Finders Keepers

by Seamus Heaney

  That secure, lucid place is moreover surely related to the one where the young Muir knelt at family prayers; the note of the poem must surely bear some resemblance to the note which the boy’s father struck on these occasions, described in the autobiography as ‘a sort of mild chant’. In fact, the overall effect of ‘Merlin’ on the reader is probably much the same as that experienced by the child-poet when he heard his father enunciate the following words for which, he claimed, he always waited: ‘a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens.’

  Mild chants of houses not made with hands: from beginning to end Muir composed poems that approximated to that kind of thing. Poems with a steady metrical beat, such as ‘The Ring’, ‘The Window’, ‘The Toy Horse’, ‘Telemachus Remembers’ – the list could be extended. And yet these poems, for all their admissible harmonies and temperate affirmativeness, impose the order of art a little too amiably upon the disorders of experience. A pane of Tennysonian glass, such as intervened between the Lady of Shallott and the traffic on the road, keeps the thick-witted world at a remove. Not unexpectedly, there is even an unashamed echo of Tennyson in ‘Telemachos Remembers’:

  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 mazed her sight.

  This is beguilingly skilful, and nobody is going to suggest that a poem of impeccable verbal order must necessarily misrepresent the complexities of living – a reading of Muir’s poem ‘The Combat’ would be enough to give the lie to such an oversimple equation of verbal melody with spiritual or intellectual gullibility. Nevertheless, Muir’s well-earned faith in the immortality of the soul and his hard-won if high-toned perspective on personal and historical suffering come through in these poems as a shade too readily available. The poems dwell too calmly in the written place, within the imagined circle. They are of course the bonus of Muir’s personal journey, but they are Parnassian, understanding Parnassian according to Hopkins’s famous definition in his letter to A. W. M. Baillie. For Hopkins, the term denoted a kind of poetry that was second to the poetry of inspiration:

  It can only be spoken by poets but it is not in the highest sense poetry ... It is spoken on and from the level of the poet’s mind, not, as in the other case, when the inspiration … raises him above himself.

  One thinks here too of Auden’s definition of inspiration as that which has occurred when a poet writes better than we could have reasonably expected. The poems by Muir just mentioned are not of this inspired sort. They do not do the whole work of art, they do not move a personal force through an artistic distance. Instead, they tread the force with stationary efficiency and produce a strain in the melodious rather than in the laborious sense of that word. They return us, a little too unscathed, to the mote-lit stillness of the cradle and the chant-filled circle of the prayers.

  They return us, in fact, to Eden; and as Peter Butter rightly insists in his study of Muir, Eden as a destination is less poetically rewarding than Eden as a starting point. From there, the poetic imagination ventures most rewardingly outwards into fallen time; its project is most forceful and its achievements most bracing when it stands with only ‘one foot in Eden’. In the poem of that name, appropriately, Muir’s music is a combination of primal song chant and the differentiated, alienated precisions of the modern world. There is a haulage job being done by the metre; the rhymes are like a system of pulleys over which the argument drags forward a positive meaning. And allied to this metrical vitality is a brisk diction which keeps the poem from indulging in longueurs or relishing its own effects:

  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 famished 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.

  ‘One Foot in Eden’ and other ‘chant’ poems such as ‘The Annunciation’ – the one beginning ‘The angel and the girl are met’ – and ‘The Return of the Greeks’ and ‘The Child Dying’ demonstrate the possibility of bringing off that most delicate and difficult of feats: writing a poem in which good wins a points-victory over the opposition, which somehow always starts out the favourite. But then that feat is only worth while when the opposition is fairly admitted – as it is beginning to be in these poems.

  In a review of Robert Frost that appeared in the Listener in 1943 (reprinted by Peter Butter in The Truth of Imagination), what Muir says of the American poet can be said with equal truth of Muir himself:

  [He] is one of those poets who so evidently succeed in doing what they wish to do that they tempt everyone to point out their limitations. The limitation is so clearly there, as it is not in poets who undertake more than they can manage. But when one examines [his] limitation one finds that it rises from proportion, and that his proportion in turn is rooted in character. If he were to say more than he says, as people sometimes wish he would, it would destroy the balance of his view of life. As for the character itself, it has the soundness and natural distortion of growing things which have already grown sufficiently to possess a distinctive shape.

  Muir, by the time he had started to write poetry in the 1920s, had also grown sufficiently to produce a distinctive shape. At that moment of beginning he could have declared what he declared in his last unfinished poem:

  I have been taught by dreams and fantasies

  Learned from the friendly and the darker phantoms

  And got great knowledge and courtesy from the dead

  Kinsmen and Kinswomen, ancestors and friends.

  If there is an echo of Yeats’s rhetoric in those lines, there is also a memory of Wordsworth’s image of himself as ‘an inmate of this active universe’. Indeed, Muir’s career as a poet has about it something of Wordsworth’s indeflectible purpose. For both of them, poetry was a necessary part of an effort at self-restoration and self-integration, an aspect of the attempt to align powers of the self with powers of the cosmos. Muir and Willa starting out in Czechoslovakia and Germany in the 1920s remind one of Dorothy and William withdrawn to the South of England in the 1790s; and the simplicity of Wordsworth’s ballad poems of that season, in which the greening of vegetation and the startle of birdsong are analogies for the shoots of self-healing he was experiencing – such simplicity is reminiscent of early work by Muir. There is a similar mirroring of outer and inner things in an early Muir poem like ‘October in Hellbrunn’. Of this and other poems composed in Salzburg, Willa Muir says, ‘they read like notes made by a childlike melancholy observer’, and that they ‘have an overtone of gentle sadness’. This is quite true, but I believe that ‘October in Hellbrunn’ is of a higher order than her affectionate references suggest:

  The near-drawn stone-smooth sky, closed in and grey,

  Broods on the garden, and the turf is still.

  The dim lake shines, oppressed the fountains play,

  And shadowless weight lies on the wooded hill.

  The patient trees rise separate, as if deep

  They listened dreaming through the hollow ground,

  Each in a single and divided sleep,

  While few sad leaves fall heedless with no sound.

  The marble cherubs in the wavering lake

  Stand up more still, as if they kept all there,

  The trees, the plots, in thrall. Their shadows make

  The w
ater clear and hollow as the air.

  The silent afternoon draws in, and dark

  The trees rise now, grown heavier is the ground,

  And breaking through the silence of the park

  Farther a hidden fountain flings its sound.

  This park scene has become what Wordsworth called ‘a prospect of the mind’: the images dwell in two places at one time. The trees, for example, sleep ‘a divided sleep’ between earth and air, and the cherubs standing in air are reflected in water. Here we are not just dealing with a gentle evocation of literary melancholy; we have entered an element suggestive of that state of consciousness which Muir recollected from childhood, when the child’s mind divines ‘a hidden tragedy taking place … the tragedy being the life he will not live for some years still, though it is there, invisible to him, already.’ ‘October in Hellbrunn’, then, is certainly a poem of tranquil restoration, in that there is fullness and curativeness in the crafting of its stanzas, but I would argue that it is, also, a poem of the apprehensive and imperilled consciousness.

  Obviously this is not to suggest that Edwin Muir had foreknowledge of what the fate of Europe would be two decades later. But there was a place in him prepared for what did occur. When catastrophe came out of the borderlands of dread into the actual events of history, Muir’s poetic strength revealed itself in being able to co-ordinate the nightmare of history with that place in himself where he had trembled with anticipation. The solitary boy who at the age of five or six on the island of Wyre was filled with fear and wonder at horses and herons was being fostered by this notably Wordsworthian ministry for the vocation of poetry. The heron would come back in a dream, grey and shining, and behind the stiff hedge of its unlikely tail feathers it would transform into a beast on four feet that were padded like a leopard’s or a tiger’s. The rest of the dream story is given in An Autobiography.

  Then, confronting it in the field, there appeared an ancient, dirty, earth-coloured animal with a head like that of an old sheep or a mangy dog. Its eyes were soft and brown; it was alone against the splendid-tailed beast; yet it stood its ground and prepared to fight the danger coming towards it, whether that was death or merely humiliation and pain. From their look I could see that the two animals knew each other, … and that the dark, patient animal would always be defeated, and the bright, fierce animal would always win. I did not see the fight, but I knew it would be ruthless and shameful, with a meaning of some kind perhaps, but no comfort.

  From that given lump of psychic matter Muir fashioned his poem ‘The Combat’, a poem with a meaning but no comfort, unless there is comfort to be found in a disconsolate renewal of effort. The Combat’ can be read politically as a parable about the war against Nazism or, more particularly and far less satisfactorily, about the Battle of Britain. It can be read – also too trimly – within a Christian framework of redemption through suffering. It can, at any rate, be recognized as an entirely satisfactory image of reality.

  ‘The Combat’ has something of the quality which Muir attributed to the ballads. It belongs ‘on the other side of the great plateau of the eighteenth century, with its humanitarian passion and its great hopes for mankind.’ It ‘has no sentimental appeal’ but operates ‘on the level of tragic acceptance’. Its heraldic apparatus is animated by a strong rhythmic energy. In it Muir manages to do in his rather abstract way what Keith Douglas managed to do by radically different means in a poem like ‘Vergissmeinicht’ – he combines the contradictory demands of tough-mindedness and compassion:

  A while the place lay blank, forlorn,

  Drowsing as in relief from pain.

  The cricket chirped, the grating thorn

  Stirred, and a little sound was born.

  The champions took their posts again.

  And all began. The stealthy paw

  Slashed out and in. Could nothing save

  These rags and tatters from the claw?

  Nothing. And yet I never saw

  A beast so helpless and so brave.

  This is well beyond Muir’s level best. Its applicability as parable is not gained at the expense of intensity. It almost possesses the ‘rich, dark wintry magic’ which the child Muir recognized in a sketch of Burns.

  Wintriness, however, is not the natural weather of Muir’s work. When it is not exercising the singing note, his music is fuller, more like the half-consoling roll-away of summer thunder, more like that ‘deepening drumming’ which hoofbeats make on an evening road in his poem ‘The Horses’. ‘The Horses’ is another of his indisputable achievements and too well known to require any further comment here. I would just want to observe that it strikes a note which is Muir’s alternative to the metrical chant; this we might characterize as a rounded eloquence, closer to the pitch of the pulpit than the pub, at its best when it arises from an intent concentration on place or story – as in, say, ‘The Return of Odysseus’ or ‘The Labyrinth’. The slightly dazed purposefulness of ‘The Labyrinth’ is doubly right: the bewilderments of Theseus dramatize both the predicament of consciousness seeking a meaning within its own complexities, and of consciousness seeking relation with the cosmos beyond itself. Once again, there is a finely held balance between Muir’s temperamental impulse to foreclose with a hopeful QED (drawn from a vision of the gods) and his artistic sense which demands that he follow the less sanguine logic of his own metaphor. We must be grateful that in ‘The Labyrinth’ this urge to correct Kafka by a dose of Browning is resisted. So, in the last lines, the word ‘deceits’ is linked with ‘the wild-wood waste of falsehoods’, but equally it refers back to and qualifies the speaker’s conviction that his soul ‘has bird wings to fly free’.

  Oh these deceits are strong almost as life.

  Last night I dreamt I was in the Labyrinth,

  And woke far on. I did not know the place.

  This good surrender to the logic of his fictions doesn’t always occur in Muir’s mythological and allegorical scenarios. Often his composing head remains at a privileged, plotting distance and cannot resist having designs upon the reader. This tendency can produce lines full of resolute wisdom, but it can also produce a loose-weave, mournful prosiness.

  In his 1949 volume, The Labyrinth, Muir’s unfashionable poetic ways were finally rewarded. His metaphysical habit of mind and mythological disposition had kept him out of the political swim of ‘Thirties’ English poetry. There seemed to be nothing up to date about him. But in the Forties, and especially in this 1949 volume, we can watch the gratifying spectacle of a solitary poetic endeavour attaining representative status; or to put it another way, by then Muir’s subject was everybody’s subject. His stand-off with modernity had preceded the general post-war dismay at human destructiveness and a new recognition of human frailty in the atomic age. His experiences in Austria and Czechoslovakia that had kept him at a slight remove from English literary culture in the pre-war years now gave him a unique personal perspective and enabled him to write a poetry recognizably akin to that being written by the tragic ironists and parablists in post-war Eastern Europe.

  Still, Muir was not a Middle-European. He was Orcadian, then Scottish, then a creature of the English literary tradition. And within that tradition, I would see him as an heir of the Wilfred Owen who wrote ‘Strange Meeting’, the Owen who combined a religious temperament with a wounded social conscience, the Owen who was working as a vicar’s assistant in Dunsden at about the same time as Muir was going through the scandal of his labours in the bone factory in Greenock. Both men were seared by contact with poverty and both developed a rhetoric that was somnolent, elegiac and yet politically purposeful. If nothing in Muir’s poetry equals the awful documentary content in Owen’s, his essential achievement nevertheless corresponds to the kind of thing Owen managed in poems such as ‘Miners’ and ‘Strange Meeting’ – poems which display a mixture of visionary breadth and particular social witness.

  Both men succeed in giving expression to a sensibility deeply affected by Christianity and almost
too susceptible to the appeal of passive suffering. It is for this reason that Muir’s early period of Nietzschean ‘hardness’ is so important, and Owen’s period of somewhat vindictive outrage and protest. These experiences surely contributed to their fully developed poetic styles, for it is true, as Yeats says, that style is the equivalent of self-conquest in a writer. When, for example, they address the futility and moral beauty of the victim in poems as different as Owen’s ‘The Send-Off’ and Muir’s ‘The Combat’, they both do so with a proper indignation against a world that seems not only to condone but even to ordain such brutality and pain. At these moments, they are both wary of pathos, and their poems represent a victory over characteristic tendencies towards resignation. So, if technically, as a composer of lines, Muir never ceased to belong to the pre-modern world of Rupert Brooke, imaginatively he did cross ‘The Bridge of Dread’, both inside himself and in the wider field of the times he lived through.

  But you may well be wondering, ‘Why all this about the English tradition? Is Edwin Muir’s place not in Scotland?’ And the answer to this latter question, in spite of objections lodged long ago by Hugh MacDiarmid, is yes. Assailable in previous days because it didn’t manifest a sufficiently nationalist fervour or sport the correct ethnic regalia, Muir’s Scottishness is best appreciated in the light of a much older alliance between Scotland and Europe. More important than the pious local colour of a poem such as ‘Scotland’s Winter’ is the Pictish bareness of ‘Prometheus’s Grave’, more convincing than the pious historical roll-calling of ‘Scotland 1941’ is Muir’s tragic sense (in a poem like ‘Troy’) of an abandoned culture being frantically and absurdly guarded. And then there are those border ballads of an utterly contemporary sort, frontier poems like ‘The Interrogation’. These, and others such as ‘The Combat’ and ‘The Horses’, open a path where there is free coming and going between the local conditions and the broader historical realities of the age. In them, Muir addressed the same matters as haunted ‘the Thirties poets’ but didn’t employ their topical political idiom or rhetoric of concern. Hence he robbed the English/Scottish dichotomy of much of its determining power. By displaying little anxiety about English cultural hegemony, by accepting with equanimity the resources it made available and then walking a little dreamily off to one side and into Europe, Muir oriented himself towards the future and left an example that still awaits full appreciation.