1960 (posthumous) ‘Complaint of the Dying Peasantry’

In ‘Complaint’ Muir despairs the loss of the ‘old songs’, valorizing oral culture over a paper one. He sees ‘Sir Patrick Spens shut in a book’ and contemporary writers as ‘newspapermen’. Muir writes:

Sir Patrick Spens put out to sea
In all the country cottages
With music and ceremony
For five centuries.

Till Scott and Hogg, the robbers, came
And nailed the singing tragedies down
In dumb letters under a name
And led the bothy to the town.

Muir equates Skipper Spens with the independence and honour of the traveling bard, a man of the people, the ‘peasantry’, who was oppressed and ‘put out to sea’ to die—thus paralleling the plot of the original ballad.

[Excerpts from: ‘Complaint of the Dying Peasantry’, Collected Poems. (London: Faber and Faber, 1963 [1960]). p. 1.Elizabeth Huberman, The Poetry of Edwin Muir: the Field of Good and Ill. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). p. 75.]