And it is love that empowers him, in the celebratory poem "In
Love for Long" (159-160) to come to an absolute awareness of life and
to find the hidden, unifying ground of existence. In this poem Muir
captures and makes formal the magic of an experience he had during the
War years while sitting in the countryside and gazing at the scene
around him. "Suddenly and without reason," he recalls, he felt a
deep and abiding fondness for the hills, the cottages, the clouds,
the soft, subdued light, and for the very ground he sat upon and he
realized that he loved these things "for themselves. n 56 As he seeks
to give concrete form to his experience of an irreducible and ir55Ibid., ;. 120.
56cited by Butter, in Edwin Muir: Man and Poet, p. 206, from
the B.B.C. "Chapbook," 3 Sept. 1952. As Muir recalls in a B.B.C.
broadcast: "I was up at S\vanston in the Pentlands one Saturday morning during the War. It was in late summer; a dull, cloudy, windless
day, quite warm. I was sitting in the grass, looking at the thatched
cottages and the hills, when I realised that I was fond of them,
suddenly and without reason, and for themselves, not because the
cottages were quaint or the hills romantic. I had an unmistakable
warm feeling for the ground I lvas sitting on, as if I were in love
with the earth itself, and the clouds, and the soft subdued light. I
had felt these things before, but that afternoon they seemed to
crystallise, and the poem came out of them."
resistible love, a love grounded in the soil of this world> Muir seeks
to create a poetry of a higher order, a poetry which tells the untellable and gives shape to the intangible. He seeks to grasp, in the
verbal space of the poem, that mysterious force which grasped him,
that force from lvhich "there's no escape~" and that force which
challenges his poetic powers of expression:
I've been in love for long
With what I cannot tell ·
And will contrive a song
For the intangible
That has no mould or shape,
From which there's no escape.
(1-6)
As he trys to penetrate the enigma of "what" it is he loves in these
simple trimeter lines with their rich mixture.of simple and Latinate
diction, the speaker-poet poses a riddle. Giving a series of clues to
the identity of the mysterious thing he loves, he invites the reader
to become involved in the process of discovery. For though what he
loves is "not even a name," yet it is "all constancy" ;(7·-8). It is
simultaneously as fleeting and airy as a "breath" and as "still., and
stable as "the established hill" (11-12). Whether "Tried or untried,"
it is "the same" and it is an essential part of his being for it "cannot part from him" (9-10). What he loves resides in paradox and contradiction for he loves the very stuff of ''being" itself:
It is not any thing,
And yet all being is;
Being, being, being,
Its burden and its bliss.
How can I ever prove
What it is I love?
(13-18)
·179
What he loves cannot be grasped through the reason nor can it be
localized or confined by the intellect--i.e., he cannot "prove" it.
What he loves can only be grasped in a poetic song, a song of utter
simplicity and child-like intensity.
It is his love for being that enables him to find a domain of
freedom within time's prison, a world of good within the framework of
the world's evils, an overarch~g joy within the realm of life's
sorrows. For th~ugh his ''happy happy love" for being is beseiged with
the "crying sorrows" of death (19-20), though time's "vice" crushes
it "beneath and above/Between to-days and morrows" (21-22), yet he
retains his love for being. His love is "A little paradise/Held in
the world's vice" (23..:24):
And there it is content
And careless as a child,
And in imprisonment
Flourishes sweet and wild;
In wrong, beyond wrong,
All the world's day l~ng.
This love a moment known
For what I do not know
And in a moment gone
Is like the happy doe
That keeps its perfect laws
Between the tiger's paws
And vindicates its cause.
(25..:37)·
Though the ''happy" moment of love passes, in its integral time-space
unit the speaker-poet recovers the world of innocence,· joy, and fulfillment. Though vulnerable and doomed by time, his love, like the
''happy doe" found in the tiger's grasp, "vindicates its cause" by the
very fact of its existence. For his love creates its own dynamic
world of perfected order and value, its own fullness of presence, its
--
180.
own open moment of time. Freedom and joy emerge within the boundaries
of time. Human life can be infinitely expanded within the boundless
moment of love.