{"id":268,"date":"2012-04-16T19:00:22","date_gmt":"2012-04-16T19:00:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/?p=268"},"modified":"2012-07-02T17:19:42","modified_gmt":"2012-07-02T17:19:42","slug":"edwin-muir-1887-1959","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/afterlife\/edwin-muir-1887-1959\/","title":{"rendered":"Edwin Muir (1887-1959)"},"content":{"rendered":"

1960 (posthumous) \u2018Complaint of the Dying Peasantry\u2019<\/strong><\/h3>\n

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:<\/p>\n

Sir Patrick Spens put out to sea
\nIn all the country cottages
\nWith music and ceremony
\nFor five centuries.<\/p>\n

Till Scott and Hogg, the robbers, came
\nAnd nailed the singing tragedies down
\nIn dumb letters under a name
\nAnd led the bothy to the town.<\/p>\n

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\u2014thus paralleling the plot of the original ballad.<\/p>\n

[Excerpts from: ‘Complaint of the Dying Peasantry’, Collected Poems.<\/em> (London: Faber and Faber, 1963 [1960]). p. 1.Elizabeth Huberman, The Poetry of Edwin Muir: the Field of Good and Ill.<\/em> (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971). p. 75.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

1960 (posthumous) \u2018Complaint of the Dying Peasantry\u2019 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: … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":39,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30366],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-268","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afterlife"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/39"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=268"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":468,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/268\/revisions\/468"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=268"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=268"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/sirpatrickspens\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=268"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}