Despite being a natural optimist, I have for some reason always been attracted by the genre of dystopian fiction, although I’m not the only one judging by the enduring popularity of dystopian classics such as Orwell’s seminal 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids. The inspiration informing this genre comes from many and varied sources, including, just for starters, the rise of industrial-scale warfare in the World Wars, the development of the atom bomb, totalitarianism, AI and Big Tech, genetic engineering, deadly viruses, the surveillance society and climate change. It seems we have a perpetual collective curiosity, and fear, about where our society might be going.
The genre extends to poetry, too; at school I became aware of this enigmatic poem called The Horses, by Scottish poet Edwin Muir (1887–1959). Muir was born on the island of Orkney and had an idyllic childhood which was curtailed in 1901 when his father lost the family farm and they had to move to Glasgow. For Muir, this was a move from Eden to Hell: within a few short years, his father, two brothers, and finally his mother died in quick succession, and meanwhile he had to endure a series of mundane jobs in factories and offices.
Such a change in his life must have had profound effects on his future poetic works, although balanced by the happiness that he eventually found when he met his wife, the translator and writer Willa Andersen. He found great purpose with Willa and teamed up with her to translate the works of many notable German-speaking authors like Franz Kafka. Anyway, although I haven’t read much else of Muir’s work, the poem that found its way into my schoolboy hands nonetheless stayed with me as a slightly disturbing piece of weird and prophetic dystopia right up to the present day.
The poem gets stuck in from the start:
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep
So no messing: we know where we are, we’re in a bleak, post-apocalyptic world…and then the very next line of the poem wastes no time by introducing the horses of the title:
Late in the evening the strange horses came
Thereafter, fifty lines of an exploration of what it might be like to be in a post-apocalyptic world…but with added horses! Of course, interpretation of the poem and what the horses represent, is entirely up to the reader.
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.
