Cold War - take2theweb

The Horses Edwin Muir (1952)

Edwin Muir 1887-1959 

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Edwin Muir was born on the remote Orkney Islands to the north of Scotland in 1887. His father was a tenant farmer but he lost his land when Muir was fourteen. Muir then moved with his family to Glasgow in 1901, where he remained for 18 years. The family lived in a poor part of the city. His life as a young man in Glasgow was a depressing experience for him, involving a succession of unpleasant jobs. During the early 1920s Muir travelled in Europe. Muir wrote poetry and plays and earned his living as an editor, translator and literary critic. He poetry is personal and often dreamlike and reflects the age that he lived in (through two World Wars and their aftermath, writing some of his best poems towards the end of his life, at the height of The Cold War).

What was The Cold War? 

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The Cold War (1945–1991) was the continuing state of political conflict resulting from the end of WW2 between the USSR and the western world. Although the primary participants' military forces never officially clashed directly, they expressed the conflict through military coalitions, strategic conventional force deployments, a nuclear arms race, espionage, proxy wars, propaganda, and technological competition, e.g. the space race.

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The Soviet Union created the Eastern Bloc with the eastern European countries it occupied, annexing some as Soviet Socialist Republics and maintaining others as satellite states. The US and some western European countries established containment of communism as a defensive policy. Several such countries also coordinated the rebuilding of western Europe, especially western Germany, which the USSR opposed. Elsewhere, in Latin America (Cuba) and Southeast Asia (Korea mainly) the USSR fostered communism and revolutions.

The height of the Cold War: 

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The Berlin Blockade (24 June 1948 – 11 May 1949) was one of the first major international crises of the Cold War and the first such crisis that resulted in casualties. The Soviet Union blocked the Western Allies' railway and road access to the sectors of Berlin under their control. In response, the Western Allies organized the Berlin Airlift to carry supplies to the people of Berlin. The United States Airforce, the RAF, and other Commonwealth nations flew over 200,000 flights providing 13,000 tons of food daily to Berlin in an operation lasting almost a year. The success of the Airlift was humiliating to the Soviets The Berlin Crisis 1961 = Berlin Wall built The Cuban Missile Crisis 1962

Tension at home  

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http://www.secretbunker.co.uk/ Hidden beneath an innocent Scottish Farmhouse in the middle of a secluded field in Fife, a tunnel leads to, Scotland’s Secret Bunker: 24,000 square feet of Secret accommodation, the size of two football pitches, one on top of another, on two levels, 100 feet underground. Had there been a Nuclear War, this is where Scotland, would have been Governed from. They would have survived, you wouldn’t. Along with military personnel there would have been a fully equipped and staffed BBC sound studio. They would have issued emergency broadcasts with all other radio and TV channels ‘off air’. All this time personnel would never see daylight, they couldn’t even shower as uncontaminated water was too precious a commodity and remember they may have had to stay underground for over three months. http://bbc.co.uk/schoolradio/history/worldwar2audioclipslibrary_clip02.sht ml

The Horses background information The poem ‘The Horses’ describes a future way of life that will be like the simple farming life of the past.  This way of life will be like how it used to be in the Garden of Eden. There will be no industry or technology. Man will once again be close to nature and animals. The roots of this poem lie in Muir’s experience of life:  His life as a boy on a remote island was sheltered compared to the disorder and uproar of life in Glasgow.  In Glasgow first his father, then his two brothers, and then his mother died in the space of a few years.  Thus he began to imagine and long for a more innocent way of life, close to the earth like in his childhood. 

Influences 

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The horror of twentieth century world wars influenced the poem. Like many writers of the twentieth century Muir thought a future war might wipe out the world as we know it. The central idea in the poem is that people ought to live a life of hard work close to the earth. Calvinism is a religion that proposes a life of strict innocence based on hard work, closeness to the soil and avoidance of pleasure. Calvin’s ideas were central to the Presbytarian religion that Muir grew up in. In this religion only a small portion of people would get in to heaven after God angrily destroys the world. Muir seems to think the good people are those who live close to the earth. Written in 1952 at the height of The Cold War

What is it about? 

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Muir creates a speaker or narrator from the future who describes recent history. The descriptions of events at sea suggest he is on an island, similar to where Muir grew up. The poem is futuristic. The speaker is like a survivor describing the new, recovered earth after a Third World War. It is a dream-like poem that contains farming imagery straight from the poet’s childhood on the farm in the Orkney Islands. The poem refers to mysterious horses that come to help humans rebuild their life. These horses represent a new world. At the end of the bible, in the Book of Revelations, four horses were a signal for the end of the world. In this poem, Muir imagines one world has ended and a new one has begun. The horses that ended the world in the bible, return to help build the new world, a world close to nature.

Now read the poem…