On Edwin Muir's The Grove Poem by Sally Evans

Here's to your smothering grove.
You tarried in it lamely
while travelling lands afar,
training your blinded eyes on
a murky terrain stretching,
spreading to high horizon.
Nor was this mountaineering
or was this mountaineering?
A knapsack and a kerchief,
a folded map with trees on
and flourishes for seas on,
fresh intellectual fashions,
manna and faith for rations.

I know your smothering grove.
I seek its peopled bowers,
love skirmishing with dragons,
hunt hidden howling corners.
I do not share your feeling
of owl or eagle wheeling
above the vegetation
from heavenly lookout station.
The grove is all around us,
and you are right, it smothers,
you are so right. You found us,
the sea is all around us.

So, rhythmic theologian,
earlier, cleverer crosser
of Anglo-Scottish border,
my strangest predecessor,
for me your smothering mazes
are mumbo jumbo places,
and your strange dream creations
lamentations, , incantations.
Your stories' spells must be
in my untheology.
Yet they release, unsmother
as rarely any other.
I utter them, still puzzling.

1981