The concern with evil that runs like a fault-line through the poetry of Edwin Muir (1887–1959) is a direct result of the seismic convulsion that shook his life when, at the age of fourteen, he and his family moved from the prelapsarian beauty of the Orkney island of Wyre where he was born to the Dantesque horrors of industrial Glasgow. For the rest of his life he was able to see this upheaval as an almost literal re-enactment of the Fall partly perhaps because, as he tells us in his Autobiography, Orkney was a place where "there was no great distinction between the ordinary and the fabulous", an observation that goes a long way towards accounting for the Symbolist nature of much of his poetry. But although Muir was always looking for what he called the "fable" in the "story" in his own work, he was acutely aware of the failure of the Presbyterianism in which he was brought up to find any richer meaning in the word "God" which, as he writes in The Incarnate One, was little more than "three angry letters in a book".

In this poem, discovered amongst his papers in the National Library of Scotland and published twenty years after his death, he directs his anger specifically at the intolerant Calvinism of John Knox, the ruthless father of the Scottish Reformation which, for Muir, had so damaged not only the spiritual but also the intellectual and cultural life of Scotland. The "Righteous Man" of the title is in fact a hapless inheritor of self-righteous religious bigotry and will not be softened either by God or Art. In Muir’s original manuscript, the last three lines of the poem are crossed out but were restored when the poem was published on the grounds that they pick up the earlier rhymes on "race" and "face". But they do more than that. Despite the irregularly recurring rhymes and line lengths, the poem is in fact a crude, swollen sonnet, exactly half as long again as a conventional one, with a turn at line twelve instead of line eight and a coda of three lines rather than two. And it is in this coda that Muir attempts to enlist his God – the grace of poetry perhaps – in the struggle against more grudging words.

A Righteous Man

This good man is accursed
By an ancestral dudgeon, stern old grudge,
Inherited from the first
Forefather of his surly race,
Which has imprinted on his brow
The vehement prophet and inveterate judge.
These you will see,
Looking at him, and the wrongous dignity
Of an old, obstinate, half-sculptured stone
That will not bow
To the artist’s gentle hand and be,
What it should be, a kindly human face.
The dudgeon, which is ours, we must forgive.
But why should he hand on
The wrong so ostentatiously,
As if to bear that burden were to live,
And there were nothing to say
But that we must, and yet can never pay?
Lord, fling into his face
The gift, it seems, that never can be
His choice, Your grace.

EDWIN MUIR (1979)

To read last week's Poem of the Week, "Epitaph for Many Young Men" by George Barker, click here.

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