Good and Evil in Horses The concepts of good and evil resonate throughout the work of Scottish poet Edwin Muir. In Muir's important poem “The Horses”, guilt and innocence, good and evil are also clearly visible. But the poem is not artistically sabotaged by this, as many of these poems are. “The Horses” is about the unexpected return, after an apocalypse, of new horses who restore “long-lost archaic companionship” with the surviving humans. The narrator condemns the “bad old world” that caused the damage: Just a year after the Seven Day War that put the world to sleep, late in the evening the strange horses arrived. By now we had made our pact with silence, but in the first few days it was so quiet that we listened to our breathing and we were afraid. On the second day the radios failed; we turned the knobs; no response. But on the third day a warship passed us, heading north, with corpses piled up on the deck. On the sixth day a plane crashed above us into the sea. Then nothing. The radios are silent. And they are still in the corners of our kitchens, and are, perhaps, lit in a million rooms, all over the world. But now if they were to speak, if suddenly they spoke again, if at the stroke of noon a voice spoke, we would not listen, we would not allow it to carry with it that bad old world that quickly swallowed its children in one great gulp. We wouldn't have that anymore. . .Have Armageddon and its aftermath ever been imagined more powerfully and palpably? Yet, I don't think the extraordinary vividness of the poetry is the strong point of "The Horses". Its special power lies in the way the cataclysm evokes Muir's most constant theme: the renewal of that “archaic long-lost” link between life and the world even in the face of catastrophe (“Our life has changed; the their arrival is our beginning”).