We would not have it again

On Edwin Muir's 'The Horses'

Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.

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On the second Friday of March 2020, before the first UK lockdown had begun — though talk of it was everywhere — I was listening to the BBC news and boiling pasta for my children’s tea when a line of verse ran through my head:

Our life is changed: their coming our beginning.

It’s the last line of Edwin Muir’s apocalyptic 1956 poem ‘The Horses’ (you can read it, and hear it read by Robert Pinsky, here). Later, I shared the poem on Twitter. It was widely appreciated, with many people remembering the haunting effect it had on them as school children during the Cold War.

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On the second day

The radios failed; we turned the knobs, no answer.

On the third day a warship passed us, headed north,

Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day

A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter

Nothing

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Muir died in 1959. In a tribute to him, T.S. Eliot saw the poem as the expression of Muir’s life: from a rural childhood on nineteenth-century Orkney to

the sordid horror of industrialism in Glasgow [then] the modern world of the metropolis in London, and finally the realities of central Europe in Prague where he and his wife […] saw the iron curtain fall and where they saw their friends gradually finding it safer to avoid their company. And all of this experience is somehow concentrated into that great, that terrifying poem of the ‘atomic age’ — ‘The Horses’.

It is a terrifying poem in that it imagines the aftermath of nuclear war. But it is also — as some terrifying poems are not — very touching. I was particularly struck by poet Matthew Francis’s comment on Twitter that it was ‘the only poem that consistently makes me cry. I’ve had to give up discussing it with students because I get too embarrassed.’

I did, nevertheless, discuss it with students: at an online poetry reading group during lockdown — staring into a black screen as we spoke on mic, like shortwave radio users — and then at an outdoor poetry reading group in Autumn 2020, when the return to in-person university teaching was vigilantly socially distanced.

After reading the poem aloud together, the discussion turned immediately to our own strange circumstances: bringing the poem alive by sounding its words, in a quiet corner of campus, while at the same time avoiding each other’s breath.

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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.

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The resonance of the poem in March 2020 was, for me, partly a feeling about place, as Eliot suggested it was for Muir, recalling his childhood from old age in the English countryside (Muir lived in the village of Swaffham Prior, outside Cambridge, where he was ringed by a cluster of airbases that would have been Russian nuclear targets).

While I was stirring the pasta, 50 miles north-east of Swaffham Prior in Norwich, my wife was driving home from work through the Norfolk fields, and I was thinking of her, and, suddenly, the landscape of ‘The Horses’:

The tractors lie about our fields; at evening

They look like dank sea-monsters crouched and waiting.

We leave them where they are and let them rust:

‘They’ll molder away and be like other loam.’

As lockdown set in, and we stayed at home, wondering if the local shop — now quiet as a hospital — would have pasta or bread or flour on its shelves, I looked for accounts of the sudden ending of centuries of the horse: that shock of modernity which the poem imagines going into reverse.

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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.

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I found Adrian Bell’s Men and the Fields (1939). Describing an agricultural show in Suffolk before the Second World War, Bell remarked that there were ‘tractors of a compactness that would have seemed impossible less than twenty years ago’, and that everything to do with horses seemed ‘like something ornamental’:

A few years ago we used to cart corn as a usual thing by road wagon. But now, I am suddenly aware […] that this no longer tallies with the life of the country: it has dropped clean out.

Then, in the Eastern Daily Press in late March, I saw a report about ‘Social Distancing for Farmers’, which noted that the average age of farmers put them in a vulnerable group for coronavirus. The 2020 harvest would depend on this workforce, who knew how to ‘drive a GPS-guided tractor’ — and so precautions came in, including ‘not swapping tractors, not having communal rests and meals’. Their lives were changed, though their horses had not returned.

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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.

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The current television advert for Lloyds Bank shows horses running through a suburban British landscape (‘At Lloyds Bank, we will always be by your side’). Did somebody remember the poem, and its growing feeling of liberation and renewal, as they worked on a brief with the theme: ‘life returning’?

The idea that the natural world was suddenly flourishing was a strong mythology in Spring 2020. I remember how loud the birds seemed on daily walks. Queueing outside the local shop for groceries, I heard an elderly couple discussing, with cheerful wonder, the (fake) photos of dolphins in the clear canals of Venice. Perhaps we were finally at a turning point in the human pollution of the natural world?

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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.

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But now, this week, I listen to the news at evening, and think again of ‘The Horses’.