The Horses by Edwin Muir

The Horses by Edwin Muir The Poem that I am going to talk about in this essay is "The Horses"

by Edwin Muir. In this essay I am going to talk about the poems use of

language to convey a picture, the theme of the poem and how the poem

has affected me.

On the first few lines of the poem, the word choice is crucial, the

poet uses the phrase "Barely a twelvemonth after", the word

twelvemonth is an old word and this conveys one of the poems main

reoccurring images of time.

On the second line the poet talks about the seven-day war that put the

world to sleep, this is a Euphemism about a nuclear war that killed

everyone in just 7 days. The 7 days is a biblical reference, the irony

is that it took God 7 days to create the world and took man 7 days to

destroy it. The time aspect comes into it again to goes from year to

day onto the next line with a particular time of day.

This poem is about surviving a war.

When it talks about the strange horses either there is something

strange about the horses or the horses are strange, this has more than

one meaning, throughout the poem things have more than one meaning.

On line 4 it talks about making a covenant with silence, covenant

could mean either one of three things, it could either be an archaic

word, a legalistic word or a biblical word but the author uses all of

these 3 meanings to build up how quiet it was with all the people.

On line 5 the cyclical nature of ...

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...t talks about Eden and how God made ruler of the world but

also had the responsibility of looking after all the other animals.

Man had betrayed that trust and he broke the companionship for

technology.

The poet uses horses in this poem because they played a large part in

our civilisations development, they helped us explore, they fed us

etc.

And in the last 2 lines of the poem it talks about how nature forgived

us with open arms again is clear, it still surprises humans and makes

them sorry that they ever turned their backs on nature for technology.

I enjoyed reading this poem and the imagery used in this poem is good,

only after some of it has been explained. This poem emphasises the

fact that man will if it can find something newer, even if it isn't

better just because it is new they think that is improved.