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 imaginative conception of what it might be like to be in a post-apocalyptic world…but with added “strange horses”! Of course, interpretation of the poem and what the horses represent, is entirely up to the reader. A few years ago I wrote an electronic soundscape to catch the poem’s atmosphere and to accompany a reading of the poem. More recently, I revisited this recording and noodled about with some images and footage and have set it to video, which I’d like to share with you here. I like to think I have captured the mood of Muir’s poem and I hope he would approve!
