Edwin Muir Death Poems
- 1. The Child Dying
Unfriendly friendly universe,
I pack your stars into my purse,
And bid you so farewell.
That I can leave you, quite go out,
... - 2. Robert The Bruce (to Douglas In Dying)
'MY life is done, yet all remains,
The breath has gone, the image not,
The furious shapes once forged in heat
Live on though now no longer hot.
... - 3. The Castle
All through that summer at ease we lay,
And daily from the turret wall
We watched the mowers in the hay
And the enemy half a mile away
... - 4. The Transfiguration
So from the ground we felt that virtue branch
Through all our veins till we were whole, our wrists
As fresh and pure as water from a well,
Our hands made new to handle holy things,
... - 5. The Killing
That was the day they killed the Son of God
On a squat hill-top by Jerusalem.
Zion was bare, her children from their maze
Sucked by the dream of curiosity
... - 6. Reading In Wartime
Boswell by my bed,
Tolstoy on my table;
Thought the world has bled
For four and a half years,
... - 7. The Combat
It was not meant for human eyes,
That combat on the shabby patch
Of clods and trampled turf that lies
Somewhere beneath the sodden skies
... - 8. The Good Man In Hell
If a good man were ever housed in Hell
By needful error of the qualities,
Perhaps to prove the rule or shame the devil,
Or speak the truth only a stranger sees,
... - 9. The Animals
They do not live in the world,
Are not in time and space.
From birth to death hurled
No word do they have, not one
...