I first discovered Edwin Muir at a turning point in my own life. I had just spent a year living in a vibrant Catholic community in Vietnam, alongside people who appeared to be more alive and joyful than I had ever known. I was looking for answers. Why did my culture seem dull and lifeless in contrast with theirs? Why did my own person hood feel so stinted? As I meditated on these questions, I found much consolation and guidance in this knowledgeable yet little known Orcadian writer.
Born in Orkney in 1887, Edwin Muir could be described as a self-taught man of letters. A poet, critic and essayist, he wrote one of the most moving and sensitive autobiographies to come out of Scotland in the last century. While he never became a Catholic, he has much to offer the Catholic imagination, and his poems are printed in our breviary. Muir’s deeply sensitive writings – which explore the perennial themes of the human condition – helped to awaken my own sensitivity and understanding of the deeper realities which underly all human activity, both in the individual soul, and in the story of civilisations – especially the story of Scotland.
A constant preoccupation for Muir was that of innocence lost and regained, which is, of course, is the story of every person and every people. This theme forms the underlying narrative in Muir’s autobiography. Here he describes his childhood in pre-industrial Orkney as a sort of Eden, which impressed upon him a vision of immortality.[1] This vision never left him but continued to haunt him as his life took a different turn.
At the age of fourteen Muir’s family left Orkney for the poverty-stricken and industrialised city of Glasgow. In the ensuing traumatic years, most of his family members died Muir describes this plunge out of order into chaos as a ‘meaningless waste of inherited virtue’.[2] He became preoccupied with the theme of fallen man, especially as it related to the ‘lost soul’ of his own country, Scotland. Books like his brave revised history of John Knox and his deeply bleak travelogue, Scottish Journey, explore how the reformation, industrialisation and modernisation have severed us from a simpler life lived in harmony with God.[3] Some of Muir’s best poems came out of this exploration. ‘Scotland 1941’, speaking on behalf of those born in such desolation, asks:
How could we read our souls and learn to be?[4]
I found these reflections deeply consoling as a starting point from where to begin to make sense of my own sense of wretchedness. However, this is not the end of the story. Late in his life Muir came to a deep realisation of the Incarnation. This realisation deepened his faith in Christ and renewed his hope for our fallen world. His famous poem ‘One foot in Eden’, which can be found in the Breviary, muses that:
Strange blessings never in Paradise
Fall from these beclouded skies.[5]
Another later poem, entitled ‘This Great House’, likewise both laments our lost civilization, and promises that new life can spring from the ruins:
However it came, this great house has gone down
Unconquered into chaos (as you might see
A famous ship warped to a rotting quay
In miles of weeds and rubbish, once a town.)
So the great house confronts the brutish air,
And points its turrets towards the hidden sky,
While in the dark the flags of honour fly
Where faith and hope and bravery would not dare.
Accident did not do this, nor mischance.
But so must order to disorder come
At their due time, and honour take its stance
Deep in dishonour’s ground. Chaos is new,
And has no past or future. Praise the few
Who built in chaos our bastion and our home. [6]
As poignant as the phrase ‘unconquered into chaos’ may be, and as depressing the image of the ‘rotting quay’, the poem finishes on the promise of restoration. The image of honour taking ‘its stance deep in dishonour’s ground’ is a powerful one, pointing to the nature of our own redemption through Christ’s coming on earth. To see this ongoing work of salvation in history, Muir instructs us to look to the past, and honour those who ‘built in chaos our bastion and our home’.
Memory and salvation are strongly linked in Muir’s writing. So too, the act of remembering is integral to our Catholic faith. When we pray, we remember. Again, and again, and again, we recall the mysteries of Grace and in doing so step into a life lived within them. Our saints, who lived in abiding memory of the One gone before, were ennobled to partake in His saving work of bringing earth closer to Heaven. This crucial and salvific act of remembering is explored in one of my favourite poems by Muir, ‘Outside Eden’:
A few lead in their harvest still
By the ruined wall and broken gate.
Far inland shines the radiant hill.
Inviolable the empty gate,
Impassable the gaping wall;
And the mountain over all.
There are still some people, Muir writes, who live in sight of the ‘radiant hill’. Although out of reach, the ‘ruined wall’ and broken gate’ offer an enticing vision of what lies beyond. In the closing verse, he draws attention to those ‘few’ and ‘simple’ people who can truly love the world by choosing to remember not only what was lost but what has been gained:
The simple have long memories.
Memory make simple all that is.
So these the lawless world can love
At ease the thicket running wild,
The thorny waste, the flourishing grove.
Their knotted landscape, wrong and clear
As the crude drawings of a child,
Is to them become more dear
Than geometrical symmetry.
Their griefs are all in memory grown
As natural as a weathered stone.
Their troubles are a tribute given
Freely while gazing at the hill.
Such is their simplicity,
Standing on earth, looking at heaven.[7]
As Scottish Catholic, seeking to rebuild my home and perhaps even my country from its own ruins, I take strength from Muir’s poetry. While many have forgotten their Christian heritage, we live here – literally and spiritually – in sight of the ‘radiant hills’ of Eternity. I can ‘learn to love’ this ‘knotted landscape’, which has much to teach my soul, even though it lacks the ‘geometrical symmetry’ of more cultivated lands. It is here that I meet God in the everyday; it is here that he chooses to step in and redeem my little patch of fallen world.
It is somewhat ironic, but mostly sad, that Edwin Muir, who so understood the importance of receiving wisdom from the past, is so little remembered today. May his writings, so sensitive and so astute, guide, console and encourage us as we continue the age-long work of rebuilding from chaos ‘our bastion and our home’.
By Rebecca Blakey
[1] Edwin Muir, An Autobiography (Edinburgh: Canongate, 2000), 24.
[2] Ibid., 84.
[3] Edwin Muir, John Knox: Portrait of a Calvinist (Books for Libraries Press, 1971). Muir, Scottish Journey (Mainstream, 1996).
[4] Edwin Muir, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 1960), 97.
[5] Ibid., 227.
[6] Ibid., 230.
[7] Ibid., 212.
March has some wonderful and important Saints, particularly for Scotland - not withstanding St Patrick of course! Today is St Duthac’s feast day then in a couple of days on March 10th we have an important feast for the Diocese of Aberdeen - St John Ogilvie’s. We have the prolific St Curetan and then moving down to Northumbria we have the great St Cuthbert. Go to our website and find out more about these Saints and some the others we celebrate in March.