The Magi - Henry Siddons Mowbray

Epiphany, the Light for the Way, falls just over the threshold of each new year.

As the fatherly advice at the opening of the main story of A House Not Made With Hands goes: "Plough a straight furrow, lad. Fix your eye on the far side and never look back."

Here, Muir's poem is complemented by the work of figurative artist, Daniel Gerhartz. The scenes are quiescent, yet inspiring, charged with an optimism that verges on the sacred and captures the extraordinary in the everyday. His dreamy luminism has the clarity of a vision and becomes almost an experience of life in a timeless parenthesis. Some of his paintings echo those of Joaquin Sorolla.

Friend, I have lost the way.
The way leads on.
Is there another way?
The way is one.
I must retrace the track.
It’s lost and gone.
Back, I must travel back!
None goes there, none.
Then I’ll make here my place,
(The road leads on),
Stand still and set my face,
(The road leaps on),
Stay here, for ever stay.
None stays here, none.
I cannot find the way.
The way leads on.
Oh places I have passed!
That journey’s done.
And what will come at last?
The road leads on.

Edwin Muir, courtesy of the Scottish Poetry Library

first published in The Labyrinth (Faber, 1949) and included in Collected Poems (Faber, 1984)