EDWIN MUIRの詩における宗教的主題

抄録

Edwin Muir is, like many other modern poets, obsessed by the theme of Time and Eternity, which is skillfully worked out in his poems by employing many popular Biblical stories as well as Greek myths, expressing the anxieties of the age and man's ambivalent attitude toward Eternity. This persistent pursuit of the fundamental gives a religious atmosphere to his poetry, accompanied by his wistfulness for the days of innocence among the idyllic scenes of the Orkney Islands, which are in his vision transformed into those of Eden. We come to recognize, therefore, that it is indispensable that we regard his poems in close relations to his childhood and the Biblical vision peculiar to him. Among his images a most recurring one is a road, partly because Muir has led a wandering life both spiritually and residentially, and partly because a white road running on the green hill in his native land has been deeply impressed upon his mind. So he considered our life as nothing but a journey, and even the commonest journey of men on some trivial errand transfigures itself into a pilgrimage to his eye. And in his mind's journey he goes back to the immemorial days exploring what we were before the Fall, aided by dreams and hallucinations in which our racial memory betrays itself out of the unconscious dark. In his later works, looking down on the time-ridden world from the Garden of Eden, he shows us what we are, presenting a marked contrast to what we should be. In this process of probing into the present and the past, he indicates the future-the Millennium in which 'the long-lost archaic friendship' between men and animals is to be restored; and, as a herald of the Millennium, an apocalyptic horse makes its appearance, Lsuggesting us the end of our journey and the place where we are. In addition to this, Muir's increasing stress is upon the close affinity between God and man. Accordingly, he continues to insist that the Fall of Adam is all the more significant, because every human being must experience the similar fall when he grows out of infancy and because 'realization of the Fall is a realization of a universal event'; and that Christ becomes all the more real as the Saviour, because he lived an ordinary man's life, suffering from all the mundane agonies, in spite of the fact that he is the Son of God. Muir does not acclaim God sonorously, but his solitary soul, while his body is ensnared in the labyrinth of Time, calmly praises Him and His works in all sincerity, hoping for the blissful tranquillity in which men and beasts shall enjoy a happy coexistence, bound together by natural piety. This integrity of purpose in his life and work makes us realize his poems as a coherent, organic whole, and besides, makes us imagine an innocent and faithful farmer in Muir who sows Light and Wisdom, and cultivate our minds with Poetry.