Edwin Muir’s Poetic Style From the Volume “Labyrinth” Research Paper

There are several poems, written by the famous Orcadian poet Edwin Muir that made me think of his writing style as unique poetry. These poems are from his volume The Labyrinth and their common topic is the terror of war. These poems are The Horses, The Combat and The Good Town. All of his works I examined consist of the description of terrors of war. Moreover, it became clear that throughout his poetry Muir uses Bible and different myths to compare reality and the past.

The poem that impressed me the most is The Horses. It fascinated me with the way Edwin symbolizes humanity’s progress in it. The author describes the holocaust and the “new beginning” brought by horses: “Essentially a cold- war poem, which T.S Eliot called “that terrifying poem of the ‘atomic age’, “the Horses” portrays a remote farming community struggling to come to terms with the aftermath of a nuclear war – the seven days war” (James, 80).

The author in this poem looks optimistic about the future after an awful accident that happened to humanity. He analyses the Second World War and the imaginary nuclear holocaust in both parts of the poem. However, the second part is dedicated to the new beginning and returning to nature. Although Muir shows his pessimistic view, in the beginning, he changes it in the second part of the poem, giving the reader a sense of relief.

I think that the main idea of this poem is to show people how dependent our world became on technology. Edwin Muir tries to awake people and to tell them to stop their destructive behavior. Although the poem has a happy end, the main idea is still unfavorable. By bringing the image of horses into the poem, the author shows how our ancestors used to live and how stupid we are to change horses on tractors:

The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea (Muir, 112).

As it was stated earlier, there is a literary technique that the author uses in all his poems and The Horses is not an exception. Spiritual words and biblical words such as “covenant” and “twelvemonth” bring some mysticism to Muir’s literature.

Another Muir’s poem that also describes the terrors of war is The Combat from his volume Labyrinth that was written in Prague. Like in all his previous poems, Muir, describing battles, uses many comparisons with animals. In The Combat, he creates an unusual and powerful beast: “Body of leopard, eagle’s head and whetted beak, and lion’s mane”. This unique literature philosophy and use of animals in his poems as a technique is a Muir’s distinguishing feature. Just like he uses horses in the previous poems, Edwin uses comparison with the animals in the Combat.

The Combat arises deep emotions like the previous poem, but the mix of dream and reality presented by the author here became the central theme here:

Muir felt ‘that sleep, in which we pass a third of our existence, is a mode of experience, and our dreams a part of reality’. Muir’s psychoanalytic treatment involved recording his dreams for interpretive analysis. Many of Muir’s poems are based on dreams and ‘The Combat ’, from the Labyrinth, is the most celebrated- dream poem. It tells of a setting in which two unevenly matched animal antagonist fight a perpetual battle (Bold, 172).

The third poem was also written in Prague and is from the volume Labyrinth as well. It is The Good Town. In my opinion, it is one of the brightest works written by Edwin Muir and influenced by Kafka. As Muir was not a poet only but was also a translator of Kafka’s works, the impact of the last is very obvious in some of Edwin’s works. Although it was not clearly stated in the poem, The Good Town is Prague, the city where Muir worked on Labyrinth and where he wrote almost all his poems about war. The Good Town has the same structure as two previous poems, typical for the author:

The mechanics of a Muir poem are relatively straightforward. One of his favorite devices is to open with a descriptive passage and then to move on to a philosophical commentary on the earlier observations. A good example of this is ‘The Good Town’. Even his epithets seem essential rather than unusual, as in ‘warm health’, ‘lonely stream’, ‘noisy world’, ‘unequal battle’, etc (Gross, 62).

It is clear for Muir’s reader that some thoughts in all author’s poems are similar. In The Good Town just like in two previous poems, the idea of unequal battle is pivotal. Although Muir uses these ideas in different contexts, it is clear that in The Horses he presents the battle of people and technologies and in The Combat it is the battle of animals.

All three poems are very descriptive and are written in the same style. It is clear after reading all three poems that “Muir is a philosophical poet and his thought is, to a large extent, his poetry” (Bold, 167). The idea of war, terror and different kinds of battles is basic and appeared as the influence of Franz Kafka. The use of different techniques such as comparison makes Muir’s language functional and unique.

Works Cited

Bold, Alan Norman. Volume 2 of Cambridge book of English verse. NYC: CUP Archive, 1976. Print.

Gross, Harvey Seymour, and Robert McDowell. Sound and form in modern poetry. University of Michigan Press, 1996. Print.

James, Davis, and Philip Tew. New versions of pastoral: post-romantic, modern, and contemporary responses to the tradition. Cranbury: Associated University Press, 2009. Print.

Muir, Edwin. Collected poems. UK: Oxford University Press, 1965. Print.