Writers on Reading

from Poetry of the Second World War

Reading in Wartime

by Edwin Muir

Boswell by my bed, 

Tolstoy on my table; 

Thought the world has bled 

For four and a half years, 

And wives' and mothers' tears 

Collected would be able 

To water a little field 

Untouched by anger and blood, 

A penitential yield 

Somewhere in the world; 

Though in each latitude 

Armies like forest fall, 

The iniquitous and the good 

Head over heels hurled, 

And confusion over all: 

Boswell's turbulent friend 

And his deafening verbal strife, 

Ivan Ilych's death 

Tell me more about life, 

The meaning and the end 

Of our familiar breath, 

Both being personal, 

Than all the carnage can, 

Retrieve the shape of man, 

Lost and anonymous, 

Tell me wherever I look 

That not one soul can die 

Of this or any clan 

Who is not one of us 

And has a personal tie 

Perhaps to someone now 

Searching an ancient book, 

Folk-tale or country song 

In many and many a tongue, 

To find the original face, 

The individual soul, 

The eye, the lip, the brow 

For ever gone from their place, 

And gather an image whole.

Edwin Muir (15 May 1887 – 3 January 1959) was an Orcadian poet, novelist and translator, born on a farm in Deerness, a parish and peninsula in Mainland, Orkney. He is remembered for his deeply felt and vivid poetry in plain language with few stylistic preoccupations.  He moved to Glasgow but was not satisfied as this extract from his diary suggests:
"I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time-accidents happened to me. Then in 1751 I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751, but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two-days' journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul that invisible leeway. No wonder I am obsessed with Time." (Extract from Diary 1937–39.)

Poetry of the Second World War: An International Anthology, Desmond Graham, ed. Chatto & Windus, Lond, 1995.