.

The poem also discusses the idea of life as a cycle: in six days God created the world; in six days it will be destroyed and on the seventh – nothing, rest and the return of the world as it was before man introduced destruction and death.

Although it was not in use when the poem was written, Muir uses archaic language throughout as a way of reminding us of the happiness that we had in the past and urging us to return to nature instead of trying to block it out of our lives.

By using “Barely a twelve month after” Muir links the poem and the issue being discussed to the Bible and appeals to the religious and cultural part of his audience.

Euphemisms are also commonly used to suggest an idea without putting it forward harshly or offending the ear. An example of this is “the seven days war that put the world to sleep.” Muir uses sleep as a euphemism for death. This well known euphemism makes the reader feel at ease and suggests the idea of death without the horror or violence with which it is often associated.

The poem ends with hope. After a great deal of sadness, we are given the message which the poem was written to achieve. “Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.”

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muir.rhizomatics.org.uk –

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 plows,

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 plows and borne our loads

But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.

Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

Edwin Muir

http://www.bookrags.com/essay-2003/5/13/43029/1143

http://www.slate.com/id/13105