January 3rd sees anniversary of the death of poet Edwin Muir in 1959.
Born on the Orkney island of Wyre in 1887, Muir spent his early years in the idyllic setting of his father’s farm, ‘The Bu, when he was 14, his father lost his farm, and the family moved to Glasgow. In quick succession his father, two brothers, and his mother died within the space of a few years. His life as a young man was a depressing experience, and involved a raft of unpleasant jobs in factories and offices, including working in a factory that turned bones into charcoal. “He suffered psychologically in a most destructive way, although perhaps the poet of later years benefited from these experiences as much as from his Orkney ‘Eden’.”
Termed a philosophical, political and social poet, Muir’s poetry attempts to find meaning and pattern in life, harmony & cooperation instead of competition and conflict; popular themes include a sense of timelessness, a sense of displacement and rootlessness and innocence. He travelled in Europe with his wife and fellow writer, Willa Muir, translating European writers such as Franz Kafka into English. The Muirs were significantly involved in the Scottish Literary Renaissance.
In 1955 he was made Norton Professor of English at Harvard University. He returned to Britain in 1956 but died in 1959 at Swaffham Prior, Cambridge, and was buried there.
A memorial bench was erected in 1962 to Muir in the idyllic village of Swanston, Edinburgh, where he spent time during the 1950s, there is also a Memorial to Edwin Muir in St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, Orkney.
Scotland 1941
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. A simple sky roofed in that rustic day, The busy corn-fields and the haunted holms, The green road winding up the ferny brae. But Knox and Melville clapped their preaching palms And bundled all the harvesters away, Hoodicrow Peden in the blighted corn Hacked with his rusty beak the starving haulms. Out of that desolation we were born. Courage beyond the point and obdurate pride Made us a nation, robbed us of a nation. Defiance absolute and myriad-eyed That could not pluck the palm plucked our damnation. We with such courage and the bitter wit To fell the ancient oak of loyalty, And strip the peopled hill and altar bare, And crush the poet with an iron text, How could we read our souls and learn to be? Here a dull drove of faces harsh and vexed, We watch our cities burning in their pit, To salve our souls grinding dull lucre out, We, fanatics of the frustrate and the half, Who once set Purgatory Hill in doubt. Now smoke and dearth and money everywhere, Mean heirlooms of each fainter generation, And mummied housegods in their musty niches, Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation, And spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches, No pride but pride of pelf. Long since the young Fought in great bloody battles to carve out This towering pulpit of the Golden Calf, Montrose, Mackail, Argyle, perverse and brave, Twisted the stream, unhooped the ancestral hill. Never had Dee or Don or Yarrow or Till Huddled such thriftless honour in a grave. Such wasted bravery idle as a song, Such hard-won ill might prove Time's verdict wrong, And melt to pity the annalist's iron tongue.
