THE SYMBOLIC USE OF GREEK MYTH AND BIBLICAL SAGA

IN THE POETRY OF EDWIN MUIR

by

TRAVIS L. LIVINGSTON, B.A., M.A.

A DISSERTATION

IN

ENGLISH

Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Texas Tech University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Approved

{/ Accepted

December, 1977

AC

13

PREFACE

Edwin Muir worked out from his own experience a

basic philosophy of life and gave expression of it in

universal or archetypal form throughout his poetry, but

principally and most fully, through the format provided

by Greek myth and Biblical saga. He found the best

mode for communicating this philosophy to be poetry,

which deals with values as opposed to mere fact. The best

means of communicating his ideas in terms of modern man

he felt to lie in the use of archetypal patterns of human

experience, particularly as represented in Greek and

Biblical mythology. The purpose of this investigation is

to show how Muir's use of classical and Biblical subject

matter in certain poems provided him with a special

symbolic mode for objectifying his particular personal

discoveries about man's existence in a hostile world and

the form most useful for communicating the latter to his

fellows.

The poems to be considered in this investigation are

contained in Edwin Muir, Collected Poems (2nd ed., 1965).

Only those poems which appeared in the eight earlier

volumes, and were retained in this collection will be

considered. The original publication of these collected

11

poems was in 1960; and Muir, himself, was engaged in their

selection at his death in 1959. The poems thus represent

what he considered to be the best and most expressive of

his poems. Because of the emphasis upon Greek myth and

Biblical story, the study will concerned primarily with

those poems in which Greek myth or Biblical saga dominate

with respect to the overall development of an individual

poem; poems that have only incidental allusions to

characters or situations from classical or Biblical

subject areas will not be included. Excluded also are

poems which merely refer to abstract theological ideas

without citing in any detail the Biblical story from

which they derive.

In its major development the investigation consists

of the following divisions: Chapters I through III are

devoted to (1) an account of Muir's life and literary

career, (2) a presentation of the development of his

basic philosophy concerning the meaning of man's existence

in the universe, and (3) a description of his classical

and Biblical poems as the symbolic vehicle of Muir's

principal views concerning the meaning of man's existence.

These are followed by a brief conclusion summarizing the

substance of the work as a whole.

fl • •

111

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PREFACE ii

CHAPTER

I. LIFE AND LITERARY CAREER 1

Early Influences and Professional

Life 1

Poetic Career 22

II. THE SEARCH FOR A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE . . 44

Universalization of Personal Experience 44

The Concepts of the Story and the

Fable, Of Time and Eternity . . . 48

III. THE CLASSICAL AND BIBLICAL POEMS . . . . 68

The Classical Poems 69

The Biblical Poems 80

IV. STORY: MAN'S EXISTENCE IN A TIME WORLD 92

The Complexities and Paradoxes of

Everyday Experience 94

The Entrapment of Man in Time . . . 113

V. FABLE—INTIMATIONS OF ETERI>fITY 131

Love's Redeeming and Enduring Power 131

Insights into an Ideal Order Outside Time 148

IV

The Reconciliation of Time and Eternity 166

The Experience of the Eternal . . . . 178

VI. CONCLUSION 182

NOTES 186

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED 195

CHAPTER I

LIFE AND LITERARY CAREER

Early Influences and Professional Life

Since the death of Edwin Muir, and with the increased

study of his poetry, many facts about his personal life

have become more widely known. The segments of his life

which seem to have influenced his poetry most are his

childhood in Orkney, his years in Glasgow, and his

travels on the continent. Some understanding of Muir's

life is helpful in understanding his poetry; for as

T. S. Eliot states in the preface to Muir's Collected

Poems, "The work and the man are one. . . . " Most of

the information about his early life can be obtained

from his autobiography. An Autobiography (1954), or from

the standard account of his life, Edwin Muir: Man and

Poet (1966), by Peter Butter. The brief resume of his

life given here is for the purpose of providing convenient

reference to some of its main events.

Muir was born in the Orkney Islands on May 15, 1887.

Both his mother and father were from older families of

these islands, and both parents retained many of the more

primitive ideas that were prevalent on the islands at the

time. His mother lived more in the past than his father,

but his father relayed to him ideas of the supernatural

and stories cibout the Book of Black Arts. Both parents

accepted the ideas of the supernatural or fabulous as

being a part of the real world. His father, for example,

a good horseman, was supposed to have known the special

word which gives man control over the animal. From this

parental influence and the general cultural influences

of the islands, Muir came to conceive of the world as

existing on two planes, the ordinary and the fabulous,

though making very little distinction between the two.

Together they existed as a larger reality in which

fairies, leprechauns, and mermaids also existed. The

people of the islands, as well as Muir's parents,

accepted this fact as a way of life. In his later career,

as will be shown, Muir tried to reconcile these two

levels by two concepts: Story, or man's everyday existence,

and Fable—an area that lay above and beyond the reality

of man's human existence.

While Muir was a youngster, his father farmed several

places on the islands, though not very successfully.

However, the influences of this early life on the farm

were important to Muir throughout his life. Although some

of these concepts were eventually modified, he initially

drew several ideas from his farm life experiences. For

example, the experiences inherent in the agrarian life

became for Muir a ritual of life. Each phase of this

life, he saw as part of the ritual of man's existence

from birth to death. He later said of it that it was a

"carnival of birth and death" that could frighten a 2

child. He himself as a child was frightened at times

by the actions on the farm, but eventually came to see

them as a part of the ritual act: the ritual of the bull

serving the cow; the ritual of the slaughter of the hog

and the sheep. The ritualistic pattern followed by the

Orkney farmers, he stated later, seemed to transform

these actions into a "sad, sanctioned duty."

Partially through seeing the farm life as a ritual

pattern and partially from the nature of the Orkney

community, Muir conceived of his early life as part of

an order and harmony. The farming techniques of the

islands had not changed for hundreds of years, and the

farmers were still a cooperative group who helped each

other when help was needed. Each family grew most of its

own food, and purchased very few items from the commercial

stores. Indeed, the culture of these agrarian people was

very close to self-sustaining. Muir wrote of them that

they "did not know ambition and the petty torments of 4

ambition." In The Story and the Fable he observes:

"I was brought up in the midst of a life which was still

cooperative, which had still the medieval communal

feeling. We had heard and read of something called

'competition', but it never came into our experience.

Our life was an order." Men in this society, he gener­

alized, had learned to live together, and with the animals

of the farm. In Muir's later life he seemed to be

searching for an order and harmony which could replace

this early view lost by his removal with his family to

the industrial city of Glasgow.

Yet the early life of Muir was not always one

characterized by a sense of order and perfection because

during this time he also became aware of the human weak­

nesses of evil and fear. The home life of the Muirs was

a religious one, and no doubt he was introduced early to

the ideas of good and evil. All the forms of good and

evil that affect Muir's thought may never be clear, but

he did indicate some of them in his autobiography. As

he spent many hours watching the scurrying insects around

the farm, for example, he felt that they came to

symbolize something evil to him. He wrote, "The gavelocks

and forkytails were my first intimation of evil, and

associations of evil still cling round them for me, as,

I fancy, for most people: popular imagery shows it."

His impressions of evil began to enlarge as Muir grew

older and began to observe more. The animals of the farm

as well took on certain characteristics of fear and terror

which he associated with evil. As a child, for example,

Muir was afraid of his father's horses, yet along with

this fear was a strong desire to touch the horses. In

later years Muir refers to this combination of emotions •7

as representing something close to Old Testament worship.

Yet while the horses generated in Muir a fear and terror,

the cows, on the other hand, gave him comfort. With

certain other animals, particularly those slaughtered for

food, Muir associated a sense of guilt that they must be

slaughtered, but the guilt was not very strong because of

the ritual pattern in which the slaughter was done.

There was thus an association of good and evil even with

the farm animals as Muir gradually became aware of good

and evil in his early life.

As a boy of about seven, Muir became conscious of

guilt and evil on a personal level during an incident

which involved some bags of sheep dip which his father Q

had told him not to touch. His father had placed the

poisonous bags in the field, but after the bags had been

destroyed Muir could not be certain that he had not

touched them. His fear and sense of guilt grew until he

felt continually inclined to wash his hands, though this

action did not help. Finally, as these feelings began to

play on him, he began to experience a sense of alienation

from his family. This experience was particularly

traumatic for Muir since it was the first time that he

had experienced fear and guilt to such a degree. He was

eventually able to recover from this experience as he

became older, but he was never able fully to explain it.

His sense of guilt may have been influenced to some

extent by the general religious climate of the islands—

that of a staunch Calvinism. Muir's mother and father

were both religious people although in somewhat different

ways. His mother was a gentle women who taught him about

Jesus from children's books. She was in the revivalist

movement and loved to sing hymns from the Moody and

Sankey hymn-book. But Mrs. Muir did not confine her

singing to hymns, for she also sang ballads, introducing

ballads to Edwin in this way. But she was careful to

make a distinction between the sacred and "carnal" songs.

Mr. Muir's religion was not overtly strict, but he was

reverent. Muir wrote that some of his fondest memories

were the Sunday night Bible readings and prayers led by

his father. Muir's family received the weekly. The

Christian Herald, with sermons by Charles Haddon Spurgeon

and Thomas De Witt Talmage, but the portion that influenced

Muir most was the millennial speculation of a Doctor

Baxter. Not only was the millennium represented in the

Herald, but discussions of it went on in the home. Thus

religion was a common and important aspect of the Muir

family life, and helped Muir to formulate his first

ideas of good and evil.

This religious influence was probably instrumental

in the religious conversions which Muir experienced

during his life. His first religious conversion was in

response to the preaching of a Mr. Macpherson. Even

though Muir later refers to this incident as a dubious

experience, it made a strong impression on him and his

companions. The results of this experience created a

change in him and in the other boys who were similarly

"saved." Coarse words and thoughts became unpleasant to

him, and he found it easy to answer insults with a gentle

reply. The others who had found redemption showed similar

changes in conduct as if some form of thorough purification

had taken place. This change that took place in Muir's

experience made an impression on him that furnished him

in later years with numerous images for his poetry.

Muir's first formal schooling occurred during the

time that they lived on Wyre, in a small school, which

for several reasons Muir hated. He was frequently ill

during this period of his life, and this fact forced him

to start to school at an age later than normal, as well

as to miss a great deal of school. This experience was

8

the first association with many other children for Muir.

He had had only one friend, outside his own family, a

girl from a neighboring farm, before he went to school.

Even though there were only fifteen or sixteen pupils in

the school, Muir was frightened by the experience, though

he finally made friends with some of the younger students.

The chief experience of this schooling that stands out

for him was a series of encounters with a boy named

Freddie Sinclair. He and Freddie had a fight over a

knife, and in the first encounter Muir won; but on the

second confrontation Muir turned coward and ran. He did

not know why he ran, only that he did. The experience so

affected Muir that he later wrote, "For almost thirty

years afterwards I was so ashamed of that moment of panic

that I did not dare to speak of it to anyone, and drove it 9

out of my mind." The experience, though forced under­

ground, became the background for his poem "The Ballad of

Hector in Hades."

His next formal schooling came at Kirkwall Burgh

School. He did not hate school here as he had at Wyre,

and even at times enjoyed it. It opened views of the

world for him by his meeting larger groups of students

and more teachers, and coming to contact with new ideas.

However, probably more important than this formal training

in school was his acquiring a habit of wide reading.

His devouring of printed material started when he was

about nine, continuing throughout the remainder of his

life. The new school gave him new and more material,

and although much of the material he read was not good,

and much he did not understand, he did develop the

reading habit. At about eleven, he discovered poetry and

history, both of which stimulated his interest until he

was beginning to buy books of his own with what little

money he had. He made up his mind that he wanted to be

a writer, but this decision created problems between his

parents and himself, for they considered the writing of

novels and poetry an unworthy occupation. Muir tried to

appease them by saying that he was going to write a life

of Christ. Muir never wrote the book on Christ, but he

did later fulfill his ambition to become a literary man.

After a year at Kirkwall, Muir left school and ended his

formal education.

During this last period of formal schooling, Muir

was becoming aware of the breaking up of his family. His

family had been for him the one stationary pattern in

life, but now it was beginning to lore its members to a

broader world. The oldest brother, Jimmie was working

away from home and came home only on visits. His brother's

being a part of the family and yet separate from it

troubled Muir. He became unconsciously aware of the

10

paradox of unity and separateness, although he did not

understand it. This problem was further complicated as

other of his brothers and sister—Willie, Johnnie, and

Elizabeth—gradually left home for involvements in other

places. The paradox thus presented may not have been the

first of this kind for Muir, and it would not be the last

that he would have to try to resolve during his life, but

it did make him conscious of a new aspect of life—that

of paradox.

At about this same period in Muir's life he began to

achieve a realization of another aspect of human life that

perplexed him, for the element of time began to be a

significant factor in his existence. He was beginning

to have a vision of life in which time began, as it had

not in his childhood, to play an important part. Now,

with a maturation of insight, he was beginning to see the

world as his elders looked at it. As the ideas related

to time are presented in the Autobiography, the early life

of the child is a period of timelessness, a period in

which time is of little or no consequence. As he said

of his mother and father, "I never thought that they were

like other men and women; to me they were fixed allegorical

figures in a timeless landscape." He states further,

"Our first childhood is the only time in our lives when

we exist within immortality, and perhaps all our ideas

11

12 on immortality are influenced by it." Time, however,

cannot be ignored for long in life, but will come and

pull man into itself. Thus, at about thirteen, Muir

began to awaken to a sense of time. He wrote, "At the

Bu [a farm where he lived] I had lived my life separately

and in peace, but now I felt that need to become at once

like grown-up people which tortures growing boys: it

13 was as if time had suddenly spoken aloud within me."

In such awakening he became aware of the differences

between his vision of the world as a child and that of the

world in which adults existed. Time became the primary

observable difference between the childhood vision that

he lost and the adult vision he was trying to formulate.

When he was fourteen, a major event occurred in the

life of Muir; for his father, having sold his farming

equipment, decided to move to Glasgow. This move from the

agrarian-centered islands to the industrial-centered city

was a very traumatic change for a boy beginning his search

for adulthood. In the new city and new society, Muir

saw sights and encountered situations that he had not

known in Orkney. The poverty and slums that he saw in

Glasgow had no counterpart in his past. Even though the

Muir family was not directly a part of this abysmal scene,

Edwin was very much affected by it. He wrote of his

journeys back and forth to work each day: "The journeys

12

filled me with a sense of degradation: the crumbling

houses, the twisted faces, the obscene words casually

heard in passing, the ancient, haunting stench of pollu­

tion and decay, the arrogant women, the mean men, the

terrible children, daunted me, and at last filled me with

14 an immense, blind dejection." These impressions

remained with Muir for many years because he later wrote,

"The first years after we came to Glasgow were so stupidly

wretched, such a meaningless waste of inherited virtue,

that I cannot write of them even now without grief and

15 anger." His attempts to escape these surroundings by

walking into the country were frustrated because of the

industrial society. The fields were blasted by disease,

the trees twisted, the grass covered with soot. The move

to Glasgow offered a profound shock to young Muir's

sensibilities.

But he was shocked by other factors as well, particu­

larly since he became directly acquainted with death. In

Orkney he had known a man who died and seen a boy who

later died, but he had not known death in his immediate

family. However, within a year of their arrival in

Glasgow, Muir's father died, then his brothers Willie and

Johnnie. Finally his mother passed away. Within four

years, he had lost four members of his family, and the

other four had gone their separate ways. Trying to

13

understand these events Muir could make nothing of them

except that "life was ruled by an iron law." Much later

he wrote, "I was too young for so much death, all that

time seemed to give no return, nothing but loss; it was

like a heap of dismal rubbish in the middle of which,

without rhyme or reason, were scattered four deaths. I

climbed out of these years like a man struggling out of

a quagmire, but that rubbish still encumbered me for a

17 long time with post-mortem persistence."

Yet in the midst of this despair, Muir was still

continuing to read and to advance his understanding of

literature and ideas. He continued to read widely in

English literature including the works of Shakespeare,

Milton, Hardy, Meredith, and others. He became interested

in Socialism, which led him to join the Clarion Scouts,

which sponsored lectures by various famous people on

diverse subjects. From his association with the scouts,

Muir became a member of a small group of intellectuals

who were interested in discussing varied subjects. He also

subscribed to The New Age edited by A. R. Orage. The New

Age printed articles on such varied subjects as politics,

economics, philosophy, literature, and art. The New Age

with its diverse ideas created a new interest for Muir.

As Butter wrote, the paper "released over him a flood of

exciting ideas, but he could not at that time distinguish

14

those which were in accordance with his deepest intuitions

from those which were not. In consequence we find him

in the next few years adopting a series of opinions and

18 attitudes which were not native to him."

In his depressed state Muir wrote to Orage for advice.

He told Orage his situation and asked if he could give

any assistance. Orage replied that he had been helped

himself in a similar situation by a detailed study of the

works of one author. He recommended Mahabharata, but

Muir chose instead Nietzsche. Butter indicates that, in

addition to Nietzsche being popular at the time, Muir

was attracted to his writings for several reasons:

1. Nietzsche was a poet and prophet as well as a philosopher, expressing himself in myth and parable and metaphor rather than by logi­cal argument.

2. He had a special appeal for those who had lost faith in Christianity, and yet felt the need for something more than a merely materialistic creed to put in its place.

3. Nietzsche's special combination of pessimism and optimism was attractive to one who could not find comfort in more complacent philoso­phers. 19

Muir, having lost his faith in Christianity after the

deaths of his family, became infatuated with the writings

and ideas of Nietzsche. Nietzsche offered what he was

looking for at the time, and he continued to study his

works for several years, although he eventually rejected

15

most of Nietzsche's ideas, as he began to find his own

and to visualize a sense of order in the world.

About the time that Muir began his study of Nietzsche's

writings, he was a clerk in a beer bottling company;

however, this company was changing owners and many of the

old employees were being released. Muir consequently

decided to look for new employment. He found a job with

a company whose main office was in Glasgow, but he was

20 to work in Greenock. The conditions of the job were so

bad that in writing his autobiography he used the ficti­

tious name "Fairport" for the place. He was the clerk for

a firm engaged in rendering animal bones. The physical

condition of being located near all the bones of the dead

animals that were to be converted into charcoal was

sickening to Muir. The stench and the maggots additionally

affected his nerves. Finally, although the general

physical decay and bad smell were oppressive to Muir, the

moral decay generated by this job was probably more

psychologically damaging to him. Muir found himself as

clerk having to cover up for the inefficiency of the office

generally in which he worked and for an unreliable fore­

man in particular. The main office wanted everything

smooth, neat and balanced; Muir fabricated explanations

to please the main office. This lying was not in the

true nature of Muir's temperament, but he endured it for

16

two years. But finally the situation grew so bad that

while walking by the river Clyde one night with David

Mason, he said, "If I don't get out of this place I

21 expect I'll jump in there soon." Mason helped get

Muir a job as a clerk in a shipyard, but Muir carried

the effects of this situation with him for many years to

come.

During this period of the Glasgow days, including

"Fairport," Muir was encountering other psychological

problems associated with such a devisive life. His

work as a clerk did not lend itself intellectually to the

development of the ideas with which he was working.

Particularly being a clerk in a beer bottling factory and

a bone factory did not complement the writings of

Nietzsche and the idea of the superman. Muir consequently

began to shut out the physical world around him, to the

point that he could no longer see it or realize its

existence. This action increased his states of loneliness,

isolation, and dread. He wrote of this period: "But

at the same time dread raised its walls round me, cutting

me off; for even while I yearned for these things I felt

a hidden menace in them, so that the simplest object was

22 dangerous and might destroy me." He was unable to

reconcile his physical surroundings and his intellectual

ideas because they were at such extreme opposite ends of

a spectrum.

17

During the latter part of this period, two things

began to develop that would eventually help Muir recover

from this situation. First, he began to write. His

first writings are imitations of the style of Nietzsche

and echo many of his ideas; however, by means of writing

he was beginning to expand his own ideas. He eventually

sent some of these aphorisms to The New Age which published

them under the heading "We Moderns." Some of these

writings were collected and published as a volume. We

Moderns in 1918. The publishing of this volume led to

his meeting with Willa Anderson—his future wife. During

the time he was writing the aphorisms, he also met for

the first time Francis George Scott and Denis Saurat.

These two men introduced him to music and helped him to

understand its qualities. Saurat, in addition, introduced

him to new ideas. Muir had had many acquaintances before,

but these two men seemed to have come at about the right

time to open new frontiers that enabled him to endure and

eventually escape the conditions of the Glasgow days.

The most fortunate of the events just mentioned was

his acquaintance with Willa Anderson, whom he met in the

winter of 1918 and married in the summer of 1919. She

was instrumental in getting Muir to leave Glasgow and move

to London where they both found jobs, and were able to

start something of a new life, though Muir continued to

18

be plagued by fears and was frightened by the large crowds

of London. Muir also became ill and was treated by a

Russian doctor, who told him that the ills of man were

caused by the ring or circle of life being broken. The

needed cure was to join it together again. Muir eventually

managed to recover, but he had lost his job. Orage then

offered him part-time work with The New Age. Muir

secured additional work as drama critic for The Scotsman

and as a reviewer for The Athenaeum. These events marked

the beginning of a literary career.

Still troubled by his old fears and problems, Muir

was persuaded by Orage to undergo psychoanalysis. The

New Age had been running some articles on psychoanalysis,

and Orage was interested in the new techniques, probably

more so than Muir. But Muir reluctantly agreed to go for

an interview with Maurice Nicoll, during which Nicoll

agreed to do the analysis free and Muir agreed to partici­

pate. The period of analysis was very painful for Muir

as he had to relive some of his past life. During this

time also he began to have dreams and trances which he

did not understand, although Nicoll was able to help him

see some of the meanings of some of the dreams. On the

basis of Nicoll's interpretations, Muir began to work out

his own ideas about the nature of dreams. He began to

crystalize many ideas that he had only vaguely perceived

19

earlier. However, it was not until some years later that

Muir began to see most clearly how the analysis had

helped him. In the summer of 1921, before the sessions

had been fully completed, the Muirs decided to go to

live on the continent.

With an assurance of some income by reviewing for

The Freeman, the Muirs became residents in Prague. Here,

in more pleasant and satisfactory conditions, Muir began

to reawaken the physical world which he had so closed out

in the Glasgow days. With more leisure time, he was

able to take walks to enjoy the countryside and to think.

This experience was very beneficial to him, and he finally

realized that many of his fears from former days were

beginning to disappear and that his imagination was

beginning to come alive. After a move from Prague to

Dresden, Muir realized that he must review his earlier

years, for he wrote, "I realized that I must live over

again the years which I had lived wrongly, and that

everyone should live his life twice, for the first attempt

23 is always blind." When the Muirs moved to Hellerau

the next year, he was able to state, "But in Hellerau my

imagination was beginning to waken after a long sleep and

the perceptions it promised were so much more real than

those with which I had been trifling that these no longer

24 excited me." By now most of Muir's fears had disappeared.

20

and his imagination had become sufficiently active to

begin, at the age of thirty-five, to write serious poetry

that offered an adequate mode of expression for his

imagination."

The Muirs' first four years on the continent, living

in various places—Prague, Dresden, Hellerau, Italy,

Salsburg, Vienna, Rosenau—were profitable ones for them:

the "reawakening" of his imagination in Prague, his

beginning to write poetry in Dresden, and the final period

in Rosenau. His fears had completely disappeared; he had

clarified many of his ideas, and he was involved in

writing literature: his first book of poems had been

accepted by the Hogarth Press for publication. His first

volume. First Poems, was published in 1925 just as they

returned from their first continental tour.

The Muirs had by now established a name for themselves

in the literary world, and would continue in it.

Although they returned to England, they did not stay very

long, and were soon in search of a place of residence

again across the channel, one which would be more

economical and thus permit them more time for their work.

During the remainder of his career, Muir was frequently

on the move, both on the continent and in England. Many

of the moves were influenced either by economics or working

conditions and occasionally by both.

21

Other events or situations in Muir's life also had

an effect on his general philosophy and upon his poetry.

In the 1920's, Muir had been introduced to anti-

Semitism. Muir did not understand its full meaning at

the time, but during the 1930's he saw the mass hatred

of the Jews in Germany. He had known hatred in Glasgow,

but the massive hatred that the Nazi organization

engendered against the Jews was a shock to him. He saw

again the reenactment of this mass hatred when he wit­

nessed the Communist coup d'etat in Czechoslovakia in

1948. Muir was there working for the British Council,

and had made many friends and had a following of students.

Wnen the change came, Muir saw the direct effects on these

close personal friends. Forced to leave Czechoslovakia,

he suffered, after arriving back in England, what amounted

to a nervous breakdown. How much of the breakdown was

because of this experience has never been made clear, but

certainly the experience had some effect. Both the anti-

Semitism and the Communist take-over enlarged Muir's

concept of human hatred that had started while he was in

Glasgow.

In 19 39, the Muirs were back in England where Willa

was in the hospital. One night after returning home from

visiting her, Edwin found himself quoting the Lord's

Prayer. And, as he records in his autobiography he

22

realized then that he was a Christian, even though

2 6

perhaps a bad one. The realization that he was a

Christian helps explain part of the importance he places

on the incarnation several years later when he worked in

Rome for the British Council. While there witnessing the

display of physical evidence of the life of Christ, he

slowly began to perceive a new and deeper meaning

regarding the incarnation as a true expression of the

Word made flesh. Subsequently the incarnation, for Muir,

became a universal symbol of the incarnation of man.

From this new insight, Muir began to see more clearly

the place that he thought Christ should have in the lives

of men. These two religious experiences did not bring

Muir into any organized religious body, but they did

deepen his intimation that life has meaning. This

confidence gradually came to infiltrate his poetry, as

demonstrated particularly in his last volume. One Foot in

Eden.

Poetic Career

By the time Muir began to write serious poetry, he

had already established himself as a reviewer and critic,

having published two prose volumes—We Moderns: Enigmas

and Guesses (1920) and Latitudes (1924)—before he

published any major poems. At the time he began writing

poetry, he was reviewing for the Freeman, but he had

23

previously written for The New Age, The Scotsman, and

The Athenaeum, and continued to publish prose work the

rest of his life; however, he had a very special feeling

for poetry; and though he wrote prose for the purpose of

making a living, he wrote poetry because he felt it was

worthwhile. During his life, he published three novels,

a biography of John Knox, two version of An Autobiography,

and two volumes of impressions of Scotland. Along with

his reviews, he published several books of literary

criticism, including The Structure of the Novel (1928)

and The Estate of Poetry (1962). He and his wife colla­

borated on translating German literature into English,

particularly some of the works of Franz Kafka.

Although Muir's life was surrounded by literature

of all sorts, poetry had for him a special value; for he

considered poetry the highest form of expression of the

27

human imagination. The first serious poetry that Muir

began to write at age thirty-five was composed during his

first stay on the continent. At this time, Muir was

beginning to awaken to himself and the world around him.

The psychoanalysis had enabled him to begin looking at

his earlier life from a new perspective. When the

volume. First Poems, was published in 1925 by Hogarth

Press, this new awakening was reflected in the twenty-

four poems. Muir, as a beginning poet, had not developed

24

a very effective poetic technique; nevertheless, he was

beginning to attempt to express his ideas in poetry.

First Poems

First Poems reflects his awakening in several ways

as Muir reflects on childhood memories, sees nature, and

relates conflicts of emotions. As Muir reverts to his

childhood memories of innocence and its loss, these

memories intensify his awareness of that loss and the

consequences of it. At least three poems show his

awakening to the physical world around him: e.g., "When

the Trees Grow Bare on the High Hill," "Autumn in Prague,"

and "October in Hellbrunn." Although life of the growing

period is still present in each, Muir chiefly describes

aspects of late fall after the harvest is over and overt

signs of life are gone. By implication Muir suggests

that time is responsible for the dead appearance of late

fall. In "Betrayal," however, he introduces time as the

chief adversary of nature and the destroyer of its beauty.

As he was in his own experience awakening to nature, he

also was witnessing tne destructive force of time on its

beauty. During this period, Muir was beginning to see

various aspects of conflicting emotions, many drawn from

childhood memories into the present. One such was the

emotional experience of thirty years before, when he ran

from Freddie Sinclair; this he now records in the "Ballad

25

of Hector in Hades" to bring that emotion, as he suggests,

into the present and find release from the fear and guilt

2 8 associated with the event. In "Horses" the emotions

of fear and delight came together as he remembered his

father's plow horses and the experience of these emotions

with those horses. That they created a sense of fear

while at the same time they had a magnetic quality that

drew his attention and his sight is revealed in the poem

as he sees the horses as "bright and fearful presences

to me." The imagery that he uses in the poems in First

Poems was drawn mostly from childhood memories, observa­

tions of nature, and his dreams; but some came from the

Greek myth and Biblical saga. Although Muir began in

these early poems to explore some of the ideas that he

would develop more fully later, some of the poems are not

good, a fact that he himself obviously recognized since

he wrote "bad" by some and excluded them from his Collected

2 9 . 1 1 • •

Poems. The two major weaknesses m the poems lie in

the fact that (1) Muir tries to retell a dream without

form or focus, and (2) that the metrical and rhythmical J -. • .c 1 30 patterns are often mechanical and lifeless.

Chorus of the Newly Dead

The next volume to be published by Muir was a single

poem. Chorus of th£ Newly Dead (1926). He had begun the

26

poem in Hellerau, and gave a general idea of what he was

attempting to do in the letter to Sydney Schiff:

I have this in mind, and I have also an idea for a poem, which I shall call Chorus of the Newly Dead (a good deal of it is written") T I wished to get a certain pathos of distance in contemplating human life and I found this the most unconditional way. In this "chorus" there will be types like the Saint, the Beggar, the Idiot, the Hero, the Mother, the Rebel, the Poet, the Coward, and they will all give some account of their lives as they see it from eternity, not in Heaven or in Hell, but in a dubious place where the bewilderment of the change has not been lost. There will also be choruses for all the newly dead in which some kind of trans­cendental judgment will be passed on these recitals as they arise. The atmosphere, I am aiming at is one of mystery and wonder at the life of the earth. There will be no dogmatic justification, and as little mere thought as possible; no mention of the name of God, but an assumption of infinite and incalculable powers behind the visible drama.31

The poem, as printed, differs slightly from his projected

aim, for he has seven characters speak, with the chorus

speaking eight times. After the chorus opens the poem,

the idiot, beggar, coward, and harlot make their

respective speeches in which they try to evaluate why

they have had to suffer in the conditions of their lives,

as all show a sense of both an alienation from other

human beings, and a personal suffering. The chorus adds

its comments after each has given his speech. As the

poet, the hero, and the mystic try to present answers

27

to the others for their predicament, none are able to

give a very satisfactory answer to the four characters.

The poet sees the end of the world and the truth that

man will carry with him his sense of beauty into what­

ever lies ahead. The hero has no clear answer, nor does

the mystic; in the final section the chorus chants only

of the passing of earth and time. The assumption of

infinite power behind the lives of these characters seems

to become mere cruelty, fear, pain, and injustice; for

no answer to their condition is given since that answer

32

is not yet available to Muir.

In the Chorus, Muir adopted the vantage point of

the hereafter in order to present the poem in a more

objective vein, in effect to move outside himself.

Although he was not completely successful in achieving

objectivity, he did introduce a larger theme than any

he had included in First Poems, namely an effort to

explain why man is what he is in the condition of his

existence. Thematically the poem is unsuccessful, for it

fails to deal adequately with the problem of evil and

suffering; and the relationship of time and eternity 33

presented is vague and uncertain. The general tone of

the poem is one of sympathy for the suffering man, but

the picture as a whole is bleak, for there is no way out

nor a clear understanding of the situation offered.

28

Variations on A Time Theme

Muir's third volume of poetry. Variations on A Time

Theme (1934), is composed of ten separate poems written

on the theme of time. Although some of these had

previously been published as separate poems with titles,

the titles were removed in their new setting and replaced

by Roman numerals. The poems in this volume show an

34 advance over First Poems in content and style, since

Muir used a wider selection of images than in the earlier

work, though the images were still derived from the same

sources as his first volume: childhood experiences,

dreams, myth, and the Bible. Here also he still sought

images and patterns to fuse together personal experience

and philosophical view of the world, particularly, as

the title suggests, his feeling of time as the enemy of

man. For example man, a prisoner of time, is prevented

from seeking answers to the great mysteries of life, for

he cannot discover who he is, where he came from, and

how he should relate to others, nor can he understand to

any more degree the intuitive feelings of immortality

that he possesses. Combined, the preceding form a vision

of man that includes his origin, history, and destiny;

however, time prevents man from understanding or seeing

this vision. And even though faith is never totally

lost, the emphasis in the volume is one of man's being

29

lost in a wilderness waste land in which he is "trapped

and tortured in a temporal world where his heritage has

been destroyed, his purpose lost, and his spiritual

35 values 'crucified'." Echoing throughout the poems is

the implied question, "Does the journey of life have

value?" The answer to the question is not clear for

Muir presents a general mood of purged resignation and

negative expectancy revealing a bitterness and inner

36 tension for which he is unable to find a resolution.

Journeys and Places

Approximately three years after the publication of

Variations on A Time Theme Dent and Son, Ltd. published

Muir's fourth volume. Journeys and Places (1937). This

volume included six poems that had previously been

published by The Samson Press, but since many of the

copies had been destroyed by fire, all six were reprinted

37 as part of the twenty-five poems in this volume. Most

of the poems in the collection had previously been issued

separately in magazines such as The Spectator, The

Listener, and London Mercury. In collecting the poems,

some of the titles were changed and the individual pieces

38 put in a special order to give them an overall unity.

This pattern of collecting poems published independently

and putting them in a volume established a precedent Muir

was to follow throughout his career.

30

In the volume, Muir expanded the images that he

used. Hence some derive from literature and history,

such as the stories of Tristram, Ibsen, and Holderlin.

Each poem in the volume is constructed so as to employ

a journey metaphor since even the place poems represent

stops and stations along the journey, as Muir explains

in the prefatory notes of the volume:

The Journeys and Places in this collection should be taken as having a rough-and-ready psychological connotation rather than a strict temporal or spatial one. The first deal more or less with movements in time, and the second with places reached and the character of such places; but I have also included in the latter division imaginary situations which by license of the fancy may perhaps pass as places, that is, as pauses in time. The division, however, is merely one of convenience.39

Since many of the place poems represent symbolic mental

states in which the mind is trying to find the true

resting place, these poems tend to become abstract

because Muir could not clearly see or visualize the

concrete phemonena of the conflict he wished to suggest.

In some poems, such as "The Road," Muir turned to a

determinism as though his earlier concept of life as

being ruled by an iron law were valid. The last stanza

gives a picture of this view:

The ancestral deed is thought and done And in a million Edens fall

A Million Adams drowned in darkness For small is great and great is small. And a blind seed all. (62)^0

31

All the poems in the volume, however, are not as bleak

as "The Road," for some show a more optimistic visions,

as in "The Mountains" and "The Sufficient Place." As

may be seen in this fluctuation of quality and tone,

Muir is at this point still not certain of the direction

that his interpretation of life will take, he is still

trying to work out his intellectual problems, particu­

larly that between determinism and idealism, for as

Selden states of Journeys and Places, he "was torn between

the notion of the road as a fixed circular path on which

all move according to a rigid determinism, the cycle

being endlessly repeated, and the conception of the road

as a way or path through chaos and beyond to the goal of

41 another Eden."

The Narrow Place

Muir's next volume. The Narrow Place, appeared in

1943, six years after Journeys and Places. Published

by Faber and Faber, Ltd., it contained thirty-four

poems written from 1937-1942, most of them probably

completed toward the end of the period. The poems in

this volume show development in skill and range as he

had now begun to experiment with more varied metrical and

42 rhythmical patterns. He tried the short tetrameter

lines as in "0 you my law" and the overrun of the

pentamenter as in "To their still home, the house and the

32

leaves and birds." In the poems "The Day" and "The

Question" he attempted to construct poems of one sen­

tence with a controlled length of line to convey a sense

of completeness. Finally, he worked with various rhyme

schemes, even trying the difficult terza rima in "The

Ring."

The Narrow Place likewise showed an advance in

poetic presentation of thought over previous volumes,

as he moved away from a tendency toward abstract ideas

to efforts in the direction of concrete imagery drawn

from actual experience, letting the latter type of image

convey the message. Often these poems contain scenic

detail which had been personally observed by Muir; for

example, "The Wayside Station" had its setting at a train

station where Muir actually changed trains, and in

"To J. F. H." Muir recounts an incident in which he saw

a motorcycle rider who reminded him of his former friend

John Holms, whom he conceived of as speeding his way

toward a destiny. Although fewer poems in this volume

are based on his childhood memories, there do appear

images from them: "The Little General," for instance,

based on Muir's impression of a landowner from Orkney

who hunted near the Muir's home when Muir was a child.

Muir's obsession with time, though in this volume it

has lessened, it is still present, as is also his continuing

33

debate between determinism and idealism, and the rela-

43 tionship of man and animal. He is also able in this

volume to fuse the image and the theme more consistently,

even though he continues to write on much the same

philosophical and poetic ideas. In its general tone the

volume remains one of confident hope which is aided by

his inclusion of his first poems about love. After

twenty years of marriage, he began to venture into

writing about the love he shared with his wife: e.g.,

"The Annunciation," "The Confirmation," and "The

Commemoration," which all relate to that marriage and

the love he shared in it. Perhaps the last lines of

"The Day" reflect Muir's thinking about this time in

his writing. After three conditional clauses about his

thoughts, the road, and joys and pain, Muir writes:

Oh give me clarity and love that now The way I walk may truly trace again The in eternity written and hidden way; Make pure my heart and will, and me allow The acceptance and revolt, the yea and nay, The denial and the blessing that are my own. (122)

The Voyage

In 1946, after a lapse of three years, Muir published

The Voyage, containing poems written toward the end of

World War II while Muir was living in Edinburgh. The

volume showed Muir still limiting himself to a narrow

range of themes, images, and verse forms. The themes

34

are those of the preceding volumes, although they

occasionally show slight changes or modifications. Time

has by now become only one of several themes that he

develops in this volume rather than an all-encompassing

obsession. Moreover, he continues to use immediate

concrete situations as the basis for some poems, as in

"Suburban Dream," "Reading in Wartime," and "For Ann

Scott-Moncrieff." In his use of more immediate settings,

however, he seems to have made less use of his dreams for

the imagery in the poems, though, he continues, as before,

to use metaphors and symbols drawn from nature, Greek

myth, and Biblical saga. The following statement by

Butter summarizes Muir's poetic development at the time:

An escape from time is no longer sought, nor an escape from the present into future or past; and he is no longer dependent upon dreams to revive a kind of perception lost in waking life. He writes of the present, of himself and his wife, of a friend whose honesty, naturalness and courage he had admired, of two lovers seen in the street. The poetry is more directly human and personal, less concerned with problems than before, though without losing the sense of a larger context which gives particular things meaning. Self-knowledge had lead to a release from self and from inner tensions, and so to a new feeling of at-oneness with the world outside.^^

The Labyrinth

About the time that The Voyage was published, Muir

was sent to Prague, Czechoslovakia, as Director of the

35

British Council Institute there. At age sixty with a

busy schedule as Director of the Institute and lecturing

on English literature at Charles University, Muir engaged

in one of the most poetically productive periods of his

career, in which he produced the twenty-eight poems that

appeared in The Labyrinth (1948). To one of his favorite

correspondents at this time, Joseph Chiari, he wrote two

letters which provide insight into his current poetic

ideas and into this volume. In the first letter, he

remarks, "I've been trying for some time to write poetry

45 that was both simple and unexpected." One application

of this statement occurs in "The Child Dying," but it

also appeared as a guiding principle in the composition

of other poems as well. In a later letter, he wrote,

"I have almost a volume, but not quite, by this time;

I intend to call the poems Symbols, or something of that

kind, for they all deal with symbolic human situations

and types; and I hope this will give the volume a sort

of unity, and at the same time that it won't cause the

46 contents to be montonous." The proposed title Symbols,

however, was dropped and the title The Labyrinth adopted

instead on the volume's publication by Faber and Faber,

Ltd. in 1948. Muir seems to have been well satisfied

that he had accomplished his original intention, for it

is the only complete volume contained entact in the final

36

47 Collected Poems. For the volume. The Labyrinth, he

received the William Foyle Prize for the best volume of

poetry published in England for the year 1949.^^

Muir further developed his poetic skill in The

Labyrinth, particularly in the use of longer poems in

blank verse. Over the years, Muir had experimented with

verse patterns, but not until The Labyrinth had he used

the vehicle of blank verse so satisfactorily. He wrote

nine longer blank verse poems for this collection, by

means of their longer length being able to treat his

ideas more fully than before, and to develop the ideas

showing a combining of the outside vision—i.e., of the

world around--and the inner vision—that of his life and

49 dreams. In this volume Muir was moving toward a

reconciliation of the acceptance of suffering and time

within human existence; that is, he was becoming able to

take unpleasant immediate situations and develop poems

that were not totally pessimistic. As illustrative of

this point, the four poems—"The Interrogation," "The

Border," "The Good Town," and "The Usurpers"—relate to

the tyranny of a powerful government rule. In "The

Interrogation," for example, Muir selected the situation

of the speaker in the poem having been stopped by a

patrol of surly indifferent men; perhaps Communist or

Nazi. They began the interrogation with all types of

37

leading question as "whose / Country or camp we plot for

or betray." While the questioning is continuing, the

speaker notices two lovers in a field across the road,

a situation, which intensifies his feeling of entrapment,

but at the same time shows the lovers in a state of

freedom and bliss that might be made available to others.

Even though not the main point of the poem, the love

element keeps the poem from becoming totally pessimistic.

The background for the unpleasant situation of the poem

could have been any number of stories that Muir heard

about, the Nazi or what he observed about the Communists

regimes. In The Labyrinth, Muir managed to bring together

the images and the themes in a controlled poetic pattern.

As Butter states, "The Labyrinth contains some of his

greatest poems, and is I think, his most consistently

50 excellent volume."

Collected Poems, 1921-1951

About 1950, J. C. Hall wrote to Muir requesting

permission to produce a collected edition of his poems,

and with Muir's agreement. Collected Poems, 1921-1951

was published by Faber and Faber, Ltd. in 1952. It

appeared in America by Grove Press in 1953 and 1957.

In preparing it for publication Muir rejected many of

the early poems. The actual number he retained—as he

38

points out in the "Author's Note"—included six from

JJ st Poems, four from Variations on A Time Theme, more

than half of Journeys and Places, most of those from

The Narrow Place, and Th£ Voyage, all the poems in The

51 Labyrinth. In addition, nine new poems were added

that appear also in his next volume. One Foot in Eden.

One Foot in Eden

After Collected Poems, 1921-1951, Muir published one

additional volume. One Foot in Eden (1956). Muir wanted

to change the name of this volume to The Succession, but

was persuaded by T. S. Eliot to retain the original 52

title. The forty-eight poems in One Foot in Eden are

divided into Part I and Part II, with each part starting

with a sonnet that sets the tone of the section. Part I

starts with "Milton," suggesting that the emphasis will

be on a paradise lost and regained. Of the twenty-seven

poems in this section, Muir used Greek and Biblical

story materials extensively for his basic symbolism, to

emphasize the perception of life, its acceptance, and

a reconciliation of the conflicts in it. Part II begins

with the sonnet "To Franz Kafka," and the twenty-one

poems contained in the section are considerably more

personal and occasional, than those in the first group.

The second part is marked by a general progression from

39

the bitterness of "Effigies" to the joy of acceptance in

"Song."^-^

Although in his late sixties, Muir was still, in

One Foot in Eden, trying to find and to perfect a poetic

pattern that would enable him to express his ideas best.

Thus in the volume he adds the sonnet fomi to the

longer blank verse vehicle he had perfected in The

Labyrinth. By now, he has advanced in his poetic

technique to the extent that he can control the rhythm

and meter, and more adequately use the right word in the

correct place, although occasionally he slips into his

old weaknesses of a superfluous adjective or an awkward

inversion.

In this last volume of poetry Muir presents the

theme of Reconciliation of conflicts in much stronger

terms than he had ever done before, and his vision of the

54 imaginative world is clearer. The poems fuse what he

has experienced and seen into ideas, but not into dogma.

They show sensitivity of personal feeling while revealing

at the same time more of the experience of the race in

the journey of life. In his summary, statement about

the volume, Selden suggests that "the metaphors have

changed, the poet's sensibility is deeper, and his poetic

techniques are more skillfully and carefully controlled;

5 6 but the message and the vision are the same." One may

40

conclude from this statement that Muir, now advanced in

age, had matured in his poetic development, and crys-

talized many of his ideas into a clear vision of life.

Collected Poems, 1958-1959

Muir's wife, Willa, and J. C. Hall made a new

collection of Muir's poems in 1958-59, with Muir

assisting them in the selection of poems and making

minor alterations. His "Author's Note," written a few

weeks before his death in 1959, states that he added

twenty-seven poems from earlier volumes that had been

omitted from the other Collected Poems because, as he

said, "They express certain things which I wished to say

57 at tlxe time and have not said in the same way again. "

After Muir's death, the editors discovered thirty-nine

uncollected poems and included them in the special

section entitled "Poems Not Previously Collected." In

their editorial apparatus the editors relate that some

of the poems had been published, some had been sent to

publishers, and were still unpublished, and that some

were still in manuscript draft awaiting to be submitted

58 for publication. They probably represent the poetry

of his last five years, though they show no significant

change from the already established patterns of Muir's

verse. In the preface of this edition, T. S. Eliot

41

wrote, "Edwin Muir will remain among the poets who have

59 added glory to the English language."

Over the years Muir came, in his poetic development,

to see poetry both as a way of fulfilling his need for

expressing himself and as a brief means of communicating

his most characteristic concepts about life and man's

existence in the universe. The mystery of existence,

he felt, could best be explained through imaginative

literature of which poetry was the purest and best medium.

As he expressed it, "The supreme expression of imagination 6 0

is in poetry." Principally, Muir concerned himself

with that aspect of the mystery of human existence which

is not touched by science, namely, human values.

"There is a vast area of life," he wrote, "which science

leaves in its original mystery; and this is the area with

which poetry deals, or should deal. Science tries to

discover those things which can be defined; poetry deals

with those things which cannot be defined. It deals with

life where life is most itself, most individual, and most

61 universal. . . ." As Muir points out in An Autobiography

"Our minds are possessed by three mysteries: where we

came from, where we are going, and, since we are not

alone, but members of a countless family, how should we

62 live with one another." With these science cannot

deal; only imaginative literature—poetry—is able to do

42

so. Muir, consequently, approached poetry as the

highest form of imaginative literature that will

enlighten man's search for the meaning of life.

Most if not all of the classical and Biblical poems

contained in the earlier volumes appear in the final

collected edition. As may be seen by an examination of

them, they occur more frequently in his later volumes

than his earlier ones. For example, from First Poems

(1925), the only poem using the Greek myth that was

retained for the Collected Poems is "Ballad of Hector

in Hades." From Journeys and Places (1937) he elected

to keep "Troy" and "A Trojan Slave"; and from The Narrow

Place (1943), "The Return of Odysseus." "The Return of

the Greeks" remains from The Voyage (1946) and two

poems, "The Labyrinth" and "Oedipus," from The Labyrinth

(1949). From One Foot in Eden his last volume, which

contains the bulk of Muir's poems using the Greek myth,

five of the major classical poems in the collected

edition come from it: "Prometheus," "The Grave of

Prometheus," "Orpheus' Dream," "The Other Oedipus," and

"Telemachos Remembers."

Poems using Biblical saga follow a similar pattern

of representation starting with only a few but ending with

a substantial number. In the collected edition, poems

retained include "Ballad of the Flood" from First Poems

43

(1925); "The Fall," from Journeys and Places (1937);

and "Moses" from The Voyage (19 46); "The Transfiguration"

from The Labyrinth (1949) . As in the case of the Greek

poems also. One Foot in Eden (1956) contains the largest

number of Biblical poems, nine poems: "The Animals,"

"The Days," "Adam's Dream," "Outside Eden," "Abraham,"

"The Succession," "The Annunciation," "The Killing," and

"One Foot in Eden."

CHAPTER II

THE SEARCH FOR A PHILOSOPHY OF LIFE

Universalization of Personal Experience

Throughout his writings, Muir attempts to elevate

his own experiences, along with the insights about life's

meaning they bring him, into some form of archetypal or

universal status chiefly by means of his poems. This

effort, as will be shown, is revealed most clearly in

his classical and Biblical poems. For Muir, life is a

journey of discoveries from birth to death, marked by

milestones of childhood, adolescence, manhood, marriage

and family, and old age; a journey, moreover, marked by

hardships, obstacles, and disappointments, and one in

which one must derive the meaning of man's place in the

universe by exploring its profoundest mysteries. A

comment by Muir about Kafka's stories probably reflects

his own strong interest in the journey symbol: "The image

of the road comes into our minds when we think of his

stories; for in spite of all the confusions and contra­

dictions in which he was involved he held that life was

a way not a chaos, that the right way exists and can be

found by a supreme and exhausting effort and that whatever

44

45

happens every human being in fact follov;s some way, right 2

or wrong." The idea is repeated in Muir's volume.

Journeys and Places, where Muir sees this journey as an

attempt to recover lost innocence and to find meaning

3

and purpose in existence. Life is man's journey through

time seeking the good of the eternalness of things,

including that of man. Muir feels that his own life

offers a typical pattern of such search; hence he can,

like Walt Whitman, offer himself as a model. The ultimate

goal of such knowledge, that of the fundamental destiny

of man, is a great mystery, but man can find within his

own life directions which will lead him to an adequate

philosophy that can be shared with others through the

medium of poetry.

Muir's search for this meaning began with an attempt

at self-understanding. After Muir's bad years in Glasgow,

he submitted himself to psychoanalysis under Maurice

Nicoll. The psychiatric experience helped Muir in under­

standing his own dreams and fears. His formal attempts

to extend this understanding to other people constitute

the body of his poetry and the subject of his autobiography

The concept of a journey or search is implicit in the

following statement from tne Autobiography, "I am writing

about myself in this book, yet I do not know what I

am."" Muir enlarges on this point, as Lilliam Feder

46

points out, in The Story and the Fable:

The problem: to discover what I am, and to establish what my relations should be to other people. The first is an inward prob­lem, the second an outward problem. Both are practical, for when I understand myself I shall have changed myself, and when I understand my relation to other people I shall have changed that relation.

The more you observe yourself the more you observe other people and the world. So introspection needs no apology. The great sin is to let everything slip past in a sort of dream or stupor, aware neither of yourself nor of the world: the normal state of human life. The task is merely to waken up.^

In his attempt at self-discovery, Muir considers

his own life as a primary source of data, including both

his external experiences and his dreams and vision. From

his experience with Nicoll, he came to accept the theory

that dreams and visions have a reality and a meaning in

man's life. In An Autobiography he writes, "It is

clear . . . that no autobiography can confine itself to

conscious life, and that sleep, in which we pass a third

of our existence, is a mode of experience and our dreams

a part of reality."

From immediate dreams, Muir takes the next step to

assume that the basis for these dreams lies in the racial

unconscious which all men possess. He writes of one

special dream: "I realize that this dream, like the

first one, would have to be put down to naive spiritual

vanity if it was really invented by me and did not 'come'

47

to me, as I felt at the time it did, and as I feel still;

it was not "I" who dreamt it, but something else which

the psychologists call the racial unconscious and for 7

which there are other names." In this thinking Muir

seems to have been influenced by Karl Jung's idea of

collective unconscious. Whether or not this is true,

Muir believed that the experiences of the race of

humanity are contained within each individual mind.

Because the essential quality of man's experiences does

not change, each individual's life is a continual repeti-Q

tion of the overall archetypal pattern. Dreams and

visions, then, offer glimpses of one's relationship to

the entire racial experience, and Muir concluded that to

understand mankind one must be aware of this truth and

discern some means of identifying his own thoughts and

deeds with this larger body of knowledge about experience.

In this respect Kathleen Raine quotes Muir as saying,

"There are times . . . in every man's life when he seems

to become for a little while part of the fable, and to be

recapitulating some legendary drama which, as it has 9

recurred a countless number of times in time, is ageless."

In his search for understanding of himself, Muir

sees his experiences as corresponding to various stages

of the universal experience of man, and as he records his

insights into human nature and the universe, the latter

48

constitute in effect both his personal view and a

universal truth—since as he points out, speaking on the

subject of poetic theme, "Poetry is concerned in my mind

with great themes, and is the response of the individual

mind to those at the few moments when it is raised above

itself. . . . " Thus as Raine remarks of Muir, "The

world of ideas for him is not a doctrine but an experi­

ence" yet capable of being typified abstractly in

universal terms. Ultimately Muir concerns himself

principally with the movement of human experience from

the level of the personal to the status of the universal;

that is, to that which is encompassed in the racial

unconscious. Thus his own spiritual inadequacies readily

suggest the doctrine of the fall of man and his loss of

Eden. Almost all of Muir's themes as they relate to his

personal explanation of the mystery of life fall under

two broad categories, which may be stated as Story and

Fable and of Time and Eternity.

The Concepts of the Story and the Fable, Of Time and Eternity

Story and Fable

From his childhood experience, Muir conceived.of life

as being lived on two different planes—the actual and the

fabulous. •'• As he states in An Autobiography, "The

Orkney I was born into was a place where there was no

49

great distinction between the ordinary and the fabulous;

the lives of living men turned into legend. "" ^ He goes

on to note that the people accepted fairies, leprechauns,

and other fantasies as part of the everyday real exis­

tence of man. As a result of this background, Muir came

to conceive of life as composed of two separate, but

closely related aspects, the first of which he referred

to as Story and the second as Fable.

Under the division of Story area man's existence is

constituted by physical life—the observable events of

mankind in a real world. Willa Muir defines the principle

of Story as "the sum of conscious happenings from day to

14 day on earth." Story includes the eating, sleeping,

working existence of man, and in Muir's thought it becomes

the source of poetry. It provides the concrete images

that enable man to find meaning in existence.

From his personal experiences, Muir also saw Story

as a never ending circular journey through a deceptive

land, encompassing in its progress the drab surroundings

of human conflicts and a seemingly purposeless direction

in existence. Man, immersed in this activity, is out of

order and harmony with nature, which in these terms, is

little more than a wilderness or waste land, in which he

16 is alienated from his fellowman. Thus the world in

Variations on a Time Theme is pictured as a world of

50

"blasted nature," "crumbling towers," and "splintered

17 stones." Some of the images that he uses—"splintered

stumps," "wormringed trees," and "scum-covered potholes"

—actually derive from actual observations of the land­

scape around Glasgow, which he envisions as an industrial

waste land. Man, moreover, is trapped and tortured in

18 this temporal world. In discussing Journeys and Places,

Willa Muir writes that for her husband "places" represent

raw personal experience with feelings of "bewilderment,"

of "baffled loss," and of "conclusion without fulfill-

19 ment." Muir, thus, sees Story as a dismally tragic

aspect of existence.

In contrast to Story, which represents man's fallen

condition, the Fable represents the underlying unity of

human existence which lies in the universal racial uncon­

scious and hence gives meaning to experience by enabling

man to profit from the lessons of the past history of

the human race as he makes contact with them through his

racial unconscious, chiefly through dreams. Muir writes

on this point, "I think there must be a mind within our

minds which cannot rest until it has worked out, even

against our conscious will, the unresolved questions of

our past; it brings up these questions when our will is

least watchful, in sleep or in moments of intense con­

templation."^^ This mind within the mind is part of the

51

racial unconscious of which the Fable is a prime mani­

festation. The complete Fable can never be known,

though one can recognize one or two stages of it: such

as, "The age of innocence and the Fall and all the

dramatic consequences which issue from the Fall." "'"

Kathleen Raine defines Muir's concept of the Fable as

"that which every life seeks, more or less imperfectly,

to realize, to reflect, to embody—something we know by

inheritance, a pattern built up, it may be, by the end-

22

lessly repeated experience of the race." Mills inter­

prets Muir's idea of the Fable as "the religious and

mythological drama of man known only fragmentarily in

dreams or moments of revelation but involving each person

in the whole human legend of innocence, the Fall and

subsequent life in time, the quest for its meaning and for

23 the lost earthly paradise." The Fable is the part

played by the fabulous in each man's life, and it belongs

to the whole human race; uniting the ancestral history

of many so that historical events are repeated again and

again. This constant repetition of similar historical

events enables man to become aware of fragments of the

Fable so that he may find, to this degree, direction,

purpose, and meaning in his existence offered in abundance

by Fable.

52

The fragments of the Fable available to the finite

mind of any given individual are revealed to him through

various aspects of his experience. Dreams for man play

an important role in human life in providing an avenue

to this world of the Fable. As Muir points out, "Sleep

tells us things both about ourselves and the world which

we could not discover otherwise. Our dreams are part of

24 experience; earlier ages acknowledged this." But such

fragments include not only actual dreams during sleep

but what might be considered waking dreams or fantasies.

Such, he states, "come when I am least aware of myself

as a personality moulded by my will and time; in moments

of contemplation when I am unconscious of my body, or

indeed that I have a body with separate members; in a

moment of grief or prostration; in happy hours with

friends; and, because self-forgetfulness is most complete

then, in dreams and daydreams in the floating half-25

discarnate state which precedes and follows sleep."

Although every dream is not a revelation, nor can all

dreams be fully understood, those dreams that man can

understand give glimpses into the Fable which enable the

thinking man to make a creative response to his involve­

ment in the racial unconscious.

In addition to dreams, Muir conceives of myths and

legends as a means of insight into the Fable; therefore.

53

these can also give man insight into the meaning and an

understanding of existence. Muir's idea that "the life

of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the

life of man" assists him in accepting myths as revela­

tions of the archetypal patterns of man's life.^^ Myths

represent a stable order within the flux of time, and

one as equally dependable as man's dreams or special

visions from the racial unconscious, so that man may also

use them as guides or mentors in his daily experience

in finding what he needs to give his life meaning. The

myths being likewise peopled by archetypal figures

included as part of the racial unconscious, there exists

a common ground between them with respect to the human

27

imagination. This concept of myths held by Muir pre­

supposes that their context is both true for all time and

contemporaneous, so that in effect the archetypes

participate in particular elements of the Story that in 28 turn reveal important stages of the Fable.

Muir's use of myth encompasses two different patterns

though sometimes the two become mixed within poems. In

the first, especially in much of his early works, Muir

uses his own personal experiences or dreams to create,

as it were, a mythological order, by transforming his

personal experiences into universal mythical experience.

The landscape and attitudes of the people of Orkney, for

54

example, which are part of Muir's experience, become part

of the source materials for his myth. The second

pattern that Muir uses is to begin with an older myth

and show its contemporariness. His two primary sources

for these older myths are the Greek myths and the Bible.

Because he sees man as a wanderer or seeker, he fre­

quently employees basic quest patterns from these sources,

but in so doing reshapes the myth to reveal his own

vision of the universal human predicament. As Willa

Muir describes this process, Muir uses "ancient myths as

a vehicle to convey individual personal experience that

29 reached beyond an immediate present into timeless past."

In his use of the older myths, he does not attempt to

create profound new myths based on them, but to use them

to provide insight into the individual personal life and

thus to clothe it with dignity and meaningfulness.

Yet in employing myths Muir does not require the reader

to know the complete details of a given myth, but takes

only the general outlines of the required story, at the

same time developing within them his own particular

vision of modern man's journey within the modern world.

Time and Eternity

In addition to Story and Fable, two other con­

trasting ideas—Time and Eternity—permeate much of Muir's

55

writing, being complementary to the Story and the Fable

by the fact that in living in the Story man is con­

fronted by Time and all its problems; and by the further

fact that within the Fable, he may also grasp for, and

reach, momentarily, the status of Eternity—a timeless

state.

The element of Time is so strong in Muir's poetry

that Friar suggests that Muir possesses only one theme

31

—Time. In writing to Tschumi as late as 194 9, Muir

remarks, "I know in myself that I have been, I suppose,

unusually concerned with the problems of time and

eternity, but I hardly realized until now that it came 32 out so clearly m my poems." Muir thus seems to many

critics to have been in a perpetual quest for the meaning

33 of time. Some ten years before he wrote to Tschumi,

he commented on his obession with time in "Extracts

From a Diary, 1937-39":

I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two days' journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with time.

56

14uir felt the varying attitudes toward Time so strongly

that, as pointed out earlier, his third volume of verse.

Variations on ^ Time Theme, is devoted entirely to the

problem. In this volume time is shown as imperfection,

a river, a maze, or a bondage. Time is constantly

waging war against man, and in turn, throughout his life­

time man struggles constantly with time. Within this

twofold struggle arises the paradox of Time and Eternity.

For Muir, Time is the physical time into which man is born

as a mortal being; in contrast Eternity is a mental state

in which physical time is not an important factor.

As Muir writes, "The Eternal Man is what has possessed

me during most of the time that I have been writing my

autobiography, and has possessed me to in most of my

35 poetry." In Muir's definition, eternal in man is that

aspect of man that realizes and accepts the Fable and its

timelessness.

Time, with its bad connotation, in Muir's concept is

the physical time into which man is locked by his existence

This time is a "moving, decaying, changing world of

materiality.""^^ Time is, moreover, not only the

materiality of the world, but it is presented as an evil

force, contributing to evil. According to Mills, for

Muir, evil "flourishes in man through his existence in

57

time, through the distortions of personality that time

37 and circumstance devise to imprison the true self."

One of the evils that time perpetrates upon man is

its role as a thief. As Carruth writes, "Time, for Muir,

appears under its ancient aspect of the thief, a doubly

invidious figure that steals away, in 'deadly days' and

'melting hours', the objects and values which only time

38 itself has been able to create." Time steals away

from youth the childhood innocence and initiates him into

the world of the Fall. And once man experiences the

falling away from the ideal state of Eden, he is immedi­

ately bound by the burden of time. Mills summarizes this

involvement when he writes: "Once the original unity

has been violated, man becomes the site of warring con-

tratities and cannot resolve them at will. Time, the

medium in which he is immersed, gathers the deeds and

events of the past until, in the shape of history, they

39 create a nearly intolerable burden for him to carry."

With the Fall, time shows youth, as well as the mature

man, irretrievably lost, and cast into a world he does

not understand.^^ Muir writes in his autobiography,

"We pay no attention to time until he tugs us by the

sleeves or claps his policeman's hand on our shoulder; it

I I 4 1 is our nature to ignore him, but he will not be ignored."

As the policeman claps his hand on youth's shoulder.

58

youth loses that vision of innocence and of the world

that he previously possessed. He is, thus, thrust into

the awful blankness of time and into a world of many

conflicts. Time, moreover, continues to be man's

adversary in his mature efforts at achieving self-

understanding. For Time so imprisons man that it keeps

him away from the freedoms which could be revealed by

an understanding of the Fable or Eternity. Thus,

because of Time man cannot clearly see or know his

42 destination or his past.

Yet the world of existence is not totally bad, for

as the Fall represents man's entrance into Time, it also

represents the beginning of man's ability to seek and

find answers to his questions. Counteracting the hold

on man of Time is the eternity of the mind, or timeless­

ness, which permits him to escape the bondage of time and

to pursue and to achieve some understanding and meaning.

Immortality, Love, The Incarnation

Muir conceives of man's being able to counteract

Time through three means: the immortal spirit, love,

and the doctrine of the Incarnation. These three

essentially religious concepts give man a means whereby

he may rise above a sense of brute animal existence in a

totally time-bound world. Yet they do not void time;

they are merely the opposite side of the coin. But they

59

are nevertheless capable of leading man toward a reality

that provides him with opportunity for a self-understanding

consciousness of life's meaning. To Muir immortality is

not just an idea or a theological belief. He remarks,

"I realized that immortality is not an idea or belief,

but a state of being in which man keeps alive in himself

his perception of that boundless union and freedom, which

he can faintly apprehend in time, though its consummation

lies beyond time." Essentially Muir had trouble con­

ceiving of man as merely an animal, lacking immortal

qualities: "It would be inconceivable because if man is

an animal by direct descent I can see human life only as

a nightmare populated by animals wearing top-hats and

kid gloves, painting their lips and touching up their

cheeks and talking in heated rooms, rubbing the nuzzles

together in the moment of lust, going through innumerable

clever tricks, learning to make and listen to music, to

gaze sentimentally at sunsets, to count, to acquire a

sense of humor, to give their lives for some cause or to

44 pray." Thus, Muir could not conceive of man as man

existing in the purposeless world of animal life; instead

Muir conceived of man as an immortal being, a status

that allows him union and freedom. Only then does man

assume his truly natural state. As Muir writes, "Human

beings are understandable only as immortal spirits; they

60

become natural then, as natural as young horses; they

are absolutely unnatural if we try to think of them as

a mere part of the natural world. They are immortal

spirits distorted and corrupted in many ways by the

45 world into which they were born." In a letter to

Gwendolen Murphy explaining the poem, "The Riders,"

Muir writes, "The painful emotion in the poem comes from

a simultaneous feeling of immortality and m.ortality, and

particularly from the feeling that we, as immortal

spirits, are imprisoned in a very small and from all

46 appearances fortuitously selected length of time. . . . "

Although immortality is basically a religious con­

cept, Muir does not conceive of it in the same sense as

do the theologians. He writes Sydney Schiff, "As you

know, I have believed for many years in the immortality

of the soul; all my poetry springs from that in one form

or another; and belief of that kind means belief in God;

though my God is not that of the churches; and I can

reconcile myself to no church." Mortality and immor­

tality, with respect to Muir's concept of Time and

Eternity, become parts of the great paradox of human

existence. Mortality is man's being locked in a small

selected length of time, his life span, whereas, immor­

tality is that state of being in which man achieves a

union and freedom that transcend Time. Immortality for

61

Muir is thus not the conventional theological concept of

the perpetuation of existence beyond life, but a sense

of identity with the whole of existence—past, present,

and future—as presented to man in his racial unconscious,

Muir's conception of man as immortal spirit ulti­

mately finds its fulfillment in the concept of love.

This idea did not come to Muir as quickly as his notion

of imraortality did, but developed over a period of

several years. In the love shared by Muir and his wife,

he saw another aspect of the existence of man which is

not controlled by Time, As his marriage matured, the

idea of love grew and developed until it became a very

important factor in helping to understand the paradoxical

relationships of man's existence. Muir came to see love

as something that creates a world that is eternal and

48 timeless. Muir wrote to Spender: "For me to love is

the supreme quality and more closely connected with

immortality than any other, immortality either as you or

I conceive it. And in a way I feel it is more important

than immortality. If I could really love all things, I 49

should not trouble about immortality." Muir is not a

prolific love poet, but he does concern himself with

the subject of love, and in a general way it permeates

many of his poems, particularly the later ones. Poems,

such as "In Love for Long" and "The Annunciation,"

62

reflect Muir's basic concept of love and its fulfillment.

For Muir, love is able to generate a uniqueness and

oneness that enables man to overcome the problem of Time,

and gain a momentary identity with Eternity.

The other religious idea which Muir develops over

the years is that of the Incarnation, one of the ways in

which man may participate in the Fable. During Muir's

life he enjoyed several religious experiences; however,

the idea of Incarnation in his sense of the word, comes

to full light only late in his life. In his Autobiography

he tells of a religious experience he had in 1939 in

which Christ becomes a significant figure. He writes, "I

had a vague sense during these days that Christ was the

turning-point of time and the meaning of life to everyone,

no matter what his conscious beliefs; to my agnostic

50 friends as well as Christian." His fullest realization

of the meaning of Christ and the Incarnation doctrine

probably does not culminate until his assignment in Rome

with the British Council in 1949, after which he writes

to Chiari that Rome had "brought very palpably to my

mind the theme of Incarnation and I feel that probably

I shall write a few poems about that high and difficult

51 theme sometime; I hope so."

Yet though he seems to use the word in it conven­

tional theological sense as he views the reminders of

63

the Incarnation of Christ in Rome, he actually viewed

the concept in a broader, more secular sense, of the

incarnation in each human being of the Fable, chiefly by

means of the racial unconscious, which is present in each

individual and from which he can receive understanding

and insight into his own existence and that of other men.

Thus the physical evidence of Christ's incarnation helped

Muir formulate one of his own basic doctrines regarding

52 man's access to the Fable. Ultimately, the realization

of the Incarnation led Muir to the conclusion that time

53 IS symbolically defeated by Christ. Any human birth

is thus a kind of incarnation and as such has the potential

for breaking the control of Time and of its imprisoning

and evil characteristics.

The Imagination

The religious views of immortality, love, and incar­

nation are part of Muir's conception v/hich permits man

not only to live meaningful within his selected life

span, but, in addition to these values, enables him with

the aid of the imagination to wrestle with his burdens of

this world. Muir writes in The Estate of Poetry: "By

imagination I mean that power by which we apprehend living

beings, and living creatures in their individuality, as

.i5 4 they live and move, and not as ideas or categories.

He elaborates:

64

By imagination I mean nothing so metaphysically hard to understand as Coleridge's definition of it, but rather a faculty which belongs to us all, in however fragmentary a degree. If we did not possess imagination in this sense, we would not be able to understand our neighbors and our friends even as imperfectly as we do, and life would be a blank for us; we would have no image of it. We would not be able to gossip about our neighbors. Indeed gossip is for many people the main form that imagination takes; for it involves invention and with that some rudimentary conception of life; at its common level it is a perpetual reminder that common men are subject to the same absurd chances as the great.^^

As the quotation suggests, for Muir, every human being

possesses some level of imagination, though for some no

significant process of development enlargement of this

characteristic ever occurs. In Muir's further view of it,

the higher the development of this capacity, the higher

the personal development in the understanding of indi­

vidual personal existence and of human existence, gener­

ally. In a letter to Knights, Muir writes, "As for

'descriptive matter', the nearest I can come to it is my

belief that imagination is the main faculty by which we

comprehend human life; however imperfectly, and are able

to know the people we know, including ourselves," Man,

thus, experiences the faculty of imagination from its

lowest state of gossip to its highest expression in

poetry. Imagination "makes us understand human life

vividly and intimately in ourselves because we have felt

57 it in others." Imagination does not give man the exact

65

knowledge that a scientist seeks, but "value worth,"

understanding regarding human existence, the power to

visualize life (as in the racial unconscious) as an

58 endless repetition of a single pattern. Muir's

interpretation of, and belief in, imagination complements

his integration of myth and archetypes into the develop­

ment of the fabulous or Fable, for imagination seems to

be the chief means or vehicle through which man enters

the Fable and hence timelessness or Eternity. The body

cannot take the journey back into the past seeking under­

standing or recognition of the Fable, but the imagination

can; consequently, it becomes a transforming and

therapeutic experience for the person who is born with,

and able to employ, the higher capabilities of the

imagination. By the imagination man is able to achieve

a sense of identity with Eternity, particularly through

the racial unconscious—a fact which enables him to

escape the confines of time-bound life and to comprehend

the paradoxes of his existence. In such an instance Time

no longer becomes a factor since for the moment one is

of a state of timelessness when his imagination is

actively functioning.

66

Reconciliation of Story and Fable, Time and Eternity

Although in his search for meaning, Muir explores

many ideas that he later rejects, the two which seem to

persist throughout are those contained in the categories

of Story and Fable, and Time and Eternity. These

double concepts never change very much throughout his

verse, and Muir ultimately seeks to make an effort to

effect a reconciliation among them, and to find how man

can, in such effort, understand himself and the world

around him.

Muir's first reconciliatory step in the process just

described is the acceptance of the fact that paradoxes

exist in the life of man, but, at the same time, that as

man accepts their existence, he can come to grips with

them by trying to understand himself and thereby con­

ceivably achieve a sense of purpose or direction in his

life that will evadicate them. As Muir conceived of the

relationship of the individual to these paradoxes,

entering the Fable, or achieving timelessness through

Eternity, becomes the ultimate answer of resolving them

since they are a part only of Time, Within the Fable is

the underlying unity and order that man seeks. Here, in

a momentary grasp of that unity man may learn sufficiently

of its order and unity to apply it to his own problems

67

of Time. Such glimpses are, of course, necessarily

momentary; nonetheless, man must continue to seek them.

For Muir entrance into the Fable is ultimately made

through several means: first, through the racial uncon­

scious which each man possesses; second, through a

momentary realization of Eternity, or timelessness, by

means of the ideas of immortality, incarnation, and love.

These three religious ideas help to enter Eternity, or

the Fable, and achieve the reconciliation which he seeks.

Finally, there is the imagination, by the use of which

man obtains deeper insight into the modes of reconcili­

ation. Even though many people have never achieved a

higher degree of imagination than gossip, the latter

gossip—on similar more elementary forms—can, neverthe­

less, be a most important pathway to be followed. It is

the pathway that is most easily obtainable. But it is

poetry, rather than such secondary modes as gossip, that

is the primary mode of the imaginative instinct; it is

by poetry that man gains the entrance into the Fable which

it offers.

Perhaps the clearest and most thorough of Muir's

efforts at giving a formal expression of his basic concepts

in his verse are those poems, as we shall now see in detail,

in which he employs a format drawn from Greek myth and

Biblical saga.

CHAPTER III

THE CLASSICAL AND BIBLICAL POEMS

As shown in an earlier listing at the end of

Chapter I, Muir includes in his Collected Poems (1965)

twelve poems that use some aspect of Greek myth as a

basic symbolic unit. As was also shown, these poems

span the whole of Muir's writing career, but appear in

their greatest number in his last volume. One Foot in

Eden. Of the classical poems the largest number of

poems, four, are derived from the story of Troy, three

of which relate to the victims of the fall of Troy, and

one to the victors of the battle. Muir includes in

addition eight poems using the myths associated with

Odysseus, Theseus, Oedipus, Prometheus, and Orpheus.

The fifteen poems based on Biblical sources include many

of the traditional Biblical figures: Adam, Abraham,

Moses, and Noah from the Old Testament, Christ from the

New; the Flood, the Fall, the Creation, and certain

New Testament scenes.

Although the poems will be examined in more detail

in later chapters, they are briefly summarized here to

introduce their contents and to suggest Muir's special

adaptation in most cases of the original story materials.

68

69

The Classical Poems

The Trojan Setting

The first poem using the Troy myth is the "Ballad

of Hector in Hades." In this poem Hector is the narrator

of the poem, as he looks back at the event from Hades.

The event is that of Hector running from Achilles in

the battle for Troy, during the course of which Hector,

having come out to engage in personal combat with

Achilles, instead runs from him. Looking back. Hector

tries to understand what happened to make him run. And

even though he is not able to arrive at a conclusion as

to why, he does recall many of the minute details about

his race around the walls: for example, how the grass

sparkled and the dust puffed under his feet. He visual­

izes how all eyes had watched him as the race progressed

until finally Achilles had overtaken him and slain him

and dragged his corpse around the city. Hector from the

vantage point of Hades now relives the tragic event,

but is rid of the fear and guilt associated with it.

Two of the Trojan poems use for their central situ­

ations the background of the fallen city. The first,

"Troy" is the story of a warrior who could not admit

defeat. The poem begins at a time many years after the

conflict when the warrior, now an old man, afflicted with

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madness, hides in the sewers to escape capture by the

enemy whom he thinks to be still present. In this state

of delusion he continually thinks that the rats are the

enemy army and calls to them to stop and fight. Finally,

he is taken from the sewers by a thief looking for buried

treasures, and now beholds for the first time his city

in ruin. When the robber tries to make him tell where

the treasure is he resists and is tortured by him to

death. In the second poem, entitled "A Trojan Slave,"

an old man now a slave of a Greek citizen recalls earlier

times as a slave in Troy, which he feels were happier

days, and remembers the scenes of his homeland. These

memories of that land are interrupted by his recalling

the fact that the Trojans would not arm the slaves

because they were more afraid of them than of the defeat

by the Greeks. He feels also that the slaves themselves

are true Trojans, even though the aristocrats will not

recognize them as such. This fact creates in him a

strong hatred for his former masters. At the end of the

poem, however, he contemplates why this one fact should

bother him so much, and he finally concludes that he has

been in an earlier battle, although he does not remember

it sufficiently to visualize it clearly. But he does

recall having lost a sword in that earlier battle. Now,

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both battles begin to blend together vaguely in his mind

and his final memory is a happy one.

The last poem constructed around the Trojan War,

entitled "The Return of the Greeks," presents the situ­

ation of the victors as they return home after the ten

years' absence. Though they are the victors in battle,

as they return home they become victims of life. For

they are pictured as coming home in rags and "sleep-

wandering," as opposed to the usual romantic view of

warriors returning in glory and style. They seem at

first to have no purpose in their direction, for their

long siege of Troy has taken all their will power away;

and the land of Troy seems more important and familiar

to them than their homeland. At length, however, their

childhood memories begin to create images that help them

remember that this is truly their homeland. The warriors'

wives and sons meet them and gradually they realize that

the walls of Troy are not as important as they had thought,

The last stanza relates how Penelope, the archetypal

figure of love and fidelity, watches from her tower as

each warrior returns to his wife.

Odysseus

Muir writes two poems, "The Return of Odysseus" and

"Telemachos Remembers," based on the story of Odysseus

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both of which, despite their titles, chiefly concern

Penelope, waiting for Odysseus to return from his travels.

In the opening section of the first poem, Muir presents

the chaotic conditions of Odysseus' palace in Attica,

after Odysseus has been gone for such a long period of

time. The doors will not latch, and the persistent

suitors occupy it—even livestock wandering in and out.

Outside it, the blue sea stands in contrast to the chaos.

Within the ruin of the house Penelope still maintains

one clean chamber where she goes about her chosen task

of weaving and unweaving. As the poem progresses, she

begins to ask herself why events have turned out as they

have and whether Odysseus will ever return. Her dread

is in the emptiness of not knowing the answers to the

questions that she asks herself. The last stanza shows

her continuing to weave and unweave the garment she is

working on even though she does not know it, Odysseus

is nearing his home.

"Telemachos Remembers" uses the same setting as the

first poem, but it is narrated by Telemachos, Odysseus'

son. For twenty years he has watched his mother doing

her weaving, but has not understood why. He now recalls

her at her task, and the recollected images come and go

as though time were not a factor in them; he also

observes that they are never complete images. He is

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confused and tormented by these half-finished scenes,

in which his mother sits at her loom. Now older,

Telemachos speculates on the work of his mother, and he

perceives that had the work been completed, as it had

not, since she had unravelled her work each night, she

would have done an unparalleled wrong. That is, had she

completed the work she would no longer have a purpose

or direction in her life. He eventually perceives that

her unending siege at the loom has combined within her

fears, pride, fidelity, and love. His childish visions

had not permitted him this insight, but as an older more

mature man he now perceives it.

Theseus

Muir uses the myth of the journey of Theseus out

of the labyrinth for the poem, "The Labyrinth," The

first part of the poem is one long sentence of about

thirty-five lines, in which Theseus, the narrator, tells

of his thoughts after having emerged from the labyrinth.

He relates three sequences of his thoughts: the first

of these is of the time in the labyrinth itself and

recalls his confusion, fear, and frustration there.

The second section presents a vision of the world that

a child might have: a vision of the beauties of nature

and natural life. However, this vision is broken by a

parenthetical section relating the confusion brought upon

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him by time's effect of making man grow older, for in

the "maze," time had not seemed to have existed. The

third section in this first long sentence tells of his

feelings as he now exists outside the maze, in the world,

but things in the world remind him of the maze for he

sees in it no direction or clear pathway either, and

there are rooms and corridors and antechambers that seem

to have no meaning. He consequently begins to run as

though time were chasing him until finally he stops to

think. Yet even now, though both his good spirit and

his bad spirit speak to him, he cannot separate the

influences of either from the world of reality. And he

finally realizes that the labyrinth and the two spirits

are an illusion and that the real world, in contrast,

is like that seen in a dream—somewhere outside it.

In the dream "real world" the gods look down on man and

allow man to function, but extend their own control over

the patterns of existence: a control not realized by

man, but nonetheless present. Now Theseus affirms the

dream world of reality as the real world and the labyrinth

world a lie. Man would be a prisoner in the lie if his

imagination did not give him power to fly free. But

Theseus' confusion still remains, for a new dream now

comes upon Theseus—at the conclusion of which he wakes

up to discover that he does not know where he is--within

the labyrinth or outside.

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Oedipus

Muir wrote two poems using the Oedipus myth: the

first entitled simply "Oedipus" and the second "The

Other Oedipus." "Oedipus" consists of a long reminis­

cence by the blind Oedipus regarding his sins of incest

and patricide attempting to evaluate them in terms of

the meaning of guilt as a general principle of life.

The poem opens with Oedipus speaking about himself as

the club-footed one made to fall by fate. In this early

section, Oedipus contrasts the light and darkness between

his former sight and present blindness. This contrast

he further develops into the light and darkness symbolism

of life's contrast of good and evil. Oedipus concludes

this first section by suggesting that as a result of his

guilt he is now seeking another innocence, being led to

do so by the will of the gods. With regard to his

incestuous relationship with Jocasta, he tries to answer

the question of how two people seeking good for each

other as a result of their love can actually create evil.

In this speculation Oedipus thinks about the search for

light which he feels all must seek. In his own life,

Oedipus sees only guilt, no answers.

Following these deliberations, Oedipus reverts to

his murder of his father for answers. He asks if this

had been the place where he first sinned. As he

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contemplates this situation, Oedipus concludes—that it

was the image of fear that he had struck out against

when he killed his father, that the act of attacking was

the image of fear as a duty. Having found this much

of an answer, Oedipus realizes that these thoughts in

his mind recur and that the gods will them, but that the

gods will also watch over all mankind. He then commits

himself to the gods and realizes that he has learned

to see and understand something of the meaning of his

own life, in particular, with respect to the murder of

his father, who and what performed the act and why the

act was done. He himself is a walking riddle acting out

part of the fable, and in this sense is obedient to the

gods.

In the second poem, "The Other Oedipus," the story

is related as a legend about Oedipus in the latter part

of his life on the Peloponnesian roads. Oedipus and

those accompanying him are no part of the real world,

for they are living in a realm beyond time. Now for

them the world is beautiful, gay, and innocent. They

are out of story and have lost the memory of their former

lives within it. Though they do have one reaction to the

mention of the other of Oedipus' guilt; they stamp their

feet in an uncomprehending, childish manner. But they

soon forget the incident, and are once more back at their

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happy life again. Their way of life is at peace with

nature, for they will not dwell in any house along the

way. The poem ends ironically as the Spartan farmers

along the road, who are kind to them, pity their

happiness.

Prometheus

In his use of the Greek myth, Muir creates two poems

using the figure of Prometheus as their basic image;

"Prometheus" and "The Grave of Prometheus." In the first

poem, it is Prometheus himself who narrates the poem

relating what he has observed and what he has thought

about the future of existence. At the beginning of the

poem he notes how the seasons are in constant change,

but that in contrast the animals, the leopard and the

wild goat, are basically changeless. At least their

change appears to be changeless, as though they were

figures in an emblem. Prometheus observes that man is

not like himself, for man is a pilgrim who travels toward

a foreknown end. Man is aware of and has tasted sorrow,

although he does not understand the meaning of sorrow;

for as Prometheus observes, man is unable to comprehend

the national design of the relationship between their

happiness and sorrow.

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With respect to man, Prometheus declares that his

own state is different, for he has no destination or

end; except nothingness, Prometheus then envisions the

time, after the race of man has disappeared from earth,

when he may be invited by the gods to return to Olympus,

Yet, he asks, what would his situation be then? He

concludes that Olympus would be strange to him with no

one to answer the questions about the earth's dark

story or to converse with him. He does not see Zeus

or Eros as being able to answer the questions that he

has. His best hope would be only that his knowledge will

create an aeon's gossip. Yet should he return, he might

find Olympus empty. At this thought he relates a bit of

gossip that he has heard about earth: a rumor that

pictures a world in which man has lost his gods, and where

words have lost their mystery. An iron text becomes the

creed which drives man and beats his skull flat, Man is

in a dust storm where nothing stands but "cast iron

cities and rubbish mountains,"

But he has also heard another rumor that there is

another god, of a Christ coming in pity and love rather

than out of rebellion; one bom of woman who took upon

himself the bondage of time; yet of a Christ who was not

defeated by time, but made a toy of it. Prometheus con­

cludes that if he could find this god Christ the latter

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would hear and answer the questions about earth's dark

Story.

"The Grave of Prometheus" is narrated by an objective

observer from the grave site of the deceased Prometheus.

The observer notes that no one or thing comes to visit

the spot any more. All have been scared away by the

immortal cries and the screams of vultures. Prometheus

has now returned to earth, for when the fire went out he

became his own barrov;. The huge grave, ten yards long,

is still there with the grass growing over it; a tongue

of stone that looks like a blackened, calloused hand

begging for alms extending from the earth nearby.

Prometheus's fiery bed has been cooled by a mineral change

that also cooled his burning body so that a ring of

daisies surrounds his face. Prometheus is now at rest

in the arms of nature,

Orpheus

In the poem "Orpheus' Dream," Orpheus recounts his

tale of recovering Eurydice from Hades. The opening

scene is of the perilous voyage back from Hell in a little

boat and of Orpheus' uncertainty; but on his realization

that Eurydice is now present with him the perilous

journey becomes a happy one, Orpheus compares his

journey to one depicting the recovery of innocence. He

feels that the journey has helped him and Eurydice to

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recover "The lost original of the soul." From this

moment they both move toward a boundless good. Orpheus

concludes that is "Forgiveness, truth, atonement, all /

Our love at once—" that enables them to accomplish their

union and journey. Now they are able to turn their

heads and look back into Hades without fear, for all

they will see there will be the ghost of Eurydice,

sitting in an empty Hades.

The Biblical Poems

As in his use of the Greek myth, Muir's Biblical

poems again do attempt to follow exactly the original

tales; indeed, he often modifies them to fit his own

particular interpretation of the world. In selecting

his material from Biblical saga Muir draws upon both

Old and New Testaments figures and events.

Moses, Adam, Abraham

From among Old Testament figures, Muir selects

three major figures—Moses, Adam, and Abraham—to reveal

his various ideas about man's life in the world and man's

hope within that journey. The first of these, "Moses,"

is narrated by one of the Children of Israel, and opens

with Moses having gone to Mount Pisgah to receive his

vision of the promised land. In the vision, Moses sees

the land promised to the Children as a millennial setting

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of order and harmony, where people are working and

worshipping. However, this is only his vision, as the

reader leaves when the narrator turns from Moses's

dream vision to report what "we" the common people see.

Rather than the Promised Land the people can see only

the immediate world of battles, massacres, petty wars,

and jealousies. The people are conscious only of the

immediate situations and conflicts of their own real

world. Neither they nor Moses see the great evils that

are to befall the people in the far future; the trials

of the Israelites throughout their exile and diaspora,

the future ghettoes,- their lack of a homeland.

In the poem "Adam's Dream" Muir recounts Adam's

first dream after the fall in which Adam, standing on a

high rocky ledge, looks down on small figures like man

running about wildly. The figures are so far away that

Adam cannot identify them, and they look to be identical

and interchangeable, but somehow different. These

creatures multiply very rapidly and continue to move

without apparent order or purpose. This disorder is

occasionally broken, as two by two they run together for

awhile, but only to separate and to run again alone.

There are also some who stand still and never move.

Seeing this vision Adam cries out, "What are you

doing there?" He receives, however, only echoes from the

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rocks. Adam begins to see that the animals are now

hiding from these people. Then Adam, in his dream-

state, remembers that this is time and that time is a

strange thing that had not been known in Eden. He

wishes to be close to the figures so that he may see

their faces, and as he draws closer he realizes that

they are about some strange business that is past their

knowledge. They run wildly because of this strange

business as though they were acting out a storybook.

Finally, Adam sees their faces, and each face is strangely

like his own so that he wants to call them the sons of

God, but is restrained. At this, he remembers everything

that has transpired—Eden, the Fall, the place where he

is. As he remembers this he looks at their hands and

sees that their hands are his. At this revelation he

cries out, but leaves peace as he turns in love and

grief to fallen Eve's arms.

In the part of the poem "Abraham," the patriarch

undergoes a life journey, in which he is early compared

to a rivulet that wanders through the countryside but

does not know the way. Unlike the rivulet, however,

Abraham come to places of rest and while there, prospers.

Each time that he rests, he creates a little kingdom

with its own particular sky. But the sky of the little

kingdom is not the same sky under which Abraham moves in

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his travels. In his travels Abraham learns from strange

peoples, and he realizes that he will inherit all that

was theirs some day. In old age Abraham dies content

even though the promise has not come, and is buried far

away from his father's house in a strange land, the land

of Canaan.

Muir's poem, "The Succession," Muir uses Abraham and

his family to show the spiritual journey which men under­

take. The poem first recounts the wanderings of

Abraham, using as a central metaphor a star, which wanders

over great distances, occasionally stopping for a while.

As Abraham approaches his death, he sends out his son,

and twin star, Isaac. For a while, Isaac follows his

father, but then sets forth on his own pilgrimage. Isaac

must travel a different path than that which his father

had traveled, but he encounters strangers who help him

along the way. Yet even though he has freedom of will,

he obeys the powers as he confronts good and evil. When

Isaac's life span ends, Jacob continues the succession.

The last stanza moves from the viewpoint of Jacob to

that of the narrator who speaks in the first person plural.

We, he says, have come through the fields from Abraham to

the present, but the road has scarcely begun. Each

generation must face the hazards and dangers of the

journey. Man's forefathers understood the truth that

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the dangers and hazards are good for man and recorded it

in songs and legends. They understood the delicate

relationship in which hope has begotten danger and hazard

since man was first dispossessed of the garden of Eden,

The Flood, The Fall, The Creation

Events as well as figures furnish the subject matter

of some of the Biblical poems. The first of these,

"Ballad of the Flood," is a dream poem in which the

narrator "I" relates his dream of the Flood. It is

characterized, furthermore, by the fact that it is one

of the few poems in which Muir chose to use the Scots

dialect. In the opening stanzas, the Worm of Evil has

come out of the west encompassing the world with its

folds so that the heavens are shut out. There is a

righteous cry for repentance, but no one seems to heed

it. The people continue their routine patterns of living,

but occasionally reflect that they should attend church

to escape the fires of hell. Noah, is different, for he

builds his ark and sends his sons to collect the animals

for the ark. The animals come aboard in a state of

thankfulness. The rains come and Noah cries, "Now God

us save."

The poem presents a set of contrasting scenes as

the animals on land are compared to the ones on the ark.

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The animals that remained on land continue to moan at

night and fight all day. Their noise is so great that

the animals on the ark become agitated and shake the ark.

Finally, however, the noise subsides and the ark becomes

calm. Another boat approaches the ark and a woman on

board pleads with Noah to let her come aboard. Noah,

however, rejects her pleas and her offer to please him,

telling her to drown herself. The scene concludes with

Noah saying, "To hell the haill world gangs this day, /

But and my folk sae gude,"

Dragons come and attack all the other ships in

which mankind has attempted to save itself until they

sink. When they attack the ark, they cannot sink it,

and begin to play with it while they sing lovely songs.

Later on, dissension arises on the ark between Noah and

his sons as the sons want to see land, Noah commands

them to sail on. At length, after sending out the two

doves, Noah observes a green hill and knows immediately

that it is Mount Ararat, his new home.

In the poem, "The Fall," a persona wonders what

shape, what desires, and what thoughts he had before the

Fall. Yet, whatever height his prior existence had

cannot be regained because the Fall has blocked any

chance of return. The scene now changes to "this side

of Eden's wall," where the twisting road (riddle) of

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the Sphinx confronts the narrator. Here he finds only a

groping, lost feeling, as of a ship lost at sea—the

results of sin and confusion and the reminder of sin.

Despite this confusion, however, he continues the battle

of trying to conquer the twisting road of the Sphinx.

Ultimately, through his continuing struggle, he builds

himself a heaven and hell in a bartered paradise, from

which legendary height, he observes yet another fall

and yet another beating with his fist upon Eden's wall

wanting to reenter.

In the first of Muir's poems using the creation as

the basis of its imagery, "The Animals," Muir uses the

fifth day of creation to show the position of animals

within existence. In this view the animals are not part

of time and space; nor do they have language or memory;

consequently, they remain in the unchanging presence of

the fifth day.

In his poem, "The Days," each day of the creation

comes into being with its own place and name. In the

poem the first four days are not separated as individual

units, but are combined to represent the culmination of

this period of creation. On the fifth day the animals

appear, represented by the lion and the stallion. On

the sixth day, man is created with his language, and it

seems that now the untellable tale might be told.

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Finally the Lord calls forth the seventh day with its

own fabulous glory. From this short telling of the

creation story, the poem moves to the present time with

the expression, "And now we see. . . . " Three scenes

are then presented as being "seen," The first is of

the world in a natural peaceful order before the advent

of man. The second scene presents man involved in his

many activities, from peaceful evening walks to warfare

with each other and the animals. The third scene is of

the women praying for the millennium to come—pleading

for a day when all will be gathered together and the

clear eternal weather will rule.

Eden

The first of Muir's Eden poems, "Outside Eden,"

depicts man's adjustment to living outside the Garden.

The poem begins by relating that there are few spiritual

leaders in the world outside of Eden who keep a vision

of the Garden's glory. Within the unknown narrator's

clan, however, are a few such leaders, moreover, being

conscious of guilt and innocence, this clan has not

been able to retain the sweetness that began to bloom

when time began, but which is now beginning to die.

The guiltiest and least guilty suffer alike the same

consequences of sin. Yet outside Eden there is one group

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that stands separate: the simple, with their long

memories of a past Edenic existence: the simple who

adjust to living in the lawless world, so that the world

can react to them with love. The griefs of the simple

have grown as natural to their memory as weathered

stones. Their troubles are a freely given tribute as

they look toward the hill, Eden. Their simplicity and

their long memory come together as they stand on earth

looking at heaven.

The second poem, "One Foot in Eden," is narrated by

an "I" who stands with one foot in Eden, but the other

presumably in the existence of man. From this vantage

point, he sees that the great day is growing late, that

the end is coming. He notices at the same time that the

fields planted by man are producing crops of love and

hate, corn and tares, and good and evil. All these

products are growing together and must be harvested at

the same time. After making these observations, the

narrator speculates about the world of human existence.

Innocence is still springing from Eden as it originally

did, but time in the world outside Eden wrecks this

innocence. After time has burned the shape of terror

and grief into this innocence, a new and different

flower will bloom and blossom. Ideas, not known in Eden,

are possible: hope, faith, pity, and love. The final

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lines restate and affirm these strange blessings that

were not in Paradise, but are available in this world.

New Testament Figures

Muir's three poems based on materials from the New

Testament are "The Transfiguration," "The Annunciation,"

and "The Killing," Although the poem "The Transfiguration"

alludes specifically to the transfiguration of Christ,

the real transfiguration which Muir presents is that of

the people. The poem is narrated by a participant, but

in the first person plural. It starts by giving the

source of the transfiguration as coming from the earth

and changing the whole being so that the people come to

see the clear unfalien world of Eden. As the persons

themselves are cleansed, their soiled clothes take on

a new, fresh appearance. The narrator then inquires

whether he is observing a vision or whether the people

are witnessing the one glory that has been present all

along, but not realized. Hence the present world seems

unreal to the people. In this transfigured world all is

in its place—the animals together; man and nature at

peace; the wicked turning from their wicked ways. If

this transfigured world had lasted longer than its

brief duration, everything might have changed, but it

did not last. This section of the poem concludes with a

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question asking whether this new glory still exists

somewhere, without man's realization of recognition.

The concluding stanza focuses on Christ and his

return. It states that he will return when the time is

right. That time will be when he is wanted and summoned

by all—the beasts, nature, and man; when all in one

voice call for him, the time will be ripe. In this

second coming there will be a movement backward toward

innocence; even Judas will travel back into those states

of innocence he knew at his mother's knee. Guilt and

betrayal will be undone and never repeated again.

Another event from the New Testament which Muir

selects to use in his poetry is the Annunciation. "The

Annunciation" derives its basic imagery from the event

presented, as the girl and the angel meet in a complete

union of love. The angel has traveled from outside of

time and space to join with the girl in time and space.

Even as in time, "The destroying minutes flow," the two

join until there is a transference of heaven to her and

earth to him. Strange rapture overtakes both so that

they are unaware of the ordinary life of the world going

on outside the window of the house where they meet. In

total rapture with each other they neither speak nor

move, but remain in a deep trance.

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In "The Killing" the crucifixion of Christ offers

a stranger the opportunity to reveal his observations

about the event. Early in the morning, he sees the

crowds coming from all parts of the city, as though they

are sucked from its maze by curiosity. At the scene of

the crucifixion, he observed the actions taken against

Christ, the various ways in which people react, and

Christ's own words. He describes the general scene of

the crucifixion, of the nailing of the nails, the crown

of thorns; however, throughout this activity, he notes

that Christ fails to exhibit those actions that normally

men being crucified exhibit, for Christ is calm, and does

not revile or curse the people. The people, on the

other hand, do react normally; some revile him and curse

him; some are angry because he does not put on a show for

them. Four women present watch silently. In the last

stanza, the stranger tries to evaluate what impact this

experience has had on his own life.

CHAPTER IV

STORY: MAN'S EXISTENCE IN A TIME WORLD

Muir's verse, generally speaking, reflects the chief

outlines of nis basic life philosophy, but as already

intimated on several occasions, his beliefs emerge most

clearly in his poems based on Greek myth and Biblical

story materials—both of which furnished Muir with the

special archetypal patterns or symbols which he wished

for a full-scale delineation of his fundamental spiritual

cosmogony, Muir's approach in this respect, however,

is not systematic; indeed, it has already been observed

that the poems are scattered throughout the various

published volumes. Yet on the whole they reflect in a

vivid and forceful way his basic efforts to perceive,

and thereby to convey to his fellows, what he felt to be

the meaning of life in the difficult and hostile environ­

ment of modern civilization.

As already pointed out in a general way, many of

Muir's personal insights into the meaning of life were

derived from his own observation and experience. Where

the details of these are known, the circumstances are

sketched in the following discussion, even though Muir's

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main method is to universalize such insights by means

of the particular mythic material he is using as the

subject matter in any given poem, Muir's main symbolic

representation of such insights—or of other insights

not specifically associated with his personal experience—

lies in his concept of Story (man's existence within

the confining, restricting realm of the time world) and

Fable (a permanent eternal world outside man's knowledge,

yet accessible to him within the time world in flashes

of insight or inspiration), With these two broader

areas Muir often equates other subordinate symbolic

motifs: (1) with Story, the Biblical fall of man and his

ejection from Eden; time and its entrapment of man within

the meshes of time flux; the seemingly unreconcilable

paradoxes that beset man throughout his daily life; the

modem waste land of contemporary industrialized civili­

zation, particularly as represented in its cities;

(2) with Fable, the Garden of Eden, and man's primitive

innocence as an inhabitant of the Garden; ideal human

love, the closest embodiment in Muir's opinion of the

concept of immortality; an ideal order existing somewhere

outside time; the orderly processes of nature; the inno­

cence of man before his fall; the promise inherent in the — )

gospel and person of Christ,

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The Complexities and Paradoxes of Everyday Experience

Chaos of Modern Civilization

In general, Muir visualized contemporary civilization,

in T, S, Eliot's phrase, as a spiritual Waste Land,

symbolized most fully for him by the city of Glasgow,

which he saw as a monument to industrial ruin. This

view is presented most fully by Muir in two of his three

poems about Troy, in which Troy lies destroyed and

desolate after its fall at the hands of the Greeks, The

setting of the poem "Troy" is partly the streets of the

ruined city, partly the sewers beneath them. The madness

of an old Trojan warrior, confined for many years under-

groimd in the corridors of the sewers, is suggested by

the following passage, as is also Muir's mental picture

of Glasgow as a sort of modern version of the ancient

city:

He all that time among the sewers of Troy Scouring for scraps. A man so venerable He might have been Priam's self, but Priam was dead, Troy taken. His arms grew meagre as a boy's. And all that flourished in that hollow famine Was his long, white, round beard. Oh, sturdily He swung his staff and sent the bold rats skipping Across the scurfy hills and worm-wet valleys, Crying: 'Achilles, Ajax, turn and fighti Stop cowards,'' Till his cries, dazed and confounded. Flew back at him with: 'Coward, turn and fightl' And the wild Greeks yelled round him. Yet he withstood them, a brave, mad old man. And fought the rats for Troy. The light was rat-grey. The hills and dells, the common drain, his Simois, Rat-grew, Mysterious snadows fell

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Affrighting him whenever a cloud offended The sun up in the other world. The rat-hordes, Moving, were grey dust shifting in grey dust. Proud history has such sackends. He was taken At last by some chance robber seeking treasure Under Troy's riven roots. Dragged to the surface. And there he saw Troy like a burial ground With tumbled walls for tombs, the smooth sward wrinkled As Time's last wave had long since passed that way. The sky, the sea. Mount Ida and the islands.

No sail from edge to edge, the Greeks clean gone. (71)

The picture that Muir thus paints in the poem "Troy"

is one of a world of suffering and misery in the aftermath

of a defeat. Muir is concerned with the survivor of the

defeated city who suffers madness, and the degradation

of his humanity as a fellow inhabitant with the rats in

the sewer. Muir states in his autobiography that at

times he saw the citizens of Glasgow as animals. The

fact that he was also at that time living in a very grey

world spiritually likewise coincides with the picture in

this poem. The old man must come out of the sewer to

see the reality of his situation, and Muir needed to

leave Glasgow to begin searching for the reality he sought.

Man here, Muir would suggest in the poem, is a

prisoner of time, and experiencing the chaos of madness,

fluctuating between illusion and reality. The picture

Muir paints of the world is one of bleakness and darkness,

of man lost in bewilderment and illusion. In this poem,

he seems to be showing the pointlessness of history when

it does not reflect or enlighten the Fable, Morgan says

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of "Troy," Muir's emphasis on the pointlessness of

history was not always as cruel as this in 'Troy'

but it is a theme that was never very far from his mind,"^

Huberman restates this same basic interpretation when

she writes, "The theme, of the waste of the human spirit

in a history that is only a story, only a succession of

dates and dynasties, unrelated to an underlying fable,

is of course a theme suggested by Muir's poetry from the

beginning and repeated with increasing clarity until the

II 3 end." Muir sees contemporary history as a series of

defeats, disappointments, and growing threats; however,

through this bleakness, he continues to show d-ep concern

for the endurance, patience, and suffering of the sur­

vivor of the battle. This concern is for the "futile

heroism of the defeated people." The mad old man does

not attempt to reveal the treasure of which he is supposed

to know the location—if there is any treasure—for the

treasure belongs to Troy. This retention seems to be the

one spark of light in the poem.

In selecting the city of Troy for this poem, Muir

places emphasis not only on the images of a defeated,

fallen city, but on a lost, fallen mankind as well. Muir

extends the images in the Greek myth to create a universal

landscape of the fallen, Troy, before its fall, stands

symbolically for a second Eden, in which man lives in a

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happy and secure state. After the fall, the city becomes

a place representing a lost Eden, Troy thus becomes a

stage in the Fable of man's life since Eden is a stage

in the Fable. Troy is closer in time than Eden and

possibly the recognition and identity with fallen Troy

has remained a little more clearly with man. In this

sense Troy becomes an archetype of a city betrayed and

ruined by time.'

The second Troy poem, "A Trojan Slave," likewise

symbolizes the chaos of modern civilization, but this

time in the person of the modern industrial slave, along

with intimations of human freedom, the latter concept

belonging to the idealism represented in the realm of

Fable, The poem's persona, a former slave of the Trojans,

and now a slave of the Greeks, remembers the fall of

Troy when he saw, "Troy's towers burn like a winter wood,"

He himself would have fought for Troy to the death equally

with its citizens had they given him a sword. This reminds

him that once, a long time before, he had been a free man,

but had lost his sword in a battle: "Before I was a

slave, long, long age, / I lost a sword in a forgotten

fight!" The incident as remembered seems to have been

from his racial unconscious since he has been a slave to

the Greeks for thirty years, and, before this as a slave

in Troy, he had seen Paris as a boy.

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Obviously Muir never underwent during his life the

experience of slavery, but in a way his years in Glasgow

perhaps seemed like slavery to him. Its industrial

society was so different from that of Orkney that Muir

called the city a "tenth rate hell." Muir witnesses

people in the slum areas of Glasgow suffering worse than

an actual slave might have suffered in Troy.

In this third Trojan poem Muir presents another aspect

associated with the decline of modern civilization: that

of unreasoning fear endured by a child, who can neither

explain it nor reason it away, but which remains with

him embedded in his subconscious until brought out into

the open. Such a childhood experience was Muir's fight

with a boyhood chum, Freddie Sinclair, over a pocket

knife—already recounted in a preceding chapter. This

experience for Muir came to stand for man's loneliness

and isolation in the modern world. Something of his own

experience is thus reflected in "Ballad of Hector in

Hades," in which the Trojan hero in the afterworld

remembers his own death experience and his fear of Achilles

as the latter pursued him around the walls of the city.

Muir drops the heroic trapping of the original myth to

lay stress on circumstances more appropriate to the

average modern man. The following stanza captures some­

thing of the fear clutching at Hector's heart as all nature

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seems to stand still to observe his sudden and unexplain-

able cowardice at the moment he faces the Greek hero in

single combat:

The sky with all its clustered eyes Grows still with watching me.

The flowers, the mounds, the flaunting weeds Wheel slowly round to see. (25)

The poem ends dramatically with the two racing figures

represented by their shadows, and the resolution in death

of Hector's terror:

Two shadows racing on the grass Silent and so near.

Until his shadow falls on mine. And I am rid of fear. (25)

Thirty years after the personal event of Muir's fight with

Freddie Sinclair on which the central situation of the

poem is based, Muir wrote in his Autobiography:

That is how the image came to me, quite spon­taneously. I wrote the poem down, almost complete, at one setting. But I have wondered since whether that intense concentration on little things, seen for a moment as the fugitive fled past them, may not be a deeper memory of that day preserved in a part of my mind which I cannot tap for ordinary purposes. In any case the poem cleared my conscience, I saw that my shame was a fantastically elon­gated shadow of a childish moment, imperfectly remembered; an untapped part of my mind supplied what my conscious recollection left out, and I. could at last see the incident whole by seeing it as happening, on a great and tragic scale, to some one else.9

Muir's personal encounter with Freddie Sinclair is

of course Story--a personal experience of a child sud­

denly overtaken by an unreasoning fear. But the poem

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becomes Fable in its larger implications: Man as isolated

and alienated from those around him. He stands alone

facing, in this particular case, an unknown fear which

compels him to run. Then with the running comes a sense

of guilt and shame. For a moment Hector had stood

isolated from the walls of Troy, from the protection they

offered and his fellow Trojans behind them. And sud­

denly for him, as he says, "The world / Slowly turns

around, / With some new sleight compels my feet / from

the fighting ground," Moving from a childhood experience

to an archetypal situation. Hector and Achilles become

symbolic figures on a symbolic landscape. And though

Muir tells us that the landscape is that of Wyre it is

also a universal landscape. To accept the symbolic

representation in the poem is to create a situation with

which modern man can identify. On this level, the poem

shows mankind encountering a sense of overwhelming terror

that men recognize in themselves.

The Loss of a Sense of Direction

For man lost in the mere flux of a temporal world,

according to Muir, there appears to be very little of any

significant human pattern. History shows that man has

achieved such a pattern, but in the modern world a sense

of such pattern has been lost, Muir has several poems

101

which deal in whole or in part with this problem. The

first of these is "The Return of the Greeks,"

In "The Return of the Greeks" Muir employs a double

theme, only the first of which will be discussed here:

the confusion and bewilderment felt by the Greek warriors

returning home after the siege of Troy and the power of

love which sustains the wife of Odysseus as she continues

to av/ait her husband's return. The early portion of the

poem emphasizes the strangeness felt by the warriors as

they arrive home from the Trojan War. As they return,

rather than experiencing an expected glorification as

returned heroes would, they are possessed by a sense of

isolation and loneliness at returning to once familiar

surroundings, to find them—or rather themselves—changed

The veteran Greeks came home Sleepwandering from the war. We saw the galleys come Blundering over the bar. Each soldier with his scar In rags and tatters came home.

Reading the wall of Troy Ten years without a change Was such intense employ (Just out of the arrows' range). All the world was strange After ten years of Troy.

Their eyes knew every stone In the huge heartbreaking wall Year after year grown Till there was nothing at all But an Alley steep and small. Tramped earth and towering stone, (125)

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The sight that the people at home see is of the warriors'

bringing their battle scars and aimlessness home with

them. These are exhausted voyagers of a heroic battle

now ended, but a radiant glow of victory is not with them.

The ten years of battling the Trojans had given them

purpose and direction even though they might not have been

engaged in the real battles—" (Just out of the arrows'

range)." But now, after ten years of battle against the

Trojans, they are now cast into surroundings grown new

and strange to them. Their thoughts seem to linger with

the rubble of Troy even as they now approach home.

An additional dimension is added to the confusion

of the warriors as they compare their childhood memories

with what they now see.

Now even the hills seemed low In the boundless sea and land. Weakened by distance so. How could they understand Space empty on every hand And the hillocks squat and low?

And when they arrived at last They found a childish scene Embosomed in the past. And the war lying between— A child's preoccupied scene When they came home at last.

But everything trite and strange, The peace, the parcelled ground. The vinerows—never a change I The past and the present bound In one oblivious round Past thinking trite and strange, (125-126)

103

The confusion between the past and present suggested here

fills them with frustration and lack of any sense of

direction until all seems "trite and strange," being in

effect caught in the confusing circle of time's cycle,

lost, and without direction. The ten year's sojourn at

the siege of Troy had thus interrupted the continuity of

their thinking and their purpose in life.

Another poem with much the same point of view about

life that marks the early portion of "The Return of the

Greeks" is "Prometheus," "Prometheus" opens with a

description of the inexorable passing of time:

The careless seasons pass and leave me here. The forests rise like ghosts and fade like dreams All has its term; flowers flicker on the ground A summer moment, and the rock is bare. Alone the animals trace their changeless figure. Embodying change. Agelong I watch the leopard Glaring at something past the end of time. And the wild goat immobile on his rock. Lost in a trance of roaming through the skies,

(214)

The seasons, forests, and flowers show the simple

chronology of time of the natural order. In this order

change is normal. The animals, however, exist in a

different pattern. They change, but their change appears

to be changeless. The leopard and the wild goat seem to

remain changeless as though they were part of a fixed

pattern. The leopard looking past the end of time, and

the immobile wild goat, stand in contrast to the

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changeable man. They are as heraldic images painted on

a shield or wall. Consequently the animals offer some

hope, for they are not locked into the bondage of time

as man is. They are free of the sense of time that

plagues man most of his life, who is a pilgrim of time.

Prometheus looks and sees this pilgrim man:

I look and he is there. But pilgrim man Travels foreknowing to his stopping place. Awareness on his lips, which have tasted sorrow. Foretasted death. These strangers do not know Their happiness is in that which leads their

sorrow Round to an end, (214)

As Prometheus sees it, pilgrim man contrasts with the

leopard and goat, for man is traveling to his stopping

place. But though man knows that he is traveling, and

that he has suffered sorrow, he does not know the reasons

for his travels, nor does he understand that somehow his

happiness is a part of his sorrow.

A third poem suggesting man's loss of a sense of

direction on the modern scene is Muir's "Ballad of the

Flood." ("Ballad of the Flood," incidentally, is one of

the few poems in which Muir uses the Scots language,

which, after a few early experiments in dialect, he

abandoned for English.) "Ballad of the Flood," as may

be seen by its contents, is a retelling of the story of

Noah and the Flood. The poem is narrated by "I" as an

objective onlooker telling of a "ghastly dream." The

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first eight stanzas relate the situation of the world as

presented in the dream:

"Last night I dreamed a ghastly dream. Before the dirl o' day,

A twining worm cam out the wast. Its back was like the slae.

"It ganted wide as deid men gant, Turned three times on its tail.

And wrapped itsel the warld around Till ilka rock did wail,

"Its belly was blacker than the coal. It wapped sae close about.

That it brak the hills in pieces sma' And shut the heavens out,

"Repent, repent, my folk, repent. Repent and turn around.

The hills are sinking in the sea. The warld has got a stound,"

The braw lads woke beside their makes And drov/sy were their een:

"0 1 wat this is anither day As every day had been,

"And we sail joy to-day, my luve. Sail dance to harp and horn.

And I'll devise anither play When we walk out the morn,

"But on the neist high day we twa Through the kirk door maun gae.

For sair I fear lest we sail brenn In living fire alway,"

They looked around on every wa' And drowsy were their enn.

The day rase up aboon the east

As every day had been, (31-32)

The apocalyptic worm represented here seems to sym±)olize

the powerful grip of evil on the world, but there are

people who call for repentance and righteousness. The

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poem moves from its presentation of the abstract evil

of the worm and the unidentified righteous caller, and

to the concrete example of the unconcern of the people.

Two young lovers are more interested in their joy and

pleasure than anything else, even though they conjecture

that they must go to church in order to escape the

burning fires of hell.

This passing reference to going to church could be

simply a casual reference to the general concern of

escaping Hell rather than a serious concern for combatting

or countering evil. The couple seem to be lost in them­

selves and participating primarily in daily life as

they drop back into a drowsiness. They have neither the

wish for, nor the hope of, any significant sense of

direction which would give pattern to their lives.

Journeys for Answers

In some of his poems Muir presents individuals with

is search of answers to the perennial problems that

beset man in his existence within a time world. Perhaps

the best of these is "Abraham," which describes Abraham's

journeying toward an ultimate destination,

"Abraham" begins with the account of the wanderer

Abraham following a rivulet:

107

The rivulet-loving wanderer Abraham Through waterless wastes tracing his fields of pasture

Led his Chaldean herds and fattening flocks With the meandering art of wavering water That seeks and finds, yet does not know its way. He came, rested and prospered, and went on, Scattering behind him little pastoral kingdoms. And over each one its own particular sky. Not the great rounded sky through which he

journeyed. That went with him but when he rested changed. His mind was full of names Learned from strange peoples speaking alien

tongues. And all that was theirs one day he would inherit. He died content and full of years, though still The Promise had not come, and left his bones. Far from his father's house, in alien Canaan, (221)

The comparison of Abraham's wandering with that of the

rivulet's random progress indicates a purposeless

direction on the surface, but underneath both Abraham and

the rivulet do have a purpose and a direction—though

this way or purpose may not always be immediately clear.

Yet the rivulet goes to the sea, and Abraham, himself

seeks to return to Eden through the Promise, The middle

portion of the poem relates the happenings when Abraham

stopped his wandering for a time. He rests, prospers,

and goes on, but leaves behind "little pastorial kingdoms."

These new kingdoms differ from the kingdom of Abraham

because the same sky does not overlook both kingdoms.

Abraham has the "Great rounded sky," which journeys with

him wherever he goes, whereas the little kingdoms each

has its own particular sky. The great sky travels with

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Abraham until he rests, then it changes, for it will

not stay when he settles to rest. The sky which directs

Abraham's journey includes the promise, but it is much

more, for it entails the search for the original state

of man guided by the glimpses of the fable. When

Abraham ceases to move, he loses some of his ability to

recognize tne glimpses of the fable; therefore, the sky

changes. As long as he is seeking, the order and unity,

or the complete circle suggested by the term "rounded

sky," is gradually being revealed to him,

Abraham dies without achieving the promise; that is,

he has not found the absolute which he sought by journeying,

but he has reached an element of contentment. His con­

tentment must be in his having seen enough of the fable

to realize that there is an order and a unity and a

reconciliation of the paradoxes of man's existence in

this world,

"Abraham," taken as a whole, asks two questions

which are not clearly answered, Huberman states these

two questions as "How can a human being find tne road he

must take? How can he recognize his destiny and reach

the consummation he instinctively believes is his?"

The poem does not provide a clear positive answer to these

questions, but it does give a hint of the proper direction

one must take. The Abraham figure is of one who continues

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to seek, and as a seeker tries to find answers. The

attempt to find answers leads him in many directions, but

ultimately he dies "content and full of years," The

continual seeking and learning are thus the tools that

man has to try to find the answers to these questions.

The concept of journeys in search of answers occurs

also in "The Succession," which is in effect a sequel to

the preceding poem. The poem consists of a series of

pictures showing the journey of Abraham, Isaac, and—by

implication—of Jacob: each man traveling his own road

and arriving at a destination.

Legendary Abraham, The old Chaldean wanderer. First among these peoples came. Cruising above them like a star That is in love with distances And has through age to calmness grown. Patient in the wilderness And untarrying in the sown. At last approached his setting mark. Thence he sent his twin star out, Isaac, to revolve alone. For two great stars that through an age Play in their corner of the sky. Separate go into the dark, And ere they end their roundabout One must live and one must die,

Isaac in his tutelage Wheeled around the father light. Then began his pilgrimage Through another day and night. Other peoples, other lands. Where the father could not go There is gone the careless son. He can never miss his way. By strangers' hands to strangers' hands He is carried where he will.

110

Free, he must the powers obey. Serve, be served by good and ill, Safe through all the hazards run. All shall watch him come and go Until his quittance he has won;

And Jacob wheels into the day, (221-222)

As may be seen, Abraham makes his journey through life,

and Isaac, after serving his apprenticeship, begins his

own pilgrimage. He journeys around the light of his

father, but not in the same light, for he operates under

another set of circumstances. When Isaac finishes,

Jacob will begin his own journey. The implication is

that each makes his own journey, but that each of these,

though travelling a different direction, in effect,

repeats the preceding in a destination reached. The

common link between them is that each sought to recover

that lost Eden which is non-recoverable. Nonetheless,

each man tries, and, in so doing, achieves some degree

of spiritual substance,

Tne third stanza is presented in the first person

plural "we," which serves to generalize the ideas and

thus include modern man as well: We through the generations came Here by a way we do not know From the fields of Abraham, And still the road is scarce begun. To hazard and to danger go The sallying generations all Where the imperial highways run. And our songs and legends call The hazard and the danger good;

Ill

For our fathers understood That danger was by hope begot And hazard by revolving chance Since first we drew the enormous lot. (222)

We—past and present generations—have arrived at the

present destination through Abraham, but the road does

not end here, for it has "scarce begun." Each man's

life will continue to be the journey of trying to decide

which road to take. Muir believed that there was a right

road for each man, but nonetheless, that numerous wrong

12 roads also exist which man may take at any time. Yet

even the right road has hazards and dangers for the man

making the journey; yet, some dangers and hazards are

good, because they come from hope and chance. As hope

and chance, and danger and hazard become related in

confronting man in his journeys down the road, he

begins to realize that the existence of both is a part

of the reality which exists. He, thus, comes to accept

the paradox of the mutual existence of these facts of

life.

In this poem Muir uses Abraham as a father image for

man in general. Even as Abraham set the pattern as a

wanderer, all men since have become wanderers. At least

all men have been wanderers who follow the pattern.set

by Abraham. Muir's own life as a wandering seeker may be

symbolically seen in the poem—in particular in the final

section in which the paradox is brought together to show

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an interrelationship of danger and hope. Muir's own life

career seems to echo through the poem. It is through

the realization of the relationship of man and the para­

dox that man is able to understand the good in his

journey and accept his existence.

A third poem which touches briefly on this same

theme is "The Killing," in which, as summarized earlier,

a stranger on a journey, passing through Jerusalem,

observes the events of the crucifixion. The stranger's

narration concludes about the crucifixion scene:

I was a stranger, could not read these people Or this outlandish deity. Did a God Indeed in dying cross my life that day

By chance, he on his road and I on mine? (225)

This stranger does not understand either the deity or the

people, nor whether these happenings affect his own life.

He can only question his own role and that of the deity.

Was each on his respective individual road leading toward

a specific end? The stranger does not answer this question

directly, but the first two parts of the poem suggest

that the answer would be positive. This answer would

agree with Muir's general concept that each man has a

right road, and that his job in life is to seek that road.

Here, in this poem two men each on his own road are

trying to discover whether or not it is the right one.

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The Entrapment of Man in Time

The Fall of Man

In several of his classical and Biblical poems Muir

depicts man as trapped in the patternless time flux of

his human existence. This state Muir frequently sym­

bolizes by the Biblical story of the fall of man and his

departure from an idyllic state of perfection represented

by Adam and Eve's sojourn in the Garden of Eden. Muir's

poem which most thoroughly explores this idea is "The

Fall."

In the poem, "The Fall" Muir carries the reader

backward to a time before man or the world was created,

as suggested by the questions opening the poem:

What shape had I before the Fall? What hills and rivers did I seek?

What were my thoughts then? And of what Forgotten histories did I speak?

To my companions? Did our eyes From their foredestined watching-place

See Heaven and Earth one land, and range Therein through all of Time and Space?

Did I see Chaos and the Word, The suppliant Dust, the moving Hand,

Myself, and Many and the One, The dead, the living Land? (68-69)

The narrator of the poem, probably meant by Muir to

symbolize Adam, thus questions whether prior to his

creation he existed in some meaningful form. Through

his series of questions, he seeks some sense of personal

114

identity even before the beginning "of Time and Space."

The poem asks these questions about the pre-existent

state of man, suggesting that the answer is positive,

though at the same time, that the answer is also not

entirely clear. Man cannot move that far back into his

existence; therefore, Muir, in line thirteen, moves

away from the abstract question to a reality, in the

suggestion that "That height cannot be scaled again,"

The shift between stanza III and stanza IV is toward a

reality with which the "I" can identity—namely, the fall,

which for him becomes a focal point.

That height cannot be scaled again. My fall was like the fall that burst

Old Lear's heart on the summer sward. Where I lie now I stood at first.

The ancient pain returns anew. Where was I ere I came to man?

What shape among the shapes that once Agelong through endless Eden ran?

Did I see there the dragon brood By streams their emerald scales unfold.

While from their amber eyeballs fell Soft-rayed the rustling gold?

It must be that one thing I walked

By rivers where the dragon drinks. (69)

To emphasize the fact that the height has been lost and

cannot be regained, Muir compares the Fall to that of

Shakespeare's King Lear. In his essay "Thf- Politics of

King Lear," Muir suggests that Lear's fall resulted from

holding to an old order which lay in ruin, whereas his

115

daughters—Goneril and Regan—held to a new order which

really is not an order. The conflict between these two

orders causes the fall and sorrow of Lear."'"' In like

condition, the change of man from one order—before the

Fall—to another order that he does not clearly under­

stand—that of after the Fall—leaves man in a state of

confusion. Like Lear, man may try to reason out the

answer, or the proper direction, but he cannot regain

or restore what has been lost.

The dragons in the preceding passage have a special

meaning for Muir. They are not the traditionally feared

creatures of legend, but creatures with which man in

the past had communion and shared habitat. He is able

to appreciate the beauty of the dragon and consequently

can conclude, "It must be that one time I walked / By

rivers where the dragon drinks." Muir explains in his

autobiography that he had dreams about dragons and that

he used some of these in his poems, though he does not

suggest any specific meaning of symbolism with regard to

14 them. In the poem, at least, the dragon bears its own

meaning, where Muir uses it to symbolize an idealistic

state in Eden before the Fall. For the time after the

fall, or the latter part of the poem, he ur es the Sphinx,

The Sphinx image represents the twisting confusing

road of the present that man faces outside Eden.

116

But this side Eden's wall I meet On every twisting road the Sphinx.

Whose head is like a wooden prow That forward leaning dizzily

Over the seas of whitened worlds Has passed and nothing found to see.

Whose breast, a flashing ploughshare, once Cut the rich furrows wrinkled in

Venusberg's sultry underworld And busy trampled fields of sin.

Whose salt-white brow like crusted fire Smiles ever, whose cheeks are red as blood.

Whose dolphin back is flowered yet With wrack that swam upon the Flood, (69-70)

The sequence of images drawn from the anatomy of the

Sphinx serve to suggest the unanswered questions that

confront man. The first image—the head—builds the

simile that suggests a ship lost at sea. The prow of

the ship leans dizzily over the sea of the non-distinct

white worlds. The image thus creates the impression that

there is no clear direction and no visual objects which

may form a landmark. There is nothing to help orient the

narrator; only the sensation of movement.

The breast image presents not clear answer or

direction either. This image of a ploughshare cutting

rich furrows to create the mountains does not reveal

answers to the original questions, but offers only more

confusion. The sultry underworld of Venusberg may have

two references, both of which could apply to the setting

and idea. The first reference is to that of the lengendary

117

cave in which Venus held her court. The second refer­

ence may be that the heart exists within the breast,

and that the rich furrows are those experiences which

penetrate to the heart only to leave indelible marks on

it; however, these experiences do not answer or give

enlightenment to the questions previously asked by the

narrator. Either of these interpretations fits satis­

factorily with the last line in this stanza, "And busy

trampled fields of sin." After the Fall, the earth

becomes filled with sin. Whether that sin comes from

Venus' Courts of the sultry underworld or from the heart,

it nevertheless, exists and frequently gives the appear­

ance of trampling or overrunning the world. In either

situation the Sphinx's breast gives no directions toward

answering the original questions asked in the poem.

In the lines that follow, the persona changes the

emphasis from the vision of the Sphinx to the action that

he takes against the Sphinx.

Since then in antique attitudes I swing the bright two-handed sword

And strike and strike the marble brow. Wide-eyed and watchful as a bird,

Smite hard between the basilisk eyes. And carve the snaky dolphin side.

Until the coils are cloven in two And free the glittering pinions glide.

Like quicksilver, the scales slip down. Upon the air the spirit flies.

And so I build me Heaven and Hell To buy my bartered Paradise.

118

While from a legendary height I see a shadowy figure fall.

And not far off another beats

With his bare hands on Eden's wall, (70)

With the two-handed sword, he swings, strikes, smites,

and carves at the Sphinx as he battles to build his

"heaven and hell," but he makes little progress.

In the last stanza of the preceding passage the

persona's vision returns to the shadowy figure of man

as himself, striving to retrieve the paradise of Eden,

This paradise, once known but now having only legendary

qualities, keeps returning to the mind of man, indicating

to him that there are mysteries he does not understand but

that he wishes to regain. The shadowy figure suggests

the commonness and universality of the experience of the

Fall for man, and man's futile attempts to regain entrance

to Eden--that other paradise.

For "The Fall" Muir uses as his source his own

dre-ams on visions. In his Autobiography, he relates a

sequence of visions that he experienced during the time 15 he was being psychoanalyzed. The dragon, the Sphinx,

the two-handed sword—all seem to have come from these

visions. The specific meaning of none of these images

is clear, but generally they seem to imply the facts of

racial unconscious, pre-existence, immortality, and human

destiny. The fact that man can participate in dreams

and visions Muir accepts as evidence that man has ties

119

with the past even though he may not clearly know that

past.

In "The Fall" Muir expresses two other ideas,

although through implication rather than direct expli­

cation. The first sequence of questions, lines 1 through

12, implies a conscious pre-human existence. The

questions are constructed to suggest the human qualities

of feeling, speaking, and seeing. In his Autobiography,

Muir reveals that he earlier had an intuition "that long

before man appeared on earth he existed as a dream or a

17 prophecy m the animal soul." He admits that in the

modern world of human experience he is unable to deal with

this idea in any satisfactory manner, and simply conceives

of it as one of the mysteries of the Fable hidden from

18 man as a result of the Fall. The other idea implied

in the poem is that of immortality. The struggle in

stanzas 11 through 13 suggests a continuing battle in

which neither participant is victor. Neither the Sphinx

or man wins in the conflict; yet within or through the

conflict itself, man is able to build his heaven and hell

to buy his bartered paradise.

In the Autobiography, also, Muir speaks of telling

his analyst of a dream in which he struggles with a beast

and which might point to immortality. Yet, though the

19 analyst dismissed this suggestion, the dream that Muir

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had, if it did relate to immortality, is very close to

the sequence presented in "The Fall." He writes:

I saw now that I was naked and holding a broad sword in my hands. I lifted up the sword, swung it over my shoulder, and struck the creature in the brow. The blow made no alter­ation, I raised the sword again and struck harder, but the stroke merely pushed the head back. In a fury I thrust the sword into the beast's side at the joint of the armor; then it turned its head and smiled at me. This inflamed my fury past all bounds; I twisted the sword round and round; the mail burst open; something with white wings, robed in white, fluttered into the sky; and the creature drev; its torn mail round it like an umbrella shutting, thrust its beak into the ground and shot out of sight.20

As may be seen, the struggle in the dream and the struggle

related in the poem are very similar, and both suggests

some quality of immortality for man. Ultimately, for

Muir the idea of immortality and pre-human existence are

interwoven with his concept of the Fable, as in the last

stanza in "The Fall," which expands the idea of the fall

into universal terms and relates it to Fable, Because

the persona from his legendary height can see a shadowy

figure performing the same acts that he has performed,

he realizes that all men are involved in this Fall from,

and attempt to regain, Eden, The destiny of the human

race from its beginning to its end thus constitutes

the theme of the poem.

121

Man Lost and Confused in a Time World

As has been shown in the preceding section, according

to Muir, man, once fallen and unable to regain the Edenic

state, must by the very nature of the time world, be lost

and confused in its midst. The sense of confusion and

undetermined direction within the time world of man's

existence is described in detail in several of Muir's

poems under consideration in this study, but is involved

most fully in three poems: "The Labyrinth," "Oedipus,"

and "Moses."

The setting of "The Labyrinth" is a labyrinth in

the story of Theseus and his journey into the Cretan

maze to kill the Minotaur. Muir remarks of the genesis

of "The Labyrinth":

Thinking there [a writer's resort at Dobris] of the old story of the Labyrinth of Cnossos and the journey of Theseus through it and out of it, I felt that this was an image of human life with its errors and ignorance and endless intricacy. In the poem I made the labyrinth stand for all this. But I wanted also to give an image of the life of the gods, to whom all that is confusion down here is clear and harmonious as seen eter­nally. The poems begins with a very long sentence, deliberately labyrinthine, to give the mood,21

Theseus battles the bull and threads the maze only to

discover that his escape had led him into a more complex

and inscrutable puzzle than the maze even was—the

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outside world. Theseus thus becomes man himself as he

journeys within and outside the labyrinth of the time

world.

The poems opens with the "labyrinthine sentence"

mentioned by Muir. The sentence contains about

thirty-five lines of the poem, and presents several

different images occupying the mind of Theseus. The

first image is that of Theseus' experience in the laby­

rinth itself and the state of confusion in which it has

left him:

Since I emerged that day from the labyrinth. Dazed with the tall and echoing passages. The swift recoils, so many I almost feared I'd meet myself returning at some smooth corner. Myself or my ghost, for all there was unreal After the straw ceased rustling and the bull Lay dead upon the straw and I remained. Blood-splashed, if dead or alive I could not tell In the twilight nothingness (I might have been A spirit seeking his body through the roads of intricate Hades) (163)

After the opening passage, the scene shifts to an Eden­

like picture outside the maze:

--ever since I came out To the world, the still fields swift with

flowers, the trees All bright with blossom, the little green hills, the sea.

The sky and all in movement under it. Shepherds and flocks and birds and the young and old,

(I stared in wonder at the young and the old. For in the maze time had not been with me; I had strayed, it seemed past sun and season and change.

Past rest and motion, for I could not tell

123

At last if I moved or stayed; the maze itself Revolved around me on its hidden axis And swept me smoothly to its enemy. The lovely world) (163-64)

This Eden-like picture, however, cannot be fully appreci­

ated by Theseus since the effect of the maze is still

upon him. All he is aware of is the beauty.

In the next section the confusion is shown to be an

intricate part of Theseus' mind as he moves once again

into the everyday civilized world:

—since I came out that day. There have been times when I have heard my footsteps

Still echoing in the maze, and all the roads That run through the noisy world, deceiving

streets That meet and part and meet, and rooms that open Into each other—and never a final room— Stairways and corridors and antechambers That vacantly wait for some great audience. The smooth sea-tracks that open and close again. Tracks undiscoverable, indecipherable. Paths on the earth and tunnels underground. And bird-tracks in the air—all seemed a part Of the great labyrinth, (164)

Theseus' vision first described is one of confusion within

the labyrinth; the second of the confusion of the order

in nature with the memory of the maze; the third, of the

confusion in, and of, the civilized world—the world in

which Story takes place. The sequence of images become

somewhat confused for the reader because of the time

element suggested by the verb tenses. For in the opening

section the verbs are in past tense; in the second the

image of Eden uses no complete verbs, and in the third,

124

the present perfect is the dominant verb tense. This

shifting of tenses helps to draw the feelings of a reader

into the poem eind aids in conveying the confusion of

the narrator who uses them, and in creating a similar

state of confusion for the reader. This confusion, the

result of time and time, Muir implies, is a force in

Story and in the poem. Story takes place in a noisy

world of roads that "meet and part and meet" and

"Stairways and corridors and antechambers," The long

"labyrinthine" sentence thus carries the reader into

and through the maze until it concludes with the state­

ment, "all seemed a part / Of the great labyrinth,"

Memories, nature, and the civilized world are thus a

prolonged continuation of the labyrinth.

After the long introductory sentence, Muir returns

to more conventional syntax; however, the confusion of

Theseus is even more heightened by a conflict of good

and evil spirits within him:

And then I'd stumble In sudden blindness, hasten, almost run. As if the maze itself were after me And soon must catch me up. But taking thought, I'd tell myself, 'You need not hurry. This Is the firm good earth. All roads lie free before you'.

But my bad spirit would sneer, 'No, do not hurry. No need to hurry. Haste and delay are equal y In this one world, for there's no exit, none. No place to come, and you'll end where you are, Deep in the centre of the endless maze,' (164)

125

In these lines, Muir, after having presented the con­

fusions and illusions of memory, nature, and the civilized

world, presents the conflicts of self through the two

spirits. The self in one sense tells that this is the

firm earth where all roads are free, but in another,—

the bad spirit—replies that there is no right way, no

exit, no freedom. The two spirits reach no resolution.

It is in the first four sections of the poem that

Muir presents the confusion and bewilderment of man in

his search for meaning in this existence. To this point,

no answers or directions are evident from within the four

spectrums presented, remembrances, nature, civilized

world, or himself. In the remainder of the poem—which

will be discussed in the next chapter—he does provide an

answer—one satisfactory at least to himself.

In his dramatic monologue "Oedipus" Muir explores

further the problems and paradoxes besetting man within

a time world, Oedipus, old and blind, looks back over his

own life, using his physical blindness which cuts out the

physical light, as a symbolic focus (the darkness of

blindness representing the realm of ignorance and evil,

light of sight representing the realm of knowledge and

good) attempts to solve the problem of its meaning:

I, Oedipus, the club-foot, made to stumble. Who long in the light have walked to world

in darkness. And once in the darkness did that which the light

126

Found and disowned—too well I have loved the light.

Too dearly have rued the darkness. I am one Who as in innocent play sought out his guilt. And now through guilt seeks other innocence. Beset by evil thought, led by the gods. (189)

Oedipus' first effort is to resolve the paradox of how

the "good" of the true love between himself and Jocasta

became evil:

There was a room, a bed of darkness, once Known to me, not to all. Yet in that darkness. Before the light struck, she and I who lay There without thought of sin and knew each other Too well, yet were to each other quite unknown Though fastened mouth to mouth and breast to breast—

Strangers laid on one bed, as children blind. Clear-eyed and blind as children--did we sin Then on that bed before the light came on us. Desiring good to each other, bringing, we thought. Great good to each other? But neither guilt nor death. (189)

The light—the truth that his beloved is also "mother"—

makes the act of love the sin of incest. Yet in a darker

time would their love have been sinful, being true love?

Yet if that darkness had been darker yet. Buried in endless dark past reach of light Or eye of the gods, a kingdom of solid darkness Impregnable and immortal, would we have sinned. Or lived like the gods in deathless innocence? For sin is born in the light; therefore we cower before the face of the light that none can meet And all must seek. And when in memory now. Woven of light and darkness, a stifling web, I call her back, dear, dreaded, who lay with me, I see guilt, only guilt, my nostrils choke With the smell of guilt, and I can scarcely breathe

Here in the guiltless guilt-evoking sun, (189-90)

127

Oedipus' mind now reverts to the paradox of his act of

patricide:

And when young Oedipus—for it was Oedipus And not another—on that long vanished night For in my night, at that predestined point Where three paths like three fates crossed

one another. Tracing the evil figure—when I met The stranger who menaced me, and flung the stone That brought him death and me this that I carry It was not him but fear I sought to kill. Fear that, the wise men say, is father of evil. And was my father in flesh and blood, yet fear. Fear only father and fear in one dense body. So that there was no division, no way past: Did I sin then, by the gods admonished to sin. By men enjoined to sin: For it is duty. Of god and man to kill the shapes of fear. (190)

As Oedipus thus recalls the event of his unknowing

murder of his own father, he begins to see another aspect

of paradox. That is, that his father represents both love

and fear. The sense of the father image of love is com­

bined with the image of fear—which causes him to react

with violence toward his unrecognized father. Striking

out in fear, he thus kills his own father. The play on

the word "father" indicates some of the confusion in his

mind, as does the play on "light" and "darkness" in the

earlier section of the poem. Oedipus is not able to

answer clearly the questions he would like answered, but

he is finally able to see that in this event, at least,

he chose one side of the dilemma and acted in response to

it. In doing so Oedipus recognizes at least that para­

doxes exist; and in the concluding section of the poem

128

comes to the realization that only by seeing as with the

eyes of the god can man reconcile the seeming paradoxes

of man's existence.

In the writing of this poem, Muir draws upon two

events in his own life. The first of these was the

fear experienced by Muir in connection with an empty

sheep-dip bag. In his Autobiography Muir relates how

22

his father told him not to touch the empty bag, but

the son was unable to remember later whether or not he

had done so, and for some unexplained reason a sense of

guilt and fear came over him that he might have, and he

felt alienated and isolated from the other members of his

family. He never resolved the problem, but because he was

young, only seven at the time, it finally went away; how­

ever, not without leaving the strong sense of his fear

with him. The second event occurred while Muir was under­

going analysis. As the analyst began to interpret his

dreams Muir relates that he reached a state resembling

the conviction of sin. After some thinking, discussion

with the analyst, and reformulation, he concluded that, "It was really a conviction of sin, but even more a

23 realization of Original sin," The consequences of

these two events, the sense of fear through guilt and the

realization of sin, remained with Muir and are reflected

in the poem "Oedipus."

129

Muir's presentation of man in his poem "Moses,"

lost and confused within a time world, is primary in

contrast to Moses' vision on Mount Pisgah, of the beauty

and harmony of the Promised Land. In contrast to Moses

the people saw not a millenium, but the present world

of their conquest of the land:

The battle for the land, the massacres. The vineyards drenched in aboriginal blood. The settlement, unsatisfactory order. The petty wars and neighbouring jealousies

And local troubles. (130)

Later in the poem occurs a vision of the history of the

Israelites to the present time in the centuries following the Biblical conquest of Canaan:

We did not see and Moses did not see. The great disaster, exile, diaspora. The holy bread of the land crumbled and broken In Babylon, Caesarea, Alexandria As on a splendid dish, or gnawed as offal. Nor did we see, beyond, the ghetto rising, Toledo, Cracow, Vienna, Budapesth, Nor, had we seen, would we have known our people In the wild disguises of fantastic time. Packed in dense cities, wandering countless roads. And not a road in the world to lead them home. (130)

Through his allusions to cities Muir thus gives a brief

history of•the problems of the Jews from Babylon to

Budapesth. They are in the ghettos and large cities in

contrast with Moses' vision of a perfect rural agrarian

society, Muir probably draws his images in this poem

from his own experience in Europe in the 1930's, for he

was very disillusioned with the anti-Semitism in Europe

130

at that time. Muir's description is a tragic reflection

of the power of the time world to create confusion and

frustration for man.

CHAPTER V

FABLE—INTIMATIONS OF ETERNITY

According to Muir, man exists in Time, with all the

perplexities and illusions that Time brings, but he also

has access to the realm of Fable through dreams and

other similar intimations that come to him. As the

following discussion shows, some of the archetypal

patterns revealed to him by his own experience and

illustrated in his Classical and Biblical poems include

a sense of immortality suggested by human love; a sense

of ideal order existing outside Time; the orderly pro­

cesses of nature; the innocence of man before the fall;

the gospel and person of Christ.

Love's Redeeming and Enduring Power

As stated in an earlier chapter, Muir felt that the

love relationship between a man and a woman was one of

the nearest approaches in human life to the state of

immortality. Love, therefore, constitutes one of the

avenues by which man might approach the realm of Fable.

131

132

The Faithful Wife

The principle of love in action in the life of man

is illustrated in three of Muir's poems which stress-

in the person of Penelope, the faithful wife of

Odysseus—the stabilizing role of a wife in the

archetypal pattern represented by the institution of the

family. The first of these poems, "The Return of the

Greeks," has already been discussed in the preceding

chapter as an illustration of man's sense of a loss of

direction, as the Greek warriors returning from Troy find

all changed in the home land. Yet the one force which

will finally give them the old sense of familiarity and

security that they once had, according to Muir, is the

fact of their wives and children.

But for their grey-haired wives And their sons grown shy and tall They would have given their lives To raise the battered wall Again, if this was all Inspite of their sons and wives.

Penelope in her tower Looked down upon the show And saw within an hour Each man to his wife go. Hesitant, sure and slow: She, alone in her tower. (126)

The wives and sons cause the men to turn their thinking

to new directions; for, if it were only that their sons

and wives merely existed, they would want to return to

Troy—"if this was all." But somehow the wives and

133

children give them a sense that there is more than this

disillusionment they are now suffering.

In the latter part of the poem the emphasis is

changed, as suggested by the second stanza of the

preceding passage, from the Greek wives generally to one

in particular—Penelope—whose husband is still abroad,

at sea or still at Troy or in some other hostile environ­

ment. The image of Penelope suggests the idea that hope,

love, and fidelity are those particular human qualities

that aid man in his search for the right road.

One does not have to look hard into this poem to

see echoes of Muir's own life. As he says in his Auto­

biography, "My marriage was the most fortunate event in

my life." In other places and ways, he expresses the

feeling that the love shared between him and his wife

was a guiding force in his life: a force that delivered

him from the Glasgow days and through the trying period

of his effort to find his own purpose in, and understanding,

of life. Although Muir never fought a literal war as

the Greeks had, Muir's wife, and later his son, helped

him conquer his disillusionment and to find order and

meaning in his life.

In "The Return of the Greeks" Muir develops the idea

of man existing within the realm of Story, but with love

acting as a redemptive quality giving man a purpose in

134

that existence. In a world characterized by bewilder­

ment and chaos, the Greeks confuse reality and remember

only the home they knew in their youth before Troy,

The world of time has changed them. Then the "grey-

haired wives" intercede to help the returning warriors

find a purpose in this long forgotten way of living.

That quality of love which helps man to see beyond the

immediacy of it toward a more meaningful understanding

of self and others, helps the warriors as they try to

re-evaluate and orient themselves to a new situation.

"The Return of Odysseus" illustrates the same theme

as the latter portion of "The Return of the Greeks"—

that is, the love of the wife for her absent husband,

who does not know whether or not he will ever return.

The setting of the poem is Ithaca after twenty-year

absence of Odysseus, The first section of "The Return

of Odysseus" presents a broad description of a chaotic

disorder relative to Odysseus' home and its environment:

The doors flapped open in Odysseus' house, The lolling latches gave to every hand. Let traitor, babbler, tout and bargainer in. The rooms and passages resounded With ease and chaos of the public market. The walls mere walls to lean on as you talked. Spat on the floor, surveyed some newcomer With an absent eye. There you could be yourself. Dust in the nooks, weeds nodding in the yard. The thick walls crumbling. Even the cattle came About the doors with mild familiar stare As if this were their place. All round the island stretched the clean blue sea, (114)

135

In the midst of this ruin lives Odysseus' waiting

spouse:

Sole at the house's heart Penelope Sat at her chosen task, endless undoing Of endless doing, endless weaving, unweaving. In the clean chamber. Still her loom ran empty Day after day. She thought: 'Here I do nothing Or less than nothing, making an emptiness Amid disorder, weaving, unweaving the lie The day demands. Odysseus, this is duty. To do and undo, to keep a vacant gate Where order and right and hope and peace can enter, Oh will you ever return: Or are you dead. And this wrought emptiness my ultimate emptiness?'

She wove and unwove and wove and did not know That even then Odysseus on the long And winding road of the world was on his way. (114)

This concentration upon Penelope emphasizes her as the

heart of the house. From the poem we learn of Penelope's

plan to weave and unweave the funeral shroud for Odysseus'

father in order that she would not have to make a decision

to marry one of her suitors. Muir attempts to show her

faithfulness and patience as he pictures her in the room

thinking about her situation. She keeps a clean chamber,

and diligently pursues a task although the immediate

end of the task seems to be nothingness. In her specific

thoughts, she realizes the existence of paradox, and

moves toward the acceptance of this part of her own

existence. She realizes that in the participation in

weaving and unweaving she is complying with a sense of

duty. Duty and obligation become the factors that help

136

her reconcile the paradox of keeping the gate available

for order, right, and hope to enter. Diligence to her

duty and her loyalty to Odysseus keep her seeking more

specific answers. In this, Muir shows the loyal Penelope

as the symbol of love's redeeming and enduring power, a

power which counteracts Time and Story,^ and enables man

to live within the bondage of Time and Story.

In the two Odysseus poems, Muir shifts from the

plight of the warrior survivors of "The Return of the

Greeks" to the problem of the ones who remain behind.

The problem faced by those waiting is one of darkness and

doubt or uncertainty. The darkness and doubt exist;

there is chaos of the house; but inside the chamber

chaos is matched by order, cleanliness, and devotion.

On the basis of this picture of Penelope's inner sanc­

tuary, Muir permits the reader to observe that the gate

of hope remains open, and suggests for her some ultimate

realization of meaning in human existence. This ultimate

realization is symbolized in Penelope through her fidelity

and love. Butter writes of the volume. The Narrow Place,

in which this poem appears: "Earlier he had been able to

say only that man has intuitions both of necessity and

freedom; now he is able to go some way towards explaining

the paradox—though without removing the sense of mystery—

137

and towards showing why intuition of freedom is justi­

fied."^

The third of the poems regarding the faithfulness

of Penelope is "Telemachos Remembers." As earlier

summarized, Telemachos tells the story of watching his

mother diligently at work on a single garment for these

twenty years of her husband's absence, and relates his

own feelings about his mother's work and his state of

confusion over it. But he finally reaches a sense of

understanding of his mother's actions.

Twenty years, every day. The figures in the web she wove Came and stood and went away. Her fingers in their pitiless play Beat downward as the shuttle drove.

Slowly, slowly did they come. With horse and chariot, spear and bow. Half-finished heroes sad and mum. Came slowly to the shuttle's hum. Time itself was not so slow.

And what at last was there to see? A horse's head, a trunkless man. Mere odds and ends about to be. And the thin line of augury Were through the web the shuttle ran. (219)

As an outsider to the action, and partially at least as

a youth, Telemachos observes the coming and going of the

figures his mother wove. No matter how hard she worked

she seemed unable to make progress. Not knowing that

Penelope was undoing the weaving at night, Telemachos

sees only the incomplete and imperfect portions that were

138

completed each day. They come and go, but their coming

is very slow so that Telemachos sees them as slower than

time itself. Telemachos realizes that time is moving,

but that the images of the web seem to be stationary.

Indeed, the images come so slowly that they reveal no

story, so that the images reveal no more to Telemachos

than his speculations about his mother.

In stanza four Telemachos changes his point of view

and begins to ask questions about his mother:

How could she bear the mounting load. Dare once again her ghosts to rouse? Far away Odysseus trod The treadmill of the turning road That did not bring him to his home.

The weary loom, the weary loom. The task grown sick, from morn to night. From year to year. The treadle's boom Made a low thunder in the room.

The woven phantoms mazer her sight, (219-220)

But even as Telemachos asks the questions about how his

mother can bear the load of her husband's absence, the

answer comes to him in the form of an analogy to

Odysseus. As Odysseus treads the treadmill of his journey

that does not lead home, Penelope continues to bear her

burden of incompleteness, mystery, and bondage.

Odysseus in his voyage is undergoing these same feelings

so that both Penelope and Odysseus are lost in a con­

fusion of direction and purpose in life. Yet both are

139

still seeking and performing their functions, though

without clear direction, and hence offer symbols of the

reality associated with Fable,

The image of Odysseus treading the treadmill has

been criticized because it is not a nautical image. This

criticism led Muir to explain his ideas of the image.

He writes, "I was not trying to give a correct account

of what Odysseus was doing, but conveying the anxiety

and bewilderment of Telemachos and his mother, and I think

the picture of some one wandering about in a circle gives

a better impression of persistence and frustration over

a long stretch of years than any nautical image could

possibly give,"

Like the woman at work with it, the loom itself

shows a weariness and a sense of the loss of time; for

it echoes the problems of the half finished images, and

of Odysseus, But to this point in the poem all that

Telemachos can conclude is that they have "mazed" his

mother's sight. So far, Telemachos is in very much the

same state as his mother.

In stanza six Telemachos leaves his memories of his

mother's work to venture into philosophical speculation:

If she had pushed it to the end. Followed the shuttle's cunning song So far she had no thought to rend In time the web from end to end. She would have worked a matchless wrong, (220)

140

Telemachos thus concludes that had his mother finished the

web, long ago "She would have worked a matchless wrong,"

Had she permitted the work to be completed, she would be

taking an easy way out without realizing the purpose in

her work. The shuttle's song could have led her into

accepting a pathway that would not have shown her purpose

in life nor her great love for Odysseus, To finish the

weaving would have been to relinquish her struggles with

daily life, and hence commit a "matchless wrong,"

In the last stanza Telemachos begins to realize the

meaning of what he has observed these twenty years:

Instead, that jumble of heads and spears. Forlorn scraps of her treasure trove, I wet them with my childish tears Not knowing she wove into her fears Pride and fidelity and love, (220)

Telemachos now has come to a realization of the meaning of

what had been happening. His mother had been weaving a

subtle pattern all the while—that of "Pride and fidelity

and love," Weaving into her fears these qualities had

supported her belief in her husband and thus counteracted

the confusion and bewilderment that were her daily experi­

ence. She accepted the fear knowing that the paradoxical

qualities of pride, fidelity, and love also have meaning

and realization in her life, sufficiently to enable her

to patiently await Odysseus' return. By implication, the

poem also suggests that "Telemachos comes to this same

141

realization and overcomes some of his own anxiety and

bewilderment.

The Perfection of Love

One aspect of the redeeming and enduring power of

love is love at its moment of perfection. This aspect

is illustrated in two of Muir's poems, one from the

Classical tradition and one from the Biblical, As shown

earlier "Orpheus' Dream" is a compact eighteen-line poem

using as its background the legend of Orpheus' going

to Hades in search of Eurydice, his beloved. In the

original story Orpheus secures the release of Eurydice

provided that he does not look back on the journey to the

living world, Orpheus, forgetting, does look back on the

journey and loses Eurydice. Muir uses only the last part,

of the journey out, and changes the ending so that Eurydice

instead of returning to the underworld remains with

Orpheus. Muir does, however, retain some thematic

implications of the original: for example, "The heart­

break of irrevocable loss, the impacability of fate, the

remorselessness of death, the power of love, and the

Strength of love. . . . " However, in changing the ending

Muir develops a new theme meant to enlighten modern man

in his search for a meaningful existence and a sense of

direction in life.

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The poem opens with an affirmation by Orpheus that

Eurydice is present:

And she was there. The little boat Coasting the perilous ilses of sleep. Zones of oblivion and despair. Stopped, for Eurydice was there. The foundering skiff could scarcely keep All that felicity afloat.

As if we had left earth's frontier wood Long since and from this sea had won The lost original of the soul. The moment gave us pure and whole Each back to each, and swept us on Past every choice to boundless good.

Forgiveness, truth, atonement, all Our love at once—till we could dare At last to turn our heads and see The poor ghost of Eurydice Still sitting in her silver chair. Alone in Hades' empty hall. (216-217)

The first statement is the second half of a compound

sentence which suggests that the other parts of the legend

have already occurred, and that Orpheus is now on his way

home from the underworld. However, Orpheus is not certain

that he is not dreaming or having some kind of vision.

For his mind may be floating in the same way as the

imagery suggests that the boat is floating. It is

necessary for him therefore to restate and reaffirm that

Eurydice is really present. With the certainty that she

is with him, Orpheus marvels at the skiff's ability to

float with "all that felicity,"

The tentative sense of the construction which controls

the first part of the second stanza above, creates an

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image of a journey, but one not up to the underworld of

living things, but one back past Hades toward another

beginning that has long since been lost. In the experi­

ence of journeying to Hades and back, they have passed

the boundries of the world and recovered their soul.

Having passed into the new journey with a new or

recovered soul, new light comes to them. The recovery

of the soul gives them a new purity and wholeness in each

other. They are no longer lost individual souls, but

have joined together for this moment. And as the two

lovers join together for one purpose, they attain a

state of oneness that sweeps them toward the "boundless

good."^

The last stanza in the preceding quotation provides

an analysis of the experience they have just encountered.

Orpheus realizes that a love which encompasses forgive­

ness, truth, and atonement wins over the problems of this

existence. The consequences of their love and happiness

encourages them to take one step further and overcome

the fear of looking back. As they dare to look back,

they see the ghost of Eurydice in an empty Hades, The

mutual bonding of love has enabled them to find a security

that overcomes the great fear, conquering the vacancy and

loneliness of Hades, Only Eurydice's ghose remains there.

144

"Orpheus' Dream" emphasizes the great strength of

love and its power to give direction to one's life. The

journey out of oblivion and despair is directed by the

mutual love of Orpheus and Eurydice, This love makes

Hades grant the union, and shows that loss is not always 7

irrevocable and that death may lead to rebirth. This

joint adventure of love gives both Orpheus and Eurydice

a momentary glance of the eternal world of the Fable,

The Fable, in turn, can reveal a purpose and direction

in human existence.

The events of this poem and those of Muir's own

life are very similar, except reversed. In the poem

Orpheus rescues Eurydice, but in Muir's experience it

was his wife who rescued him. Durydice was in Hades

when Orpheus went to rescue her, Muir in what he called a o

tenth-rate hell—Glasgow. With the role of the rescuer

reversed, the remainder of the poem applies to Muir's

life almost as an autobiographical description, for the

Muirs found new and boundless good from their love. They

found new courage to face the conflicts of life. Par­

ticularly did Muir find in this relationship of love a

force to give him courage to face his own personal con­

flicts. He was able to write to Spender of love, "For .i9

me too love is the supreme quality. , . .

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The poem, however, need not be confined merely to

an autobiographical statement, for it expresses much

more. True love shared by a man and woman has the

potential of lifting the couple to the state of bliss

that Orpheus and Eurydice experienced. As Halloway

remarks, the poem speaks, "of the potentialities of our

own experience, of what fulfillment in lasting love is

like, of how it can come, of what it can yield," Thus,

as man is able to share mutual love he is able to journey

out of the world of time cind into the world of the Fable,

In this journey he can experience a reconciliation of

the paradox between Time and Eternity, good and evil; and

he can find the pathway that leads to "boundless good,"

As the title of Muir's poem "The Annunciation,"

suggests Muir had partially in mind as a suggestion of the

power of love the Angel's announcement to Mary that she

would bear the Christ child. But its most immediate

motivation, as Muir himself relates in his Autobiography,

was a plaque which he once saw depicting an angel and a

girl. As he describes the plaque, "An angel and a young

girl, their bodies inclined towards each other, their

knees bent as if they were overcome by love, 'tutto

tremante,' gazed upon each other like Dante's pair; and

that representation of a human love so intense that it

could not reach farther seemed the perfect earthly symbol

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of the love that passes understanding. "•'"• The opening

of the poem suggests that the encounter of the Angel and

the girl takes place on earth; for naturally, the girl

is bound by space and time:

The angel and the girl are met. Earth was the only meeting place. For the embodied never yet Travelled beyond the shore of space. The eternal spirits in freedom go.

See, they have come together, see. While the destroying minutes flow. Each reflects the other's face Till heaven in hers and earth in his Shine steady there. He's come to her From far beyond the farthest star. Feathered through time. Immediacy

Of strangest strangeness is the bliss That from their limbs all movement takes. Yet the increasing rapture brings So great a wonder that it makes Each feather tremble on his wings.

Outside the window footsteps fall Into the ordinary day And with the sun along the wall Pursue their unreturning way. Sound's perpetual roundabout Rolls its numbered octaves out And hoarsely grinds its battered tune.

But through the endless afternoon These neither speak nor movement make. But stare into their deepening trance As if their gaze would never break. (223-224)

The first stanza sets the earthly scene; the second

suggests in its detail the intersection of the timeless

and time. For even within the flow of time, the two

scenes form a timelessness. As "Each reflects the other's

face" time seems to cease, and the rapture that makes

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every feather of the angel tremble, supersedes movement

into total rapture. Momentarily a state of bliss exists.

Although outside, the routine of time, of Story, con­

tinues as though nothing is happening; for the Angel and

the girl, all except the deepening trance that momentarily

transposes them beyond time and space is as nothing.

By the time of the writing of this poem, Muir had

acknowledged that the Christianity of Rome had made a

profound impression on his life. Through the visual

images that represent the Incarnation, in this case, of

an angelic being in time, Muir felt that he had a new

light on traditional Christian ideas, and this is shown

in this poem. He came to see in the principle of Incar­

nation the ultimate meeting of the opposites, and hence,

in that meeting, a reconciliation of the paradox of

existence. From the plaque representing the Annunciation

of this particular Incarnation, at least in the Christian

story, Muir saw the beginning of the answer of how to 12

"fit that world to this" world. The poem shows this

through time images of the girl and the Angel as they are

totally absorbed in the rapture of the event.

Yet the poem is not so much about the particular

biographical event, the Muirs' sense of their mutual

love, as it is about the eternal nature of love. This

love, a holy uplifted spiritual order, is merely reflected

148

13 through the earthly event. Muir saw in this intense

love between mortal and eternal spirit an image for the

reconciliation of opposites, a communion of time and

14 eternity, a crucial moment which Muir attempts to show

in the details of the poem through the simultaneity

of trembling and motionlessness, purity and passion,

bliss and calm.

Insights into an Ideal Order Outside Time

Hints of the Fable in the Time World

In several of Muir's poems the personae are able to

glimpse an order that seems to exist somewhere outside

of the chaotic meaningless flux of Time which if they

can reach will be of value in making the events of Time

more meaningful; in other words, their experiences

represent glimpses into the realm of Fable, In three of

these, "The Labyrinth," "Oedipus," and "Moses,"—all of

which have already been discussed in Chapter IV—the

insights given are to individuals who, in terms of the

poems in which they appear generally, are lost without

a sense of direction or goal in their existence within

the time world,

Theseus, in "The Labyrinth," observes the world

outside of the maze as one of harmony and order, a sort

of Eden, which is described as the enemy of the maze.

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/

Thus for man in Time, the Labyrinth, which is the world

of "the lie, the maze," there is another world which is

far different, for in that world order and harmony abide:

I could not live if this were not illusion. It is a world, perhaps; but there's another. For once in a dream or trance I saw the gods Each sitting on the top of his mountain-isle, While down below the little ships sailed by. Toy multitudes swarmed in the habours, shepherds drove

Their tiny flocks to the pastures, marriage feasts

Went on below, small birthdays and holidays. Ploughing and harvesting and life and death. And all permissible, all acceptable. Clear and secure as in a limpid dream. But they, the gods, as large and bright as clouds. Conversed across the sounds in tranquil voices High in the sky above the untroubled sea. And their eternal dialogue was peace Where all these things were woven, and this our

life Was as a chord deep in that dialogue. As easy utterance of harmonious words. Spontaneous syllables bodying forth a world, (165)

The world just described appears as a dream or trance

experienced by Theseus and presents a contrast to the

world of the labyrinth. Man exists in this world outside

the maze as though they were "toy" miniatures; yet all

is permissible and all is acceptable. The man of this

world governed by the gods sitting high on the mountain­

side—conversing in "tranquil voices" and having

"dialogues of peace." The gods are the stablizing force

establishing and maintaining a peace, harmony, and order

which dominates in the time world although man may not

realize it. Each man's life is thus like a chord of

150

music in the larger hainnony so that in its scheme man's

existence has meaning and order.

Muir, through Theseus, calls this "dream" world,

with the dominion of it by the gods, the "real world":

That was the real world; I have touched it once. And now shall know it always. But the lie. The maze, the wild-wood waste of falsehood, roads That run and run and never reach an end. Embowered in error—I'd be prisoned there But that my soul has birdwings to fly free. (165)

Now the narrator's soul has birdwings to fly free, there

is escape from the chaotic world of the maze. This

escape comes through the participation in the Fable which

permits the larger dreamed vision of the world of the gods.

In the poem "Oedipus," the persona receives a

similar glimpse into the realm of Fable. Having come to

the realization that paradoxes exist in the time world

Oedipus begins to move toward a resolution of the central

paradox of the presence of evil in the time world:

These thoughts recur, vain thoughts. The gods see all.

And will what must be willed, which guards us here. Their will in them was anger, in me was terror Long since, but now is peace. For I am led By them in darkness; light is all about me; My way lies in the light; they know it; I Am theirs to guide and hold. And I have learned. Though blind, to see with something of their

sight. Can look into that other world and watch King Oedipus the just, crowned and discrowned. As one may see oneself rise in a dream. Distant and strange. Even so I see The meeting at the place where three roads

crossed.

151

And who was there and why, and what was done That had to be done and paid for. Innocent And guilty. I have wrought and thought in

darkness. And stand here now, an innocent mark of shame. That so men's guilt might be made manifest In such a walking riddle—their guilt and mine. For I've but acted out this fable. I have judged Myself, obedient to the gods' high judgment. And seen myself with their pure eyes, have learnt That all must bear a portion of the wrong That is driven deep into our fathomless hearts Past sight or thought; that bearing it we may ease The immortal burden of the gods who keep Our natural steps and the earth and skies from harm. (190-191)

The "vain thoughts" of trying to solve the complete

mystery of life recur to Oedipus, but from his perspective

of long endured blindness, he begins to perceive the light

that "the gods see all." What is one thing to the gods

may be another to man; therefore, only as man approaches

seeing with their vision can he come to a reconciliation

of the paradoxes. And though Oedipus, even though having

received new light, does not totally escape nor see

fully, his enlightenment is enough to realize that he

shares in the universal guilt and a universal innocence.

In this realization he moves toward the "other inno­

cence, "

Particularly, he comes to the realization of the

significance of the events of his father's murder.

Oedipus comes to understand "who was there and why, and

what was done." The act was done and in the conflict of

152

innocent and guilt, the consequences had to be paid for

but Oedipus comes to the realization that he has worked

and thought in a darkness in order that guilt might be

made manifest in "a walking riddle." The guilt is that

of all men--not just Oedipus, for he is acting out one

part of the Fable--that of the Fall. Hints in the

earlier parts of the poem indicate that Oedipus is

implicitly trying to solve the mystery of original sin,

as he asks, "Did we sin / Then," and "Did I sin then,"

The "then" projects these questions back to the more

philosophical ground of the question of the origin of

original sin. Oedipus sees himself as acting out a part

of the Fable associated with the Fall, original sin, and

the consequences.

Oedipus judges himself to have reached the "other

innocent" which he sought at the beginning of the poem.

For in seeing himself as part of the Fable, he sees

himself bearing a part of the original sin and its guilt,

but still possessing some part of a new innocence

realized from his seeing of the gods as the controlling

forces of existence and hence part of its pattern. He

senses his bearing of his portion of guilt as, in effect,

lending a helping hand to the gods in their efforts to

keep "Our natural steps and the earth and skies from

harm"—the latter a still further element of the pattern.

153

The dream vision of Moses in the poem, "Moses,"

suggests a third glimpse into Fable, as he observes an

idealized vision of the Promised Land from the top of

Mt. Pisgah. The narrator of the poem tells the story of

what Moses saw:

He left us there, went up to Pisgah hill. And saw the holiday land, the sabbath land. The mild prophetic beasts, millennial herds. The sacred lintel, over-arching tree. The vineyards glittering on the southern slopes. And in the midst the shining vein of water. The river turning, turning towards its home. Promised to us. The dream rose in his nostrils With homely smell of wine and corn and cattle. Byre, barn and stall, sweat-sanctified smell of peace.

He saw the tribes arrayed beside the river. White robes and sabbath stillness, still light

falling On dark heads whitened by the desert wave. The Sabbath of Sabbaths come and Canaan their home All this he saw in dreaming, (129-130)

As may be seen, Moses's vision of the Promised Land is

one of a paradise of order and beauty, and he dreams of

the people settling the land to live happy agrarian lives.

The millennial world has arrived, one in which peace and

harmony abide. Men have made their homes, and are working

and living in a common union which gives order to all,

Moses sees this millennial arrival of the Promised Land

as an actuality, as part of the Lord's promise. The

"we" narrator, however, does not. To him it is only a

legend or tale. The people thus remain in the realm of

Story; for Moses it is a glimspe into the reality of Fable,

154

The Creation and Edenic Innocence

The four other poems—"The Animals," "The Days,"

"Adam's Dream," and "Outside Eden"—which offer glimpses

into an ideal world of order and harmony deal primarily

with God's creation of the world and the fall of man and

his departure from the Garden of Eden. In "The Animals"

Muir limits his material to the creation of the animals

on the fifth day of creation, "The Animals" presents

Muir's view that the animals are different from man

because they are not bound by any sense of time and

space as is man.

They do not live in the world. Are not in time and space. From birth to death hurled No word do they have, not one To plant a foot upon. Were never in any place.

For with names the world was called Out of the empty air. With names was built and walled. Line and circle and square. Dust and emerald; Snatched from deceiving death By the articulate breath.

But these have never trod Twice the familiar track, Never never turned back Into the memoried day. All is new and near In the unchanging Here On the fifth great day of God, That shall remain the same. Never shall pass away.

On the sixth day man came. (207-208)

155

The narrator thus declares the animals to be different

from man primarily because they do not conceive of time

and space, because they have no language, and because

they have no memory. These differences represent the

crucial factors in his concept of the animals' meaning.

They do not therefore suffer the same problems of man

of existing in a time-and-space-complex existence. They

have their natural existence to be sure, but are not

in the time-space continuum within which man must exist.

Moreover, the animals do not have words or language to

associate with the past events of history. Neither do

they have language, even, to confuse the present situations

which they face. Because of their lack of language, the

animals have no "memoried day" to seek to recover. As

a result of this, they never travel the same road twice,

particularly not the road of innocence and fall, or of

the search for the recovery of innocence. For sure they

have not fallen from Eden, they need not seek the

recovery of it, but can continue to be the "same" in the

"unchanging Here."

The last line introduces man, and creates a contrast

between the state of the animals and the state of man.

The things which never create problems for the animals

always do so for man, who is bound by space and time,

uses language, and has memory. And though he may use

156

language as a potential means of escape, he finds that

any partial success he achieves leads merely to more

confusion. Again, because of his memory, man is con­

tinually trying to escape time and space by its means

and to return to that state of existence before the fall.

In such attempts to make the return, man undergoes "an

endlessly repeated performance. . . . " Muir's con­

ception of the animals as having their natural order,

and of man as having a different order, derived from

his early experience of observing the life of the farm

animals as a boy.

The poem "The Days" follows "The Animals" in the

volume One Foot in Eden, though, as opposed to "The

Animals," it covers the v/hole seven days of creation, not

just the fifth. The poem is divided into two parts by

a shift in verb tenses: the first part, in the past

tense, recounting the details of the creation, and the

second part, in the present, providing a brief glimpse

of the history of man. After a brief opening statement

about the creation, the poem presents the creation itself

through a series of images:

Issuing from the Word The seven days came. Each in its own place. Its own name. And the first long days A hard and rocky spring. Inhuman burgeoning.

157

And nothing there for claw or hand. Vast loneliness ere loneliness began. Where the blank seasons in their journeying Saw water at play with water and sand with sand. The waters stirred And from the door were cast Wild lights and shadows on the formless face Of the food of chaos, vast Lengthening and dwindling image of earth and heaven.

The forest's green shadow Softly over the water driven. As if the earth's green wonder, endless meadow

Floated and sank within its own green light. In water and night Sudden appeared the lion's violent head. Raging and burning in its watery cave. The stallion's tread Soundlessly fell on the flood, and the animals poured

Onward, flowing across the flowing wave. Then on the water fell The shadow of man, and earth and the heavens scrawled

With names, as if each pebble and leaf would tell The tale untenable. And the Lord called The seventh day forth and the glory of the Lord. (208-209)

The animals again, in this passage, suggest the same

unique pattern of existence that they do in the preceding

poem. Also notable is the fact that the account of the

creation, until the creation of man, is characterized

generally by water images; but that with the advent of

man, the imagery changes to emphasize shadow, suggesting

that he will illustrate some other kind of pattern.

Indeed, with the creation of man, the controlling element

becomes "names." The advent of language and memory,

symbolized by the ability to give names, becomes the means

158

of relating a new message, "The tale untenable," With

man now in existence, and the new controlling force,

"The Lord called / The seventh day forth. . . . "

Because of man's creation the natural order changes into

a special order, implications of the past, present, and

future being brought into play, Eden, the Fall with its

consequences are both suggested in the untenable tale.

The second half of the poem moves to the present

time as suggested by the beginning of the use of the

present tense verb:

And now we see in the sun The mountains standing clear in the third day (Where they shall always stay) And thence a river run. Threading, clear cord of water, all to all; The wooded hill and the cattle in the meadow. The tall wave breaking on the high sea-wall. The people at evening walking. The crescent shadow Of the light-built bridge, the hunter stalking The flying quarry, each in a different morning. The lion set High on the banner, leaping into the sky. The seasons playing Their game of sun and moon and east and west. The animal watching man and bird go by. The women praying For the passing of this fragmentary day Into the day where all are gathered together. Things and their names, in the storm's and the lightning's nest.

The seventh great day and the clear eternal

weather, (209-210)

In a single twenty-three line sentence, the tale of man

is unfolded. It begins with the period of Eden dominated

by the mountains and water, and ends with the women

159

praying for the millennium. The passage is filled with

short phrases, usually containing a present participle,

showing glimpses of man and his problems. These are not

complete statements except as the whole forms the state­

ment. The women are praying for the arrival of "The

seventh great day." With the coming of this day, the

millennium will have arrived, and man will have "the

clear eternal weather." The women's praying suggests

the longing for a unity and wholeness in life which is

not present. Both sections of the poem have within them

17 the problem of division: the division of time, of

works, and of man, symbolize for man another facet of the

time-space problem which leads him to lineliness and

confusion. Yet the advent of the new seventh day, the

millennium, will alter this. But the day does not arrive

within the poem, since prayers are being offered for its

arrival. In the poem, Muir leaves man without a positive

answer, but with hope of that future order that is

evidence of the fact of the Fable.

"Adam's Dream," the third of the creation-Eden poems

under discussion, recounts Adam's first dream after the

fall:

They say the first dream Adam our father had After his agelong daydream in the Garden V7hen heaven and sun woke in his wakening mind. The earth with all its hills and woods and waters.

160

The friendly tribes of trees and animals. And earth's last wonder Eve (the first great

dream Which is the ground of every dream since then)— They say he dreamt lying on the naked ground. The gates shut fast behind him as he lay Fallen in Eve's fallen arms, his terror drowned In her engulfing terror, in the abyss Whence there's no further fall, and comfort is— (210)

The period in the garden is now as a daydream in

which harmony and other reigned; now Adam's world has

changed to one of terror as he lies dreaming on the

"naked ground." Adam seeks comfort in this situation,

but the poem indicates that comfort is not an easy thing

to derive. The dash after "comfort is—" suggests both a

pause and a lack of an immediate answer. The parenthetical

statement in this early part of the poem establishes a

relationship between the dream of Adam and the dream of

every man, for it contains "the ground of every dream

since then," Yet as this dream pertains to the rudiments

of every man's dream, it must contain something toward

the explanation of the possible comfort available to man

even within the consequences of the fall. What does

Adam's dream reveal to man?

First, in the middle portion of the poem, there is

only a drab picture of barrenness and chaotic confusion:

Still there were more of them, the plain was filling

As by an alien arithmetical magic Unknown in Eden, a mechanical Addition without meaning, joining only

161

Number to number in no mode or order. Weaving no pattern. For these creatures moved Towards no fixed mark even when in growing bands They clashed against each other and clashing fell In mounds of bodies. For they rose again. Identical or interchangeable. And went their way that was not like a way; Some back and forward, back and forward, some In a closed circle, wide or narrov;, others In zigzags on the sand. Yet all were busy. And tense with purpose as they cut the air Wnich seemed to press them back. Sometimes

they paused While one stopped one—fortuitous assignations In the disorder, whereafter two by two Tney ran awhile. Then parted and again were single. Some Ran straight against the frontier of the plain Till the horizon drove them back. A few Stood still and never moved. (211)

The passage suggests that each man participates in the

fall and consequences, and that the recurring drama is

18 repeated countless times. When Adam desires to see

more, he is placed among the running figures so that he

can see their faces, and in their faces, he sees his own.

Seeing them, Adam realizes that these strangers locked in

time are related to him, but that they are more than just

relations; they are an "Adam." The faces are like his

face, and their hands are his hands. Each one is an Adam

locked in time through the fall; each living out the

"illustrated storybook of mankind." When Adam is inclined

to call them "sons of God," he is restrained from doing

so, and he recalls "Eden, the Fall / The Promise, and his

place." He sees himself as the father of these children.

Then, although he seems to cry out in despair, he finds

162

peace, because, for him, the meaning of the basic Fable

becomes clear, and he accents the paradox of love and

grief as he turns to "Eve's encircling arms."

As may be seen, although "Adam's Dream" is in large

part a description of man locked in a time world, it

offers the symbol of Eden, "The agelong daydream in the

Garden," as an example of a realm of order and harmony—

a fact that, as it were, reflects in turn the essence of

the Fable.

The Eden symbol is continued in "Outside Eden" as a

suggestion of an ideal order outside time, and the

possibility of an occasional fleeting glimpse of it for

mankind. In "Outside Eden" m.ankind, like the first man,

is now outside Eden, making his adjustments to his

changed condition. In the opening lines we see man in

a fallen lonely state outside Eden, unable to return to

it, cultivating his crops in a new environment:

A few lead in their harvest still By the ruined wall and broken gate. Far inland shines the radiant hill. Inviolable the empty gate. Impassable the gaping wall; And the mountain over all, (212)

The story is being told by an objective observer who is

seeing man in his fallen state.

In the next section of the poem, the scene shifts to

relate the method that some have chosen to adjust to being

outside Eden:

163

Such is the country of this clan. Haunted by guilt and innocence. There is a sweetness in the air That bloomed as soon as time began. But now is dying everywhere. This people guard in reverence Their proud and famous family tree Sprung from a glorious king who once Lived in such boundless liberty As never a one among the great Has known in all the kingdoms since; For death was barred from his estate. Lost long ago, the histories say. He and his consort lost it all. Guiltiest and least guilty, they In innocence discovered sin Round a lost corner of the day. And fell and fell through all the fall That hurled them headlong over the wall. Their children live where then they lay, (212-213)

Now outside Eden, the clan, "haunted by guilt and inno­

cence," must abide with each of these qualities in spite

of their contrary associations. The sweetness that

blooms within the boundary of time of which the persona

speaks, is man's ability to handle the haunting contrast

of guilt and innocence—his ability to resolve the dilemma

of the paradox. But, as Muir implies the sweetness is

dying because man fails to perceive the meaning of the

fall, and places faith in the ritual of birth. Man

reveres the historical aspect of the fall, and the

glorious days of the great king, Adam; but he fails to

see the consequences and their relationship to himself.

The narrator in the poem, however, does see, and he makes

the connection—rising above his fellows.

164

Why has man permitted the sweetness to diminish?

The persona indicates that they chose to accept its

gradual decline, rather than take any steps to avoid it:

Guilt is next door to innocence. So here this people choose to live And never think to travel hence. Nor learn to be inquisitive. Nor browse in sin's great library. The single never-ending book That fills the shelves of all the earth. There the learned enquirers look And blind themselves to see their face. But these live in the land of birth

And count all else an idle grace. (213)

The people have not chosen to try to find any answers,

by travel or attempt other forms of exploration, or to

engage in any research in order to resolve the com­

plexities of life. They have not, in other words, been

willing to venture into the world of the imagination which

might help direct them. They refuse the information of

the "never-ending book" of Story, on which the imagination

might work to restore the sweetness. And though there

are a few "learned enquirers," they are unable to offer

much help, for they blind themselves.

In the final section of the poem the emphasis moves

from "this people" to the simple among them and their long

memory: The simple have long memories. Memory makes simple all that is. So these the lawless world can love At ease, the thickets running wild. The thorny waste, the flourishing grove. Their knotted landscape, wrong and clear

165

As the crude drawings of a child. Is to them become more dear Than geometrical symmetry. Their griefs are all in memory grown As natural as a weathered stone. Their troubles are a tribute given Freely while gazing at the hill. Such is their simplicity.

Standing on earth, looking at heaven. (213)

The simple, with their long memory, can find a satis­

faction in this world. Because of their simplicity,

the world can love them, and they can love the world.

Thus, in spite of their faults, love becomes meaningful

to them, and they come to appreciate the world as it is.

They appreciate it as they appreciate the child's drawing.

They do not seek for the perfect geometric symmetry, but

sense a feeling and a relationship within the imperfection.

Within this setting of imperfection, their griefs become

a natural element as the weathered stone is natural. The

griefs and troubles form part of the imperfection that

exists within their lives. Although they do not under­

stand, they continue to view the hill and to look to

heaven. They sense an underlying unity, one associated

with the "long memory" of the racial consciousness, the

forgotten part of the past history, the Fable. Their

memories give them a sense of identity and direction as

they stand "looking at heaven."

The imagery of the poem represents two aspects of

Muir's life that recur frequently in his poetry. The

166

landscape is reminisce of Orkney. Indeed, both of the

landscape images in the first section and that in the

last section refer to sights that Muir remembered from

his youth. The poem also draws upon Muir's knowledge

of the childlike nature of "the simple" peasant of the

region, with their long memories and their childlike

acceptance of life. For Muir the vision and acceptance

of the world by the child is unique. He writes:

And a child has also a picture of human existence peculiar to himself, which he probably never remembers after he has lost it: the original vision of the world. I think of this picture or vision as that of a state in which the earth, the houses on earth, and the life of every human being are related to the sky overarching them; as if the sky fitted "the earth and the earth the sky. Certain dreams convince me that a child has this vision, in which there is a completer harmony of all things with each other than he will ever know again.19

The Reconciliation of Time and Eternity

One Foot Still in Eden

As may be observed from the preceding discussion,

Eden suggests both a symbol of an ideal order outside of

time and a symbol of the Fable itself, and hence "Adam's

Dream" and "Outside Eden" could very well have been

discussed in the present section. But in each poem,

humanity existed outside Eden, within the time world,

with the persona of each poem looking wistfully back at

167

the state of perfection and innocence it represented.

In "One Foot in Eden," however, Muir clearly stresses

the concept of the reconciliation of Time (the world

outside Eden's gate) and Eternity (Eden itself), for the

persona describes himself as having a foothold still in

the Edenic state. As suggested in the discussion of

Muir's poem "The Fall," in Chapter IV, Eden as a symbol

of the Fable is the state of innocence characterizing

man before his fall and from which he fell in disobeying

God's commands regarding the Tree of the Knowledge of

Good and Evil of the Genesis story. It is also the order

and harmony of the world as seen by Theseus in "The

Labyrinth," and the will of the gods in men's life as

seen by Oedipus in the "Oedipus" poem.

In "One Foot in Eden" the contrast between the world

of Time and the realm of Eternity is depicted in terms of

the imagery and hearaldry of agriculture. As is sug­

gested by the title "One Foot in Eden," the narrator

stands partially in Eden and partially in this world:

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

168

In the fields of charity and sin

Where we shall lead our harvest in, (227)

In the time world the narrator observes the crops of love

and hate, into which Time has injected its evil, so that

the "corn and tares," "evil and good," and "charity and

sin" are inseparable. Man has planted and shall harvest

the crop of Story. All these belong, it may be noted,

to the history of man after the Fall.

In the second stanza, Muir presents a more philosophi­

cal interpretation of the relationship of Eden, the world,

and man. The imagery is still that of the land, but a

more abstract cluster of ideas is added:

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 fanished 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. (217)

In contrast to Eden, which is still sending for the then

roots of innocence as it has always done, is Time that

takes the "foliage and the fruit" and burns into them

the "shapes of terror and grief." Time thus turns the

springing root into Story, the realm in which man must

169

live his existence. And this world of terror and

grief, of "famished field and blackened tree," has

flowers never known in Eden.^^ Both grief and charity,

as may be noted, share the darkened fields, as do other

virtues not known in the perfection of Eden: hope, faith,

pity, and love. Memory continues to retain the great

"treasure trove" of the Edenic state, and hence becomes

one of the forces within Fable which gives meaning to

man's existence. Thus, beneath the beclouded skies,

part of Eden, even without the intervention of divine,

is revealed, from which man regains something, Man is

able to regain some of the direction for his life and the

blessings associated with Eden by his ability to

participate in the Fable through memory. All this

illustrates what the persona means by still having a

foothold in the Edenic state, and such an experience is

available to all, in the present.

Variations of the Eden Symbol

Two other poems suggesting an ideal order outside

Time which may be examined briefly are "Ballad of the

Flood," already discussed earlier, and "The Grave of

Prometheus," In such respects each poem is a variation

of the Eden symbol of which Muir has made so much. For

example, in "Ballad of the Flood," Noah and the inhabi­

tants of the ark are destined ultimately to find a refuge

170

on Mt. Ararat, like another, and new, Eden. "Ballad of

the Flood" concludes with the ark grounding on the

mountain as its slopes emerge from the flood.

"Sail on, sail on," auld Noah cried, "Sail on, sail on alway!

I wat we'll sail about the warld Until the Judgment Day."

Noah sent a doo far owre the sea. It flew into the south.

It stayed four days and cam again Wi' a leaf within its mouth.

Noah sent a doo far owre the sea. It to the wast is ta'en.

It tarried late, it tarried lang. And cam'na back again,

"0 what's yon green hill in the wast Set round wi' mony a tree?"

"I wat it is Mount Ararat New risen frae the sea,"

He's set the Ark for Ararat, He's plied her owre the faen.

He's lighted down at Ararat,

And there he's made his hame, (36)

"The Grave of Prometheus" stresses the natural

processes of the earth—much like Theseus' view of the

exterior world as he emerges briefly from the Labyrinth

in "The Labyrinth" into an Eden-like landscape, pristine

and lovely. The natural processes of the earth are

viewed in very much the same manner as a symbol of order

and harmony. In the Prometheus poem the Titan, after

his suffering at the hands of the Olympian gods, returns

to earth, merging with it. The poem opens with a

171

description of the scene where his grave still exists,

but which is now unobserved, being covered by natural

growth:

No one comes here now, neither god nor man. For long the animals have kept away. Scared by immortal cries and the scream of vultures;

Now by this silence. The heavenly thief who stole Heaven's dangerous treasure turned to common earth

When that great company forsook Olympus. The fire was out, and he became his barrow. Ten yards long there he lay outstretched, and grass

Grew over him: all else in a breath forgotten. Yet there you still may see a tongue of stone. Shaped like a calloused hand where no hand should be.

Extended from the sward as if for alms, Its palm all licked and blackened as with fire. A mineral change made cool his fiery bed. And made his burning body a quiet mound. And his great face a vacant ring of daisies. (216)

The geological changes described remind a viewer of this

past benefactor of man whose only monument, a "tongue

of stone," serves as a reminder of Prometheus's gift to

man. In his death Prometheus returns to the earth to

find his final peace and rest. This union with the earth

relieves Prometheus of his agony of suffering. The

images of the union suggest that the agony leads to the

flowers as a type of natural reconciliation. Whereas the

Olympian gods are no longer meaningful to man, Prometheus

still functions as deity, offering hope of reconciliation

within the framework of the natural order of things; Muir

172

suggesting generally, by this fact, that the outcome of

suffering can be a reconciliation within the present 21

natural order. As Prometheus' "fiery bed" cools,

there develop the grasses and the daisies.

The Gospel and Person of Christ

A still further symbol employed by Muir to suggest

the reconciliation of Time and Eternity is the hope of

the Christian religion which points, within the Christian

life, toward an eternal Heaven, This concept is most

clearly seen in Muir's poems, "Prometheus" and "The

Transfiguration,"

The poem "Prometheus" has already been discussed in

Chapter IV as an example of man's sense of loss of

direction in the Time world. But we may return to it

a moment here since it also offers hope of reconciliation

between Time and the Timeless that exists in the hope

represented in the gospel of the Christ, Feeling that

no real reconciliation is possible between himself and

the Olympian gods, even though his punishment will have

been accomplished and he might freely return home to

Olympus, Prometheus cites a rumor of a new god who will

ultimately replace the gods of classical antiquity.:

A god came down, they say, from another heaven Not in rebellion but in pity and love. Was born a son of woman, lived and died. And rose again with all the spoils of time

173

Back to his home, where now they are transmuted Into bright toys and various frames of glory; And time itself is there a world of marvels. If I could find that god, he would hear and answer, (215-216)

Like Prometheus himself the Christian god shares the

concern of Prometheus for man: Prometheus giving men

fire and Christ, participating in the bondage of time

and, in the end, defeating time. This new god provides

hope that the "earth's dark story" will be told so that

man may understand his pain, suffering, and sorrow; that

he may know "Their happiness is in that which leads

their sorrow / Round to an end," This god, who partici­

pates, in his Incarnation, in the temporal world, thus

joins man in the journey of life enduring suffering and

bewilderment. Yet his defeat of Time makes it no longer

the great villain it once was. Although the story of the

new god is only a rumor, Prometheus is confident that

this god, if found, would hear and answer him, and this

is Prometheus' hope.

In the "Transfiguration" Christ's disciples not only

witness but share in the transfiguration of the master,

and, with him, participate in a transformation from a

Time World into a moment of Timelessness. The persona

describes the quality of the experience as follows:

So from the ground we felt that virtue branch Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists

As fresh and pure as water from a well.

174

Our hands made new to handle holy things. The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed Till earth and light and water entering there Gave back to us the clear unfallen world. We would have thrown our clothes away for

lightness. But that even they, though sour and travel

stained. Seemed, like our flesh, made of immortal substance.

And the soiled flax and wool lay light upon us Like friendly wonders, flower and flock entwined As in a morning field. (198-199)

The experience of transfiguration is followed later

in the poem by a vision of the world similarly transformed,

as it were, into a new Eden: a world governed by order

and good. The picture of peace and order shows that

animate and inanimate objects are in their respective

places and serving their respective functions without

degradation.

The vivid sense of a transformed world soon vanishes

so that one cannot tell whether it were actually a

reality or only an illusory vision:

Reality of vision, this we have seen. If it had lasted by another moment It might have held for ever! But the world Rolled back into its place, and we are here. And all that radiant kingdom lies forlorn. As if it had never stirred; no human voice Is heard among its meadows, but it speaks To itself alone, alone it flowers and shines And blossoms for itself while time runs on. (199-200)

But though the reality of the actuality of the vision

vanishes after too brief a moment, its reality as part

175

of the Fable remains: that lost "radiant kingdom" con­

tinues in the realm of the Fable.

Following this statement of the perpetual existence

of this transfigured world, Muir shifts to a future

vision of the world as it will exist on Christ's return:

But he will come again, it's said, though not Unwanted and unsummoned; for all things. Beasts of the field, and woods, and rocks,

and seas. And all mankind from end to end of the earth Will call him with one voice. In our own time. Some say, or at a time, when time is ripe. Then he will come, Christ the uncrucified, Christ the discrucifled, his death undone. His agony unmade, his cross dismantled Glad to be so—and the tormented wood Will cure its hurt and grow into a tree In a green springing corner of young Eden. And Judas damned take his long journey backward From darkness into light and be a child Beside his mother's knee, and the betrayal Be quite undone and never more be done. (200)

The imagery of "The Transfiguration" seems to have

arisen from Muir's own life, awake and dreaming. A

dream experience, which he relates in his autobiography,

possesses close parallels to the pictures drawn in the

22

poem. In the dream a messenger appears before Muir

and motions for him to follow. As they proceed other

men begin to approach them and Muir becomes frightened

until he realizes that they are looking at the messenger

only. In their observing of the latter, their eyes

possess only an adoration. Muir and the messenger proceed

until they are surrounded by various animals, and the

176

animals appear to raise their heads as in prayer. Muir

comments that the dream "touches the relation between

man and the animals and points to his origin. " " Muir

associates the dream with a millennial concept or

ancestral dream, and the messenger he says is a childish

24 image of Christ. In this dream, man and animal all

undergo a transformation from their present state into

a peaceful and orderly state of a perfect world.

In addition to the dream Muir draws from two earlier

experiences in which he underwent a personality change

like a transfiguration. The first experience he draws

from is his early Christian conversion at a revival

service in Kirkwall. Of that experience, he states:

For some time afterwards, I certainly felt a change within myself; coarse thoughts and words to which I had become hardened during the last year became unendurable to me; I was perpetually happy, and found it easy to reply gently to insults and sneers.

Among the saved were some of the roughest boys at the school; they were now incapable of speaking a rude word, and their faces shone with grace.^^

Although Muir later rejects this as a dubious conversion,

it impresses itself upon him so that it appears in the

Autobiography.

The other experience which influenced his picture of

the Transfiguration in the poem was his conversion to

177

socialism at a May Day parade. He writes of this

experience:

Before, ugliness, disease, vice, and dis­figurement had repelled me; but now as if all mankind were made of some incorruptible substance, I felt no repugnance, no disgust but a spontaneous attraction to every human being.

But what I am most conscious of is the feeling that all distinction had fallen away like a burden carried in some other place, and that all substance had been transmuted.^6

Muir refers to these as experiences which "brought with

them images of universal purification."^*^ The trans­

forming qualities of the two experiences probably relate

to the images of the transformation presented in "The

Transfiguration." The combination of these two experi­

ences and the dream appear to have been integrated

within the poem as part of its imagery. What the poem

seems to teach is the capacity of man to reach into the

Fable for that truth lost in the fall.

In his search for the destiny of man, Muir was con­

tinually confronted by the persistant problem of the

presence of good and evil, within the Story. "The Trans­

figuration" suggests the potential of man to overcome the

paradox of this conflict through a transmutation of his

nature. In the Biblical account of the Transfiguration,

the gloried Christ is the central figure, but in his

altering of the focus of the myth Muir suggests that

178

everyone and everything becomes a part of this trans-

figured vision. in shifting the focus, Muir shows

the possibility of man entering that "clear unfallen

world" of the Fable. In and through the Fable, man is

capable of experiencing the intersection of Time and the

Timeless within this world. Though not lasting, this

experience, nonetheless, provides man with confidence

that a reality exists in which the "clear unfallen world"

continues.

The Experience of the Eternal

Only in one poem, "The Other Oedipus," does Muir

attempt to capture directly the feeling of the Eternal,

though some of his poems may suggest its quality—Muir's

various descriptions of Eden, for example. In "The

Other Oedipus," Oedipus has passed through his life

journey and gone beyond into a world of Timelessness.

The poem, as suggested earlier, is presented as a

remembrance of Oedipus' experience along the Peloponnesian

roads:

Remembered on the Peloponnesian roads, He and his serving-boy and his concubine. White-headed and light-hearted, their true wits gone

Past the last stroke of time into a day Without a yesterday or a to-morrow, A brightness laid like a blue lake around them, Or endless field to play or linger in. They were so gay and innocent, you'd have thought A god had won a glorious prize for them

179

In some celestial field, and the odds were gone. Fate sent on holiday, the earth and heaven Thenceforth in endless friendly talk together. They were quiet storyless and had clean forgotten That memory burning in another world; But they too leaf-light now for any story. If anyone spoke a word of other guilt By chance before them, then they stamped their feet

In rage and gnashed their teeth like peevish children.

But then forgot. The road their welcoming home. They would not stay in a house or let a door Be shut on them. The surly Spartan farmers Were kind to them, pitying their happiness, (217-218)

Oedipus and his comrades are here pictured as beings

without a consciousness of Time and its binding qualities,

for they have gone past time. From their earlier

experiences, they have now moved beyond that awareness

of their existence on this earth, particularly their

existence with other human beings. They have gone beyond

Story into Eternity and Fable so that their lives are

now storyless. The new life they experience is one of

happiness and joy, and one in which they have returned to

harmonious relationship with nature. They now exist in

something like the original Edenic condition, for with

"their true wits gone" they do not see or view life as

normal man does. They have been through that journey of

normal life, but now are beyond it. They stand in a

position very similar to that of childhood innocence or

the animal's generic position of no fall; however, the

180

human experience does come back to them in response to

the words spoken of the "other guilt." With this reminder

they are thrust momentarily back into the world of man

and express their unhappiness with it. But they soon

forget and return to the happy state.

In this poem Muir uses the image of Oedipus to show

what life might be like if the conventional notions about

man are reversed. Oedipus has crossed over into the

world of Fable, yet retains memories of the world of

Story. The complete picture of the Fable is not given,

but the state in which a man might exist who has passed

into the Fable through the story does. Innocence, gaity,

happiness, and at-oneness with nature are the central

elements in the journey they take: qualities which all

men seek during the days of his journey through Story.

The response of the group makes such an impression of the

surly Spartan farmers that they are "kind to them, pitying

their happiness," as if to say that Man, still in the

Story world, is not able to recognize the true state in

which Oedipus exists, though they do recognize the

happiness. They realize a difference, but not under­

standing the difference only pity them.

"The Other Oedipus" seems to be the one poem using

the Greek myth in which Muir tries to go beyond personal

experience and picture the life of the Fable. Yet even

181

as he tries to do this, he is unable, for he must resort

to the images and ideas of Story to picture the idealistic

state of Fable. The things that are important to man

then become the center of existence in this new state,

though elements with respect to the Story may be only

transcient in their transformed consciousness.

CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSION

As has been shown, Edwin Muir attempted through his

verse, especially those poems based upon Greek myth

and Biblical saga, to give expression to his basic view

of the meaning of existence, as he had himself worked

out that meaning to his own satisfaction through his own

experiences as a boy in the Orkney Islands, as a young

man in Glasgow, and later as a professional man of letters

and poet in London and on the continent. His philosophy,

as it emerged from his own solutions to difficulties of

belief and acceptance in his own experience, conceived

of man's life as a journey of discovery in which man

learns by whatever insight he might gain from his

observations of life to adjust as satisfactorily as

possible to the problems and conflicts that mark human

experience in general. Feeling that his own findings

might be useful to others of his own generation, he

incorporated them into his poetry, especially into poems

based on subjects drawn from Greek mythology and

Biblical story. His choice of these two bodies of story

materials was determined, he himself indicates, by the

182

183

need to give universal status to his personal views, both

to enable himself to become objective about them and to

make them more useful to others. Speaking of an incident

in his childhood, later formally objectified in his

poem "Hector in Hades," he declares, "I could at last

see the incident whole by seeing it as happening, on a

great and tragic scale, to some one else."-*- Muir found

Greek and Biblical story material eminently suitable to

offer such dimensions, by providing a larger format than

the personal statement of a simple lyric could maintain,

and at the same time objectifying and universalizing it

within the archetypal motifs by which his selected

subject matter was characterized.

The two major symbolic representations which Muir

employed in his verse were--in his own terminology—Story

and Fable: the first designating the fact of man's

existence in a Time world—that of his day to day experi­

ence—and hence one subjecting him to a multitude of

temporal limitations; the second, a permanent, changeless,

and timeless realm of total order and harmony; an eternal

world, yet one accessible to man if he is spiritually

alert enough to perceive it, through its various manifesta­

tions in the world. Within these two broader areas, as

has been amply demonstrated throughout the preceding

pages, occur several very important symbolic sub-motifs.

184

Within Story, these motifs include the Biblical fall of

man and his ejection from Eden, Time and its entrapment

of man within the mesh of time flux, the seemingly

unreconcilable paradoxes that constantly beset man in

his daily life; the modern waste land of contemporary

industrialized civilization. Within Fable, they include

Eden and man's primitive innocence in the Garden before

his fall, ideal human love, an ideal order and harmony

existing somewhere outside Time but occasionally inter­

secting Time so that man may have hints of it or

actually glimpse it, the orderly processes of nature,

the promise inherent in the gospel and person of Christ.

Although Muir offers no formal systematic rendering

of his life philosophy, it comes out continually as theme

in the Classical and Biblical poems—which taken as a

whole might be called at least a vivid concrete presenta­

tion of his basic beliefs, which may be catalogued in

something of the order of the following: Man's life as

a journey has no specific direction or purpose, and as a

result he is alienated from mankind and nature, traveling

in the confusion of a modern waste land. Yet man needs

not of necessity be totally lost since by a perception of

various seminal segments of the Fable—that condition of

man that enables him to perceive an underlying unity and

harmony in his overall existence—he may find sign posts

185

that give pattern and significance to the life journey.

This perception often comes through various means such

as Identity with the racial unconscious through dreams,

legends, myths, or emblems. Within his life journey

man is immersed in, and a prisoner of. Time, represented

by those constant conflicts in human life as illustrated

in the problems of evil, the guilt sense, and other

similar causes of the disintegration of human values in

the life of man. Yet by means of rare and momentary

glimpses into Eternity, represented by a perception of a

boundless union and freedom within the limits of human

existence, man is, nevertheless, capable of achieving a

sense of meaningfulness existing in the seemingly pattern-

lessness of Time, and thus to a degree to adjust to it.

The more obvious manifestations of Eternity lie in love,

immortality, and creative imagination.

Since his death in 1959, Muir's ideas and poetic

talent have become increasingly better known to the

public and to critics of contemporary literary history

generally. Since he does offer a solution to, as well as

a diagnosis of, a contemporary world that is marked by

spiritual and cultural decline—as suggested by Spengler

and Toynbee, as by such poets as T, S. Eliot in his early

verse—his work, consequently, should—and doubtless—will

gain even greater recognition in the future.

NOTES

Preface

"Note on the Final Selection," in Edwin Muir, collected Poems, 2nd. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 7.

Chapter I

T. S. Eliot, "Preface," in Collected Poems, p. 3, 2 Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (London: The Hogarth

Press, 1954), p, 367 — 3 An Autobiography, p. 36. 4 An Autobiography, p. 63.

5 . . Edwin Muir, The Story and the Fable (London: Harrap,

1940), p. 264. An Autobiography

An Autobiography

8 An Autobiography

An Autobiography

10 An Autobiography

11 An Autobiography

12 An Autobiography

13 An Autobiography

14

15

16

An Autobiography

An Autobiography

An Autobiography

p, 21.

p. 22.

pp. 34-35.

p. 42.

pp. 42-43.

p, 24,

p, 25,

p. 66.

pp. 91-92.

p. 93,

p, 103.

186

187

17^ . ^ ^. An Autobiography, p. 104.

18 P. H. Butter, Edwin Muir: Man and Poet (London:

Oliver and Boyd, 1966) , p.TsT 19^ ^^

Butter, pp, 56-57. 20

Butter, p. 39. 21 Butter, pp. 44-45.

22 An Autobiography, p. 150.

23 An Autobiography, p. 192.

24 An Autobiography, p. 200.

25 An Autobiography, p. 193.

26 , . An Autobiography, p, 2 47,

27 Edwin Muir, The Estate of Poetry (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1962), p, 108. 2 8 An Autobiography, pp. 42-43. Butter, pp. 94-95. Elizabeth Huberman, The Poetry of Edwin Muir

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 44, 53. 31 Letter to Sydney Schiff (7 May 192 4) in Selected

Letters of Edwin Muir, ed. P. H. Butter (London: The Hogarth Press, 1974), p. 37.

^^Butter, p. 101.

" " Butter, p. 104.

^^Butter, p. 136. 35 Huberman, p. 79. Leo B. Selden, "The Use of Myth, Legend and Dream

Images in the Poetry of Muir," Diss, Tulane University, 1963, p, 225,

^^Seldon, p, 387,

188

38 Selden, p, 249.

39 Edwin Muir, Journeys and Places (London: J. M.

Dent and Sons Ltd., 1937), p. viii as quoted in Selden, p. 250.

40 Edwin Muir, Collected Poems, 2nd. ed. (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1965), p, 62, All lines of Muir's poetry quoted in this report will be from this edition, and the page numbers will be placed in parentheses at the end of the quotations,

41

Selden, p. 251,

Butter, p. 198,

Selden, p, 268,

^^Butter, p, 207, ^^Letter to Joseph Chiari (27 July 1946) in Selected

Letters, p. 143. ^^Letter of Joseph Chiari (14 September 1947) in

Selected Letters, p. 146.

^^Butter, p, 215,

"^^Selden, p. 316,

^^Butter, p. 222, 50 Butter, p. 215. • Edwin Muir, Collected Poems, 1921-1951 ed. J. C.

Hall (New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1957), p. 14.

^^Butter, pp. 256-257,

^^Butter, p. 258.

^"^Selden. p. 365.

^^Butter, p. 257.

^^Selden, p. 368.

" Edwin Muir, Collected Poems, 2nd, ed. , 1965, p. 7,

^^Collected Poems, p, 8.

189

59 T. S. Eliot, "Preface" in Muir, Collected Poems,

p. 4. '

60^^ T"e Estate of Poetry, p. 108.

^° ^n Modern Poetry, eds. Kinnon Friar and John Malcolm Brinnin (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc., 1951), p, 524.

62 An Autobiography, p. 56.

Chapter li

Letter to Sydney Schiff (8 May 1925) in Selected Letters, p. 49.

2 Edwin Muir, "Franz Kafka," in Essays on Literature

and Society (London: The Hogarth Press, 1949), p. 121. 3 Elizabeth Hubeinnan, in The Poetry of Edwin Muir

(New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 83, points out that this volume includes, as well, Muir's discussion of both movement in the life of man and pauses in that life as regards time.

4 An Autobiography, p. 49.

• 5 Lillian Feder, in Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), p. 369 points out this enlargement in Muir's The Story and the Fable (London: Harrap, 1940), p. 264.

An Autobiography, p. 49. 7 An Autobiography, p. 164. g The Estate of Poetry, p. 87. Kathleen Raine, Defending Ancient Springs (London:

Oxford University Press, 1967), p. 126.

• Letter to Sydney Schiff (6 October 1924) in Selected Letters, p. 42.

Raine, p. 3.

12 An Autobiography, p. 14.

190

13 An A u t o b i o g r a p h y . p . 14

14 . To^ox ^^^^^ Muir, Belonging (London: The Hogarth Press, 1968), p. 70.

15 The Estate of_ Poetry, p. 30.

16 P. H. Butter, Edwin Muir: Man and Poet (London:

Oliver and Boyd, 1966), pp. 121, l39". 17 Edwin Muir, Collected Poems, p. 39.

18 , Huberman, p. 79,

19 Willa Muir, p. 79.

20 , . An Autobiography, p, 44.

21 An Autobiography, p. 49.

22 Raine, p. 4.

23 R. J. Mills, Jr., "Eden's Gate: The Later Poetry

of Edwin Muir," The Personalist, 44(1963), p, 60, 24 An Autobiography, p. 54.

25 An Autobiography, p. 54.

2 6 An Autobiography, p. 49.

27 Raine, p. 74.

2 8

Brian Keeble, "In Time's Despite: On the Poetry of Edwin Muir," Sewanee Review, 81(1972), p. 651.

29 Willa Muir, p. 167. Feder, p. 377.

" •"•Kinnon Friar, "The Circular Route," Poetry, 84(April, 1954), p. 28,

" Letter to Raymond Tschumi (10 June 1949) in Selected Letters, p, 152,

• R. J. Mills, Jr., "Edwin Muir: A Speech from Darkness Grown," Accent, 19(1959), p. 55,

191

H;.r.r-. la' n ^ ' ' '^^ ^tory and the Fable (London: Harrap, 1940), p. Je3. 35_ The Story and the Fable, p, 261,

36„ . Friar, Poetry, p. 28.

37^.T, Mills, Personalist, p. 63.

38 Hayden Carruth, "To Fashion the Transitory,"

Poetry, 88(September, 1956), p. 389. 39 Mills, Accent, p. 62.

40„ , Huberman, p. 38. An Autobiography, p. 25.

42^ ,^ Selden, p. 220.

43 An Autobiography, p. 170.

44 An Autobiography, pp. 51-52.

45 An Autobiography, p. 51.

46 , . Quoted m Gwendolen Murphy, ed. The Modern Poet

(London: Sedgwick and Jackson, 1938), pp. 168-169. Reprinted in Selected Letters, pp. 213-214.

47 Letter to Sydney Schiff (16 January 1939) in

Selected Letters, p. 107. 48 Keeble, p. 644.

49 Letter to Stephen Spender (21 March 1944) in Selected

Letters, p, 138, 50 An Autobiography, p. 247,

51 Letter to Joseph Chiari (20 December 1949) in

Selected Letters, p. 154. 52 Mills, Accent, p. 66.

53 Elizabeth Jennings, "The Uses of Allegory: A Study

of the Poetry of Edwin Muir," in Every Changing Shape (London: Andre Deutsch, 1961), p. 149.

192

54_ T^Q Estate of Poetry, p. 81.

^"6 Estate of Poetry, p. 80. 56^ Letter to Lionel Knight (27 December 1957) in

Selected Letters, p. 196.

The Estate of Poetry, p. 81.

Raymond Tschumi, Thought in Twentieth Century English Poetry (London: Routledge and Hegan Paul, 1951), p. 17. He writes of Muir's poetry: "Edwin Muir's thought can also be termed poetical because it is not fixed and cannot be grasped in immutable logical concepts which have also immutable objects. If the objects of thought shift in the course of logical deduction, the result is a contradiction: Muir's thought is contra­dictory in this sense, and oscilates between two themes, time and eternity. His poetry arises from the tensions of the solution of this conflict."

Chapter iv

An Autobiography, p. 52. 2 Edwin Morgan, "Edwin Muir," in The Modern Poet,

ed. Ian Hamilton (New York: Horizon Press, 1969), p. 46, 3 Huberman, p. 9 8, 4 Morgan, p, 45, 5 Daniel Hoffman, Barbarous Knowledge (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1967), p, 250.

Feder, p. 372. 7 J. C. Hall, "Edwin Muir: An Introduction," in

Penguin New Writing, ed. John Lehmann, No. 38(1949), p. 114.

p

An Autobiography, p. 96. 9 An Autobiography, p. 43. Critics who have commented on this poem are

Hoffman, p. 251; Keeble, p. 651; Huberman, p, 95, and Selden, p. 280.

193

11

12 Huberman, p. 214.

Muir, The Story and the Fable, pp. 258-259. 13^^ . Edwin Muir, "The Politics of King Lear," in Essays

on Literature and Society (London: The Hogarth Press, 1949), pp. 31-48.

14

15

16

17

18

19

An Autobiography

An Autobiography

An Autobiography

An Autobiography

An Autobiography

An Autobiography

20 An Autobiography

^•'•"Chapbook" B.B.C in Butter, pp. 215-216

22

23

An Autobiography

An Autobiography

pp. 158-167.

pp. 159-160.

pp. 159-166.

p. 166.

p. 166.

p, 163,

pp. 161-162.

radio (3 September 1952) quoted

P

P

34.

158,

Chapter V

An Autobiography, p. 154.

2 Huberman, p. 137.

"^Butter, p. 202.

Letter to Douglas Young (24 June 1953) in Selected Letters, p. 167.

5 Huberman, p. 210,

Butter, p, 250,

8

Huberman, p, 210.

An Autobiography, p. 96

194 9_ ^^

Sel^n^^^^^f^^° Stephen Spender (21 March 1944) in ^elected Letters, p. 138.

10-r u Hnd<.on p -"^ ?' ^ ' "^^^ Poetry of Edwin Muir," The Hudson Review, 13(1960), p. 557. — -

An Autobiocrraphy. p. 278.

Huberman, p. 214.

13^ . Raine, p. 13.

Huberman, p. 216.

Selden, p. 358. 16 An Autobiography, p. 49.

Huberman, p. 2 02.

18 Mills, Accent, p. 60.

19 An Autobiography, p. 3 3.

20 See Huberman, p. 219, for an interpretation of

Muir's use of the doctrine of the Fortunate Fall. 21. "Huberman, p. 209 22 An Autobiography

23 An Autobiography An Autobiography

25 An Autobiography

2 6 An Autobiography

27 An Autobiography 2 8 Huberman, p. 190

pp. 54-57.

p. 56.

p. 57,

p, 87.

p. 114.

p, 114,

. ^ . see also note to letter to Miss Spens in Selected Letters, p, 148.

Conclusion

1 An Autobiography, p, 43,

BIBLIOGRAPHY OF WORKS CITED

Works by Edwin Muir

An Autobiography, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Collected Poems, 1921-1951. Ed. J, C, Hall, New York: Grove Press, Inc., 1957,

Collected Poems, 2nd ed, Ed. Willa Muir and J. C. Hall. New York: Oxford University Press, 1965.

Essays on Literature and Society. London: The Hogarth Press, 1949.

The Estate of Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962.

Journeys and Places. London: J. M. Dent and Son, Ltd., 1937.

Selected Letters of Edwin Muir. Ed. Peter H. Butter, London: The Hogarth Press, 1974.

The Story and the Fable. London: Harrap, 1940.

Works about Edwin Muir

Butter, Peter H, Edwin Muir; Man and Poet, London: Oliver and Boyd, 1966.

Carruth, Hayden. "To Fashion the Transitory." Poetry, 88 (September, 1956), 389-393.

Feder, Lillian. Ancient Myth in Modern Poetry. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971.

Friar, Kinnon. "The Circular Route," Poetry, 84 (April, 1954), 27-32.

Friar, Kinnon and John Malcolm, eds. Modern Poetry, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Inc,, 1951.

195

196

Hall, J. c. "Edwin Muir: An Introduction," Penguin New Writing, Ed, John Lehmann, No. 38 (1949), 101-116.

Halloway, John, "The Poetry of Edwin Muir," The Hudson Review, 13 (1960), 550-567,

Hoffman, Daniel, Barbarous Knowledge. New York: Oxford University Press, 1967.""

Huberman, Elizabeth. The Poetry of Edwin Muir. New York: Oxford University Press, 1971.

Jennings, Elizabeth. "The Uses of Allegory: A Study of the Poetry of Edwin Muir." Every Changing Shape, London: Andre Deutsch, 1961,

Keeble, Brian. "In Time's Despite: On the Poetry of Edwin Muir." Sewanee Review, 81 (1972), 633-658.

Mills, R. J., Jr. "Eden's Gate: The Later Poetry of Edwin Muir." The Personalist, 44 (1963), 58-78,

Mills, R. J., Jr. "Edwin Muir: A Speech from Darkness Grown." Accent, 19 (1959), 50-70.

Morgan, Edwin. "Edwin Muir." The Modern Poet. Ed, Ian Hamilton, New York: Horizon Press, 1969, 42-49.

Muir, Willa, Belonging. London: The Hogarth Press, 196 8

Murphy, Gwendolen, ed. The Modern Poet. London: Sedgwick and Jackson, 1938,

Raine, Kathleen, Defending Ancient Springs, London: Oxford University Press, 1967.

Selden, Leo B. "The Use of Myth, Legend and Dream Images in the Poetry of Muir." Diss. Tulane University, 1963.

Silkin, Jon. "The Fields Far and Near." Poetry, 88 (September, 1956), 393-395.

Tschumi, Raymond. Thought in Twentieth Century English Poetry, London: Routledge and Hegan Paul, 1951,