Radios In Edwin Muir's The Horses

Edwin Muir’s “The Horses” is a poem that is based “on a fantasy at the end times after a war has occurred” (Steen 13). The poem covers a variety of topics; one in particular is the eagerness to live without tractors and radios. This can be seen near the beginning of the poem where it says, “We would not listen, we would not let it bring/ That old bad world that swallowed its children quick/ At one gulp./ We would not have it again./ Sometimes we think of the nation’s lying asleep,/ Curled Blindly in impenetrable sorrow” (lines 18-22). Radios in the poem are casted off for the reason that they do not want to be a part of a world that turns on them. Tractors are treated rather the same way, however during wartime shortages of natural resources