NEEPS

bracken · Posted: Wed Nov 26, 2008 6:12 pm Post subject: The Horses by Edwin Muir

Here's a work by Edwin Muir - a Scottish poet from Orkney.
I first found it in a book by George Ewart Evans - Horse Power and Magic. George Ewart Evans was a great collector of oral history - in particular the Horseman's word and other agricultural topics.
I think it's quite topical (I'm watching Survivors too...)

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.

Smooth Hound · Posted: Fri Nov 28, 2008 8:46 pm Post subject:

now ill be honest, its taken a few readings, its long

but that is a beautiful poem, im even going to read it again, in a day or 2 though, no really its lovely

pictishpunkgirl · Neepster Joined: 08 Jul 2007 Posts: 758 Location: Turra

Referenced it on this thread:

http://neeps.myfreeforum.org/about2125.html
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unhindered by talent.....

Martin · Neepster Joined: 16 Sep 2007 Posts: 663

most excellent!

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Smooth Hound · Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2009 8:40 pm Post subject:

took me a hell of a long time to get there

slow reader,

and did i say all that

i dont half spout

Smooth Hound · Posted: Tue Jan 20, 2009 9:24 pm Post subject:

i would like to say thogh. if we goback to horses, then we must all see it our duty, that its no like the old days, this time its without cruelty, thats if ive got anything to do with it, this is the problem see,