Edwin Muir

Unfriendly friendly universe,
I pack your stars into my purse,
And bid you so farewell.
That I can leave you, quite go out

Our fathers all were poor,
Poorer our fathers' fathers;
Beyond, we dare not look.
We, the sons, keep

'MY life is done, yet all remains,
The breath has gone, the image not,
The furious shapes once forged in
Live on though now no longer hot.'Steadily the shining

O Merlin in your crystal
Deep in the diamond of the day,
Will there ever be a
Whose music will smooth

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.

I've been in love for
With what I cannot
And will contrive a
For the

If a good man were ever housed in
By needful error of the qualities,
Perhaps to prove the rule or shame the devil,
Or speak the truth only a stranger sees,

That was the day they killed the Son of
On a squat hill-top by Jerusalem.
Zion was bare, her children from their
Sucked by the dream of

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,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
The source of all our seeing rinsed and cleansed Till…

Those lumbering horses in the steady plough,
On the bare field - I wonder, why, just now,
They seemed terrible, so wild and strange,
Like magic power on the stony grange.

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

The angel and the girl are
Earth was the only meeting place.
For the embodied never
Travelled beyond the shore of space.

The windless northern surge, the sea-gull's scream,
And Calvin's kirk crowning the barren brae.
I think of Giotto the Tuscan shepherd's dream,
Christ, man and creature in their inner day.

All through that summer at ease we lay,
And daily from the turret
We watched the mowers in the
And the enemy half a mile

It was not meant for human eyes,
That combat on the shabby
Of clods and trampled turf that
Somewhere beneath the sodden

Yes, yours, my love, is the right human face.
I in my mind had waited for this long,
Seeing the false and searching for the true,
Then found you as a traveller finds a

We were a tribe, a family, a people.
Wallace and Bruce guard now a painted field,
And all may read the folio of our fable,
Peruse the sword, the sceptre and the shield.

Barely a twelvemonth
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence

They could not tell me who should be my lord,
But I could read from every word they said The common thought:
Perhaps that lord was dead,
And only a story now and a wandering word.

Boswell by my bed,
Tolstoy on my table;
Thought the world has bled For four and a half years,
And wives' and mothers' tears Collected would be able To water a little field Untouched by anger and blood,

Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,
The sun looks from the
Helmed in his winter casket,
And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky.