SOURCE: Knight, Roger. “The Three Mirrors.” In Edwin Muir: An Introduction to His Work, pp. 123-38. London and New York: Longman Group Ltd., 1980.

In the following essay from an academic study on Muir, Knight examines the influence of Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil in Muir's poetry, particularly “The Three Mirrors.” In addition to analyzing several other poems, including “The Myth” and “Comfort in Self-Despite,” the author draws upon Muir's An Autobiography and other autobiographical essays to explicate Muir's understanding of Nietzsche's ideas.

The Narrow Place collection closed with a prayer, “The Day.” It is a poem that could with equal appropriateness have opened the 1946 volume, The Voyage. Written during the same period of enforced tranquillity as produced “The Question,” “The Day” looks forward to a new spiritual freedom that is indeed the feature of the later volume. And just as “The Question” had seemed to spring from a...