The Horses by Edwin Muir
"The Horses" by Edwin Muir is a free-verse narrative poem that explores the aftermath of a devastating conflict, likely an atomic war, which leaves the world in a state of silence and desolation. Composed in the 1950s, the poem begins with the haunting line about a "seven days war" that has plunged humanity into a deep, unsettling quiet. As it progresses, the narrator recounts the eerie stillness that follows the war, where technology has failed, and remnants of destruction are all that remain. Amidst this bleak landscape, the unexpected arrival of horses symbolizes a return to a more natural and harmonious state of existence. These animals, once abandoned for machinery, evoke a sense of lost companionship and hope for renewal, as the survivors reconnect with the land and their own humanity. Muir's work reflects on the rift between technology and nature, presenting a vision of recovery that emphasizes the importance of emotional and physical connection to the earth. Through intricate imagery and contrasts, Muir suggests that even in a post-apocalyptic world, there remains the potential for rebirth and restoration of balance.
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Subject Terms
The Horses by Edwin Muir
First published: 1956, in One Foot in Eden
Type of poem: Narrative
The Poem
Edwin Muir’s “The Horses,” a free-verse narrative poem of fifty-three lines, opens to the reader a future that may have seemed all too possible at the time of its composition in the 1950’s. In the opening lines, “Barely a twelvemonth after/ The seven days war that put the world to sleep,” Muir ushers the reader out of the realm of the everyday. Brief wars have occurred in the past, but have such wars put the entire world to sleep? The notion seems outrageous. Yet that sense of outrage in itself helps to color the passages that follow and put them into perspective. The reader learns, line by line, that things in the world have gone seriously awry. Technology has reached an impasse. “On the second day,” Muir’s narrator says, in chronicling the war, “The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.” The nature of the calamity comes gradually clear. “On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,/ Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day/ A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter/ Nothing.” An enormous but quiet disaster has overcome the world. In a dreamlike state, the weapons of war appear to the survivors less as machines than as mysterious signs of new times. When the warship appears, no pursuing ships follow. No enemy planes land to disgorge conquerors. The survivors of the “seven days war” emerge into a world in which only defeat is visible. They see no victors. From these cues, readers of Muir’s poem may guess he is imagining the aftermath of atomic war, the one kind of conflict that might “put the world to sleep.”
Muir’s vision is by no means lacking in hope. Readers know from the beginning that some have survived. The survivors even thrive in an odd way: They remember certain ways of the past and return to a preindustrial level of coping. They learn again to produce food from the earth with their own hands. The horses of the title unexpectedly intrude upon the lives of these postapocalypse people. They initially possess a fearsome aspect, being “strange” and making their appearance with a haunting and “distant tapping on the road,/ A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again/ And at the corner changed to hollow thunder./ We saw the heads/ Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.”
The survivors know their forefathers had abandoned these horses in favor of tractors, which makes the unasked-for reappearance all the more unsettling. The animals return to the farms as if the “long-lost archaic companionship” between horses and the workers of the land is to be restored. The reestablishment of this relationship marks the return of natural order to the world. The horses also signal the return of validating emotional life. “That free servitude can still pierce our hearts,” Muir’s narrator says. “Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.”
Forms and Devices
While “The Horses” is a speculative poem in that Muir uses a poetic narrative form to speculate into the future from an existing situation in the world, the poem may also be read as a conceit or an extended metaphor. The future world that has been brought to stillness and silence by technology may be none other than the contemporary world in which humans have become so divorced from their “natural,” or at least traditional, modes of living that they are no longer fully in touch with their own true nature. Rather than being a future danger, the rift between humankind and the world has already grown wide.
Muir uses the narrative to take a hopeful view of the situation. By having the horses return to the farmers of their own volition, he suggests that humans may look to the world itself for the closing of the rift. A natural order may reestablish itself, even at a time when people appear unwilling to make the effort on their own. The narrator of the poem makes clear the attitude of the survivors toward the horses: “We did not dare go near them.” The horses, nevertheless, offer their “free servitude,” which allows the survivors to then rediscover their own place in nature. Muir gives depth and resonance to his free-verse lines with a series of intertwined repetitions and contrasts. Using the same adjective in the first three occurrences of “horses” in the poem, Muir emphasizes the dilemma of the survivors through a subtle oxymoron: The very animals that should have been most familiar to the farmers have instead become “strange” to them. Muir refers to the state of the world and, by inference, to the state of the survivors by speaking of the war “that put the world to sleep” and of nations “lying asleep.” That it is an unnatural sleep Muir suggests obliquely: The poet refers to “days” and “noon” in speaking of the aftermath of war. It is a daytime sleep in which the nations are plunged. If the war was indeed atomic in nature, this daytime sleep would have been brought on not only by the artificial sun of the atom bomb but also by the figurative “light of reason” of science.
In contrast, when evening comes to the survivors, they confront an odd spectacle. The once-useful tractors now “lie about our fields; at evening/ They look like dank sea-monsters crouched and waiting.” The approach of true sleep casts a mythological shadow over the machines. Evening also brings the horses and gives them similar shading: “Now they were strange to us/ As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield/ Or illustrations in a book of knights.” The parallel Muir draws between different animals at the plough also underlines a contrast. “We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs,” the narrator initially says. The horses then return. “Since then,” the narrator says, “they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads.” Muir distinguishes the unwilling and forced relationship between farmer and land in the first line from the willing and unforced relationship in the latter by speaking immediately afterward of the “free servitude” offered by the horses. The farmers need no longer “make” nature do their will. Muir also links the changes brought on by war and those brought on by the horses through parallel phrases: “it was so still/ We listened to our breathing and were afraid,” the narrator says of the first days of the war. After the farmers hear the approaching horses, they “saw the heads/ Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.” First, unusual silence brings fear. In striking contrast, the noise of life does the same.