The Transmutation - Poem by Edwin Muir

The Transmutation

        - By Edwin Muir

That all should change to ghost and glance and gleam,

And so transmuted stand beyond all change,

And we be poised between the unmoving dream

And the sole moving moment - this is strange.

Past all contrivance, word, or image, or sound,

Or silence, to express, that we who fall

Through time's long ruin should weave this phantom ground

And in its ghastly borders gather all.

There incorruptible the child plays still,

The lover waits beside the trysting tree,

The good hour spans its heaven, and the ill,

Rapt in their silent immortality,

As in commemoration of a day

That having been can never pass away.

The Road - Poem By Edwin Muir

The Road

     - By Edwin Muir

There is a road that turning always

Cuts off the country of Again.

Archers stand there on every side

And as it runs time's deer is slain,

And lies where it has lain.

That busy clock shows never an hour.

All flies and all in flight must tarry.

The hunter shoots the empty air

Far on before the quarry.

Which falls though nothing's there to parry.

The lion couching in the centre

With mountain head and sunset brow

Rolls down the everlasting slope

Bones picked an age ago,

And the bones rise up and go.

There the beginning finds the end

Before beginning ever can be,

And the great runner never leaves

The starting and the finishing tree,

The budding and the fading tree.

There the ship sailing safe in harbour

Long since in many a sea was drowned.

The treasure burning in her hold

So near will never be found,

Sunk past all sound.

There a man on a summer evening

Reclines at ease upon his tomb

And is his mortal effigy

And there within the womb

The cell of doom,

The ancestral deed is thought and done,

And in the million Edens fall

A million Adams drowned in darkness,

For small is great and great is small,

And a blind seed all.