Good and Evil in Horses

Good and Evil in The Horses



The concepts of good and evil vacillate throughout the work of the Scottish poet Edwin Muir. In Muirs master(prenominal) poem The Horses, guilt and innocence, good and evil, are also in the plainest view. But the poem is non sabotaged artistically because of it, as so many such poems are. The Horses is about the unexpected return, after an apocalypse, of vernal horses that restore the long lost archaic companionship with the hold up humans. The narrator condemns the old ill world that wreaked the damage:

just a twelvemonth after The seven days state of war that put the world to

sleep, Late in the evening the fantastical horses came. By then we had made our convenant with

silence, But in the start 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. But on the third day a warship passed us,

heading north, late(prenominal) bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth

day A two-dimensional plunged all 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

say, If on a sudden they should speak again If on the stroke of noon a utter 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 . . .

Have Armageddon and its aftermath ever been more(prenominal) powerfully, more palpably imagined? And yet, I do not trust that the poems extraordinary vividness is the greatest effectiveness of The Horses. Its special power is in the way cataclysm evokes Muirs most abiding theme: the renewal of that long-lost archaic bewilder between life and the world even in the reckon of catastrophe (Our life is changed; their coming our beginning). The Horses is not a topical antiwar poem, as some have seen it to be, but a...If you postulate to get a full essay, order it on our website: Ordercustompaper.com



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