The Horses
Edwin Muir (1952)
Edwin Muir 1887-1959
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Edwin Muir was born on the remote Orkney Islands to the
north of Scotland in 1887.
His father was a tenant farmer but he lost his land when
Muir was fourteen.
Muir then moved with his family to Glasgow in 1901, where
he remained for 18 years. The family lived in a poor part of
the city.
His life as a young man in Glasgow was a depressing
experience for him, involving a succession of unpleasant
jobs.
During the early 1920s Muir travelled in Europe.
Muir wrote poetry and plays and earned his living as an
editor, translator and literary critic.
He poetry is personal and often dreamlike and reflects the
age that he lived in (through two World Wars and their
aftermath, writing some of his best poems towards the end
of his life, at the height of The Cold War).
What was The Cold War?
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The Cold War (1945–1991) was the continuing
state of political conflict resulting from the end of
WW2 between the USSR and the western world.
Although the primary participants' military forces
never officially clashed directly, they expressed the
conflict through military coalitions, strategic
conventional force deployments, a nuclear arms
race, espionage, proxy wars, propaganda, and
technological competition, e.g. the space race.
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The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc with
the eastern European countries it occupied,
annexing some as Soviet Socialist Republics
and maintaining others as satellite states.
The US and some western European countries
established containment of communism as a
defensive policy.
Several such countries also coordinated the
rebuilding of western Europe, especially western
Germany, which the USSR opposed.
Elsewhere, in Latin America (Cuba) and
Southeast Asia (Korea mainly) the USSR
fostered communism and revolutions.
The height of the Cold War:
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The Berlin Blockade (24 June 1948 – 11 May 1949) was
one of the first major international crises of the Cold War
and the first such crisis that resulted in casualties.
The Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway and
road access to the sectors of Berlin under their control.
In response, the Western Allies organized the Berlin
Airlift to carry supplies to the people of Berlin. The United
States Airforce, the RAF, and other Commonwealth
nations flew over 200,000 flights providing 13,000 tons of
food daily to Berlin in an operation lasting almost a year.
The success of the Airlift was humiliating to the Soviets
The Berlin Crisis 1961 = Berlin Wall built
The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962
Tension at home
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http://www.secretbunker.co.uk/
Hidden beneath an innocent Scottish Farmhouse in the middle of a
secluded field in Fife, a tunnel leads to, Scotland’s Secret
Bunker: 24,000 square feet of Secret accommodation, the size of
two football pitches, one on top of another, on two levels, 100 feet
underground.
Had there been a Nuclear War, this is where Scotland, would have
been Governed from.
They would have survived, you wouldn’t. Along with military
personnel there would have been a fully equipped and staffed BBC
sound studio. They would have issued emergency broadcasts with
all other radio and TV channels ‘off air’.
All this time personnel would never see daylight, they couldn’t
even shower as uncontaminated water was too precious a
commodity and remember they may have had to stay underground
for over three months.
http://bbc.co.uk/schoolradio/history/worldwar2audioclipslibrary_clip02.sht
ml
The Horses background information
The poem ‘The Horses’ describes a future way of life
that will be like the simple farming life of the past.
 This way of life will be like how it used to be in the
Garden of Eden. There will be no industry or
technology. Man will once again be close to nature
and animals.
The roots of this poem lie in Muir’s experience of life:
 His life as a boy on a remote island was sheltered
compared to the disorder and uproar of life in
Glasgow.
 In Glasgow first his father, then his two brothers, and
then his mother died in the space of a few years.
 Thus he began to imagine and long for a more
innocent way of life, close to the earth like in his
childhood.
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Influences
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The horror of twentieth century world wars influenced the
poem.
Like many writers of the twentieth century Muir thought a
future war might wipe out the world as we know it.
The central idea in the poem is that people ought to live a
life of hard work close to the earth.
Calvinism is a religion that proposes a life of strict
innocence based on hard work, closeness to the soil and
avoidance of pleasure. Calvin’s ideas were central to the
Presbytarian religion that Muir grew up in.
In this religion only a small portion of people would get in to
heaven after God angrily destroys the world.
Muir seems to think the good people are those who live
close to the earth.
Written in 1952 at the height of The Cold War
What is it about?
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Muir creates a speaker or narrator from the future who
describes recent history. The descriptions of events at sea
suggest he is on an island, similar to where Muir grew up.
The poem is futuristic. The speaker is like a survivor
describing the new, recovered earth after a Third World
War.
It is a dream-like poem that contains farming imagery
straight from the poet’s childhood on the farm in the
Orkney Islands.
The poem refers to mysterious horses that come to help
humans rebuild their life.
These horses represent a new world.
At the end of the bible, in the Book of Revelations, four
horses were a signal for the end of the world.
In this poem, Muir imagines one world has ended and a
new one has begun.
The horses that ended the world in the bible, return to help
build the new world, a world close to nature.
Now read the poem…