Analysis of The Horses
Edwin Muir 1887 (Orkney) – 1959 (Cambridge)
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
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.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged 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 speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
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.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll molder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
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.
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.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
Scheme | Text too long |
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Poetic Form | |
Metre | 100110 01011110111 1001001101 1111110100110 1001111111 110110100001 10101 01011101110 10110111101 11011011011 0111010101010 100101 011101011010 01011100101 11001111111 1101011101 1101110111 11110111111 11111101101 11111111101 011110101001 11000100010 01010111110 010101101110 11111101010 1111110111 11001011101 111010110101 11011111 1110101 01110 1001001101 1101010101 010010111101 01010111010 1101 1011100001 1111010010101 11110110111 11001111101 101000111 11111111110 1001111111 11101111010 0111010010 00110111001 1101011101 0110110101 10110010101 111111111110 1111110101101 11110111101 1011111010010 |
Closest metre | Iambic pentameter |
Characters | 2,275 |
Words | 436 |
Sentences | 27 |
Stanzas | 1 |
Stanza Lengths | 53 |
Lines Amount | 53 |
Letters per line (avg) | 34 |
Words per line (avg) | 8 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 1,826 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 433 |
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Submitted on May 13, 2011
Modified on April 25, 2023
- 2:10 min read
- 99 Views
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"The Horses" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 23 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/10127/the-horses>.
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