‘This was the good town once’

A commentary on my last blog, from a 1949 poem , ‘The Good Town’, by the Orcadian poet Edwin Muir, contemplating the ruins of post-war Europe and asking himself how such terrible events could have come about—the question we must once more be asking ourselves every day and every night. Muir’s answer is the most disturbing of all—that the ‘answer’ is not Israel, or Hamas, or Russia (or, in other decades, America or Britain) but it, ultimately, in ourselves. In the global world, there are, in the end, no bystanders.

How did it come?
From outside, so it seemed, an endless source,
Disorder inexhaustible, strange to us,
Incomprehensible. Yet sometimes now
We ask ourselves, we the old citizens:
‘Could it have come from us? Was our peace peace?
Our goodness goodness? That old life was easy
And kind and comfortable; but evil is restless
And gives no rest to the cruel or the kind.
How could our town grow wicked in a moment?
What is the answer? Perhaps no more than this,
That once the good men swayed our lives, and those
Who copied them took a while the hue of goodness,
A passing loan; while now the bad are up,
And we, poor ordinary neutral stuff,
Not good nor bad, must ape them as we can,
In sullen rage or vile obsequiousness.
Say there’s a balance between good and evil
In things, and it’s so mathematical,
So finely reckoned that a jot of either,
A bare preponderance will do all you need,
Make a town good, or make it what you see.
But then, you’ll say, only that jot is wanting,
That grain of virtue. No: when evil comes
All things turn adverse, and we must begin
At the beginning, heave the groaning world
Back in its place again, and clamp it there.
Then all is hard and hazardous. We have seen
Good men made evil wrangling with the evil,
Straight minds grown crooked fighting crooked minds.
Our peace betrayed us; we betrayed our peace.
Look at it well. This was the good town once.’

These thoughts we have, walking among our ruins.