‘The Horses’ is one of the best-known and most widely studied poems by the Scottish poet Edwin Muir (1887-1959). The poem (not to be confused with Muir’s early poem ‘Horses’) was published in his 1956 collection One Foot in Eden. You can read ‘The Horses’ here before proceeding to our analysis of the poem below.

Morgan worked in a wide range of forms and styles, from the sonnet to concrete poetry. His Collected Poems appeared in 1990. He has also translated from a wide range of languages, including Russian, Hungarian, French, Italian, Latin, Spanish, Portuguese, German and Old English (Beowulf).

‘Strawberries’ captures a moment of immensely vivid memory, with Morgan recalling an afternoon of freedom and passion eating strawberries and making love.

In 1999 he became Glasgow’s first official Poet Laureate and a year later received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Most recently, in 2004, Morgan became Scotland’s first official national poet or ‘Scots Makar’, charged with ‘representing and promoting Scots poetry’.

Morgan uses the term “instamatic” to describe a type of poetry which is instantaneous and documentary in feel. Morgan has said that these poems were based on real events that he had either seen reported on television or read about in the newspapers.

Glasgow, United Kingdom
Edwin Morgan/Place of birth
One of Scotland’s most beloved poets, and Glasgow’s first poet laureate, Edwin Morgan, was born in Glasgow and lived there for most of his life.

Edwin Morgan
Edwin Morgan1920 – 2010.

A strawberry is actually a multiple fruit which consists of many tiny individual fruits embedded in a fleshy receptacle. The cultivated strawberry is a hybrid of two different parent species. Because they are hybrids, cultivated strawberries are often able to adapt to extreme weather conditions and environments.

The clash of ideas makes oxymorons striking and unsettling, so this use of the technique here tells us immediately that something is wrong. That phrase “ragged diamond” is a metaphor for the broken glass surrounding the falling couple.

Glasgow sonnet is a touching poem written by Edwin Morgan and is about how Glasgow used to be, years ago and the effects that it had on people.

Edwin Muir’s “The Horses,” a free-verse narrative poem of fifty-three lines, opens to the reader a future that may have seemed all too possible at the time of its composition in the 1950’s. In the opening lines, “Barely a twelvemonth after/ The seven days war that put the world to…

The main theme of the poem seems to focus on the way in which man has domesticated nature, but yet how nature itself, symbolised in the form of the horses, still has immense power and might. Man, by the end of the poem, is shown to be diminished by its domestication of nature, and to be left the poorer as a result.

Secondly, placing the set poems within a wider view of Morgan’s life and work, and also written at an accessible level, is the ASLS Scotnote, The Poetry of Edwin Morgan. This pays attention to the set poems, but also to the development of his writing and reputation, and it draws on my work as the poet’s biographer.

Morgan was an intelligent only child, often in adult company, and very alert to voices, and what accents and tones might mean. Travelling was always a sort of entertainment for him, and just being in Glasgow, he once said, was like being in a play. It was surprising, dramatic, comic or tragic – you never knew who would walk on-stage next.

The subjects in A Second Life ranged from the dispossessed and marginalised populations of Glasgow, in all the misery of the tenements due for demolition, to the trio walking up Sauchiehall Street, ‘laughter ringing them round like a guard’ as well as poets, Marilyn Monroe and Edith Piaf.

A book of poems in his honour, Unknown Is Best, was produced to celebrate Morgan’s eightieth birthday in 2000. His own poem, ‘At Eighty’, was characteristic of the poet’s work, faring forward into the future, embracing change: ‘Push the boat out, compañeros / Push the boat out, whatever the seas…. push it all out into the unknown!