Edwin Muir
Edwin Muir
Edwin Muirwas an Orcadian poet, novelist and translator, born on a farm in Deerness. He is remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry in plain language with few stylistic preoccupations, and for his extensive translations of Franz Kafka's works with his wife Willa Muir...
land law ran
And without fear the lawless roads Ran wrong through all the land.
knowledge skins toes
Packed in my skin from head to toe is one I know and do not know.
bible journey rocks
See him, the gentle Bible beast, / With lacquered hoofs and curling mane, / His wondering journey from the East / Half done, between the rock and plain.
law justice done
I have observed in foolish awe The dateless mid-days of the law And seen indifferent justice done By everyone on everyone.
lying thinking sorrow
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep, Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow, And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
country past long
We meet ourselves at every turn In the long country of the past.
fall eden darkness
The ancestral deed is thought and done, And in a million Edens fall A million Adams drowned in darkness, For small is great and great is small, And a blind seed all.
time kindness light
Kindness and courage can repair time's faults, And serving him breeds patience and courtesy In us, light sojourners and passing subjects.
country cuts deer lies road runs side stand turning
There is a road that turning always / Cuts off the country of Again. / Archers stand there on every side / And as it runs Time's deer is slain, / And lies where it has lain.
men performances every-man
The life of every man is an endlessly repeated performance of the life of man.
mean mind literature
The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.
character reality literature
Dostoyevsky wrote of the unconscious as if it were conscious; that is in reality the reason why his characters seem 'pathological', while they are only visualized more clearly than any other figures in imaginative literature... He was in the rank in which we set Dante, Shakespeare and Goethe.
country time lying
There is a road that turning always Cuts off the country of Again. Archers stand there on every side And as it runstime's deer is slain, And lies where it has lain.