The Innocent Eye

Edwin Muir is one of the old-stagers of contemporary English poetry. The gold rush of the Thirties came and went; he stayed with pick and basin fossicking in his private claim. For those who want quick returns from poetry, novelty, noise and panache, Edwin Muir can provide little. Beginning with private emblems and a preoccupation with the mystery of time, he has developed slowly and naturally towards a specifically Christian interpretation of experience. His verse method is plain to the point of monotony; but how expertly he moves within his chosen limits:

Legendary Abraham,
The old Chaldean wanderer,
First among these peoples came,
Cruising above them like a star
That is in love with distances
And has through age to calmness grown,
Patient in the wilderness
And untarrying in the sown . . .

One feels (perhaps on too slight evidence) that here at least is one poet who will never be strangled by the cliques, who has braved out the demons of sterility and melancholia, who could not write a smart poem if he tried, though he might produce an honest, dull one. Where does the peculiar sweetness of Muir’s poetry spring from, like honey from a hive in the rock? I think it may come from his never having really lost contact with the first world of experience, the child’s vision of indubitable reality in man and nature:

And shapes too simple for a place
In the day’s shrill complexity
Came and were more natural, more
Expected than my father’s face
Smiling across the open door . . .

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We others, who have lost contact and scarcely desire to regain it, recognise all the same the language of home, both foreign and familiar. Edwin Muir communicates that most difficult truth: the holiness of the familiar world.

1957 (159)