by
Poet's Day

Fabulous Steeds

Fabulous Steeds
by
Poet's Day

This week’s poem is “The Horses” by Edwin Muir, and I have chosen it to reflect the current world situation.

We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.

Edwin Muir (1887—1959)

Poem 237. The Horses

Barely a twelvemonth after
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,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
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. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll molder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.

This is a rather eerie poem that imagines life after some terrifying conflict. With global civilisation at an end, the world falls silent as if drugged or dead: radios stop receiving broadcasts, ships manned only by corpses pass by, a plane crashes into the sea, and it grows so quiet that even breathing sounds like a loud noise.

After a week, the silence is accepted as the new normal and the radios, standing dumb in every household, are kept only as a curio since any further broadcast from them would trigger suspicion and rejection of the “old bad world that swallowed its children”.

The people have rejected technology, perhaps because the energy needed to drive it is no longer freely available: tractors lie unused and rusty as their ploughs are pulled by the oxen just as their ancestors’ ploughs were in an earlier generation.

Into an evening of this quiet world a year after the catastrophe come the “strange horses,” their hooves on the road building from a faint tapping to drumming like thunder before they come into view, seeming like ancient warhorses. Miraculously, there are colts as well as full-grown animals.

We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.

After some initial hesitation, people form a bond with them—not the old one of master and mount but a partnership described as “free servitude” and a constant reminder that a new life for both man and animal has sprung from this encounter.

This poem was published in 1956 and it suggests the devastation a nuclear war might inflict on civilisation while hinting that even in the ruins, hope might still exist. It reminds me of the science fiction written by John Wyndham and Ray Bradbury during the same period—specifically Wyndham’s “The Wheel” (1952) and Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” (1950).

I like it because it is easy to imagine the world Muir describes in the early part of the poem, I like the depiction of the moment when the horses arrive and because it reminds me of the science fiction stories I cited above.

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