Did they ever speak like yon in Langholm? A psychogeography of Scottish poetry.
Why are the results of modern Scottish poetry so disappointing? The corroding effects of bilingualism have been remarked on by all commentators. It may simply be true, although so many partisans have said this, that Scots (and Northumbrians, Welsh, etc.) find it hard to write emotionally in the Standard, South-East Midland, language; compared even to lower-class people from close to its home. Writing in Scots, after schooling in English, is hard to learn: the transition from domestic oral fluency to written fluency is a high ridge which most aspirants fail to cross. Finally, class problems, of selfconsciousness, anxiety, etc., affect Scottish writers more, even, than English ones: Scotland is a bilingual country split on class lines, England isn't. The Scottish poetry market is restricted, marketing in England is unthinkable, and the pressures to broaden your appeal are crushing; you can just about get a book out if your appeal is broad, but if you want to write in an unfamiliar way, the splintering effect reduces your audience to dozens: solidarity is not merely invoked incessantly in Scottish poetry but is an economic necessity. I suspect that publication problems mean that poetry simply doesn't get written. Besides, once there is an identifiable way of writing Scottish poetry, a foray into originality and new realms will be decried as unScottish; inventing a new linguistic realm is tantamount to emigration, and therefore to disloyalty.
Diglossia and class
Scottish history differs from English because the latter country did not have to come to terms with a pathologically violent, domineering, and bloodthirsty neighbour. Is the choice between English and Scots based on a psychological difference? Although agreeing that there is a close link between language and personality, I seriously doubt that the difference between the two languages is such as to constrain anyone, since character can be expressed via stylistic modification of either language. In the perspective of general linguistics, the two languages are rather similar; indeed, the resemblances are dramatic. It's not as if we were talking about Greek and Turkish. This means, of course, that English people should make the effort to read Scots poetry. The difference between the two languages is one of social class. This ascription outside the ascriptions of the text threatens to crush the poet into a tiny repetitive territory at the same time as it offers effortless, muggy, tribal patch identification. The first problem is to acquire autonomy from this roaring system which overwrites the meanings of the poet. Where does the aggression and territorialisation in the system come from? only from the people inside it. The hostility which intimidates Scottish poets comes from Scottish people. The ports where aggression enters the circulation are the utterance of defiance and intransigence, which is also demanded of the poet. Scottish politics, certainly until the Seventies, were characterized, as Andrew Marr remarks, by a violence of assertion, digging and palisading positions which, however, were not meant to be put into practice. J.R. Hale remarks in War and Society in Renaissance Europe, on 'the belief that men from certain regions-Scotland, Gascony, Corsica, Switzerland, the Romagna, Croatia-Dalmatia-were by nature such natural soldiers that they arrived in the spirit of volunteers, as vocational soldiers in posse.' Scotland was a violent society until the seventeenth century, even if the really large-scale stuff was the work of the English; local aristocratic factions defended their interests by mobilising armed men, a hunting-pack cohesion which defined disloyalty as shameful. The Highlands retained archaic Scottish customs for longer, conservative but not foreign. The eighteenth century settlement demilitarised Scotland while leaving intact the psychological structures which had made family or religious associations formidable in war. Modern thinking about politics, or poetry, had to compete with the set of inherited loyalties which defined it, at first, as infidelity. If you stood fast behind the battlements, you appealed to the audience even if you wrote terrible poetry. The analogy with drunkenness exposes a kind of insincere subjectivity, a warmth of feeling which is disavowed in the cold light of day; a treacherous model for poetry. A poet who tries to evoke these full-blooded polarisations - class war, anti-English hatred, anti-Catholic hatred, Celtic nationalism - finds himself a guignol, a blustering puppet from the Charlemagne cycle opera dei pupi, a rodomontade - because no-one is actually going to muster in those uprisings. In the thirteenth century, the poet could narrate the joys of the nation smiting and routing the national enemy, with a kind of hunter's bragging and verbal trophies; the reduction of conflict to aesthetics in Scotland made it impossible to make conflict into works of art. Prowess and pride, therefore violence also, are socially admired, especially in the West of the country, as narrated notably by William McIlvanney and Gordon Williams, and we can be grateful if it expresses itself merely as pugnacious and blustering literary opinions rather than as armed factions. We can also be grateful to a poet like Alastair Mackie, whose scepticism limited his own flights, but was a reproof to national literary vices. Of course Scotland is run more by the sceptics than by the hotheads.
The Scottish poet has to orient himself in three sets of linguistic coordinates, geographical, social-class, and ethnic. The other coordinate frame is the theory of history; given that history has gone wrong, a founding disaster which Scottish poets find it easy to accept, writing has to locate itself in a theory of solution, which implies also a version of what it was went wrong. Some versions are Socialist (the disaster is capitalism), nationalist (the disaster is 1603 or 1707), Catholic (the disaster is the Reformation, the 1560s), traditional Highland (the disaster is the Clearances). Writers who reject the course of events after 1603 tend to exclude words and objects which postdate that year, and of course the English language.
Raymond Vettese, a representationalist poet, writes, "Scots was the language of my parents and myself (...) and therefore, I think, came from deeper sources than my English efforts. English had always been the language of the classroom. We were taught to 'speak properly' at my primary school. There was something of the delight of the illicit in speaking 'improperly' while gathered in our gangs outside the picture house on Saturday afternoon or in shouting and cursing while playing football in the Green Park." The place was Montrose in Angus. The appeal he identifies is negative prestige, the identification, described by the dialectologist Peter Trudgill, of reproved speech patterns as independent and virile and solidary.
We can't wholly separate literary styles from speech patterns. Aitken points out that the Scottish aristocracy acquired an English accent in the 17th C, as part of entering the lucrative English (landed) marriage market; this entrained the anglicization of the Scottish bourgeoisie, as a service class to the landowner; with a lag, but massively already before 1750. Literature had, as expected, anticipated this shift. So the situation at the time of Burns, as now, was the classic one of diastraty: there is a speech of maximum prestige, which corresponds to RP English, and of minimum prestige, which is the least anglicized (and most 'Scottish'); there is a continuous variation between these two, with almost every position occupied by some speakers; the linguistic position of a speaker between these two poles corresponds to their social status; education, administration, and publishing take place entirely in something close to the upmost norm; the norm which is anglicized phonetically also has the widest vocabulary, the most elaborate (latinate) syntactic structures, and the highest percentage of Latin words. This shows similarities to the sociolinguistic structure of Dublin, Jamaica, and New York. Scots is a 'sociologically incomplete' language. The flowers of language which sound so well on the football pitch or in the pub may sound conformist, aggressive, and brainless in a poem.
The 'schizoid' relationship to England applies also to the English language. Scotland is a country with two languages: Scots and English. (I omit the Gaidhealtacht.) This fact is unpalatable to many Scots on political grounds, nonetheless it is quite wrong to ignore the important role of English in Scotland in official use and in middle-class domestic life. This is the life basis for the Scottish writers who use English. These are of course more numerous than those who use Scots. The language struggle can be better understood if we recall that it is taking place between Scots. The count in Dunn's anthology is: poets in Scots, 16; in Gaelic, 6 in English, 51. (Some of the first two categories write in English as well.) Like almost every dialect in Europe, Scots has been enormously helped by the very factors - education, urbanization - which threaten its continued existence.
The location of power
The issue of starting up a separate government in Edinburgh is quite secondary to the issue of the reliance of Scotland on international capitalism. As the Checklands point out in their book on 19th C Scotland, transformations in the structure of capital in the late 19th C swept up, over several decades, all large corporations in Scotland into British (later, transnational) corporations, with chief executives and boards in London. Combined with the residence of the Scottish peerage and large landowners, and MPs, in London, this meant that there was no locally visible employer larger than a small farmer. (This was already true in the 1920s, but has certainly intensified since.) This export was combined, at the time, with fabulous success in the export of heavy engineering products, a branch whose capital demands were the spur to huge consolidated concerns less susceptible to downturns in the market. The early Scots Nationalists were faced with a baffling vacuum of authority; no-one to argue with them and no-one to listen to them. The secular decline of all branches of heavy industry, and of the Atlantic ports, has caused the Scottish crisis; it's quite incredible that an Edinburgh government could have arrested it. Given the virtual absence of purely Scottish firms and investment agencies, any putative SNP government would have the choice between an Algerian-style mass nationalisation (with a following boycott on investment by external banks and firms, and the abrupt cutting-off of the foreign-owned firms which dominate Scottish manufacturing) and import substitution, or a regime of tax breaks, reduced social costs, fiscal subsidy, deregulation, and union busting, to lure foreign capital in. Given the European political climate, we can be fairly certain that the SNP would in practice tax Scottish citizens to subsidize and attract foreign-owned employers. By contemplating this schizoid truth, we can appreciate the schizoid relationship already existing between the thinking Scots voter and the English State (or London-based international capitalism).
Home Rule for Scotland was on the Liberal Party's agenda already in the 1880s; the twisted path of history seems to have been that the mass influx of Irish into Scotland in the 1840s and subsequent decades (they were systematically used as strikebreakers and rate-cutting scab labour) aroused such wrath in Scotland that Scottish Liberal MPs split the party rather than be associated with the policy of Irish Home Rule. The 'unionist' part of the Conservative Party's name comes from a fusion with the breakaway Scottish Liberals. The assertion of Scotophilia had as its train the disappearance of the policy of Home Rule for Scotland. Scottish xenophobia is in practice directed, not against the remote and virtual English, but against the Irish in Scotland. Archaic assertions of Scottish identity, in a terrain full of Orange lodges, are likely to cause bloody polarization between Catholic and Protestant in Western Scotland. The SNP has had nil electoral success in certain areas of the (de-)industrialized West where there is a massive identification of the Catholic voter with the Labour Party. One has to look at questions of 'race' and 'the deep past' with extreme caution. Geographically, Glasgow has to be linked to Belfast and Liverpool; all three split on religious lines; all three felled by the mysterious devastation of the Atlantic.
This vacuum of authority had two contradictory effects. First, it led to an absurd over-rating of the parochial (or, perhaps, burghal) level, a poetic attitude which was interested in where you came from but not in your ideas or feelings. Second, it allowed a burst of radical intellectual speculation, unhindered by the need to justify day-to-day political wriggles or to be polarized by constant argument. Modern Scottish poetry has an intellectual acuity and scope quite missing from English poetry of the same period. Decentralization could take the form of determining the intellectual in Aberdeen or on Lewis to study and solve all the questions of the cosmos for him- or herself. Calvinism had in fact predisposed the population to this kind of radical distrust of authority. The basic questions of sovereignty (the English link) and economic organization (the attachment to capitalism) were not shirked. Brand's work on Nationalism remarks on the detachment since the 1960s of Scottish intellectuals from the Nationalist cause. Evidently this followed the electoral success of the SNP; they could provoke radical thought when they were a party of (inchoate) ideas, not as a practical association running various towns and parishes (often rather badly).
As for geography, MacDiarmid wrote, in the (1939) introduction to his 1940 Golden Treasury of Scottish Poetry: 'Recent Scottish poetry has been trying to reclaim a little of its lost territory. (...) That movement back to the ancient Gaelic classics and then North to Iceland and then East to Persia and India is the course the refluence of a Gaelic genius must take (...) In The Chronicles of Eri (...) -the great odyssey whose course we must thus retrace (...) is shown as having begun near Caucasian Georgia (where the story of Tristan and Iseult had its origin), whence came the migration westward that led to the esablishment of our Gaelic peoples. (...) here the greatest perspective, and the key to all the others, is revealed, and it is undoubtedly for this that Yeats and Morris and many other poets in the past half century or so have cast to the North and the Far East. (...) 2000 years BC is a bagatelle; the Edda refers to exploits of about 3380-3350 BC, and Dr. Albert's edition of The Chronicles of Eri is well entitled 'Six Thousand Years of Gaelic Grandeur Unearthed'.' Of course this is fantastic nonsense. Many of MacD's ideas belong to fringe science. (The translation of the purely mythical material of the Edda into history is owed to L.A. Waddell; the Chronicles of Eri are crazed nationalist nonsense published by Roger O'Connell in 1836.) The point is the dissolution of the consensual reality which makes change seem impossible and thought seem unnecessary. Even Kenneth White, whose prose utterances seldom stray from a personal ideal of niminy-piminy gobbledegook, has to be commended for unorthodoxy and temporal depth. (I recall that Hector Boece traced the origin of the Picts to Denmark, and of the Scots to Egypt.) At the time MacD wrote this, the 'official version' of Scottish history was partial and scanty, a victim of academic 'underdevelopment'; the resources to controvert him and Waddell really weren't there. Only since 1960 has historiography really been able to answer 'what was Scottish social structure in the 15th C?' or 'what happened in Scotland in the Dark Ages?'. But this progress has been a by-product of Nationalism, whose founding father was MacDiarmid H. The coronation ceremony of the mediaeval Scottish kings was an outdoor event at which the candidate stood on a ritual stone and a bard recited in Gaelic the genealogy which was the legal argument for his succession. For me, MacDiarmid's evocation of a mythical past resembles and clarifies the 9th century construction of an eminent royal genealogy for Kenneth McAlpin, founder of the Kingdom of Scots. "Needless to say, the forty-five kings from 'Fergus I' to Fergus, son of Erc, were a fabrication, typical of the Irish readiness to present claims to territory and allegiance in genealogical form" (details in Scotland, the making of a nation, by Gordon Donaldson); the much later consolidation of the Scottish kingdom in something like its modern form involved the 'hundred kings' invented by some shadowy shannachie and recited, at the Stone of Scone, on the Tay, by a Gaelic bard in a legitimizing rite. (The term 'Irish' is used here with perfect objectivity, we understand the Dalriadic genealogies precisely because of Eoin MacNeill's work on the Irish genealogies, and because the Dalriads came from Ireland.) Scottish poets have frequently been called on to secure some kind of political authority. The past (as content of bardic knowledge and source of valid law) has presented itself in the form of a phantasmagoria, a genre which pervades Scottish literature, not only in the shadowy 'hundred kings of Dal Riada' but in the works of Burns, MacDiarmid, Garioch, Morgan, Crawford, and W.N. Herbert (especially). Dynastic prophecy and religious visions have never been quite separate, in the rimy Northern wastes, from satire and speculative drunkenness.
I want to stress the groundbreaking nature of MacDiarmid's gigantomania, which invented the terms of all subsequent debate despite his phobia for reason. He wanted to attack the legitimacy of the system of authority as he found it, and since that authority was rooted in 'specialist knowledge' of economists, agronomists, town planners, financiers, etc., he forcibly moved the centre of poetry to include that knowledge in its scope. He divagates on botany and geology as a 'cockfight' over legitimacy, a body-to-body bout to establish his credibility as a critic of the agricultural policy of Government and Tory landowners. Nothing else would do. It remains a crux, whether one can write political poetry without bringing the matters of administration into poetry; the alternative, of communalism where the assertion of group identity replaces thought and argument, is wilfully infantile.
Linguistic geography
The primary fact about modern Scottish poetry is the assertion of a national frontier where no administrative one exists, between the North and England. If we are thus moving away from legal boundaries to boundaries of human geography, one has to ask is this the place to draw the border? and is it the only border to be drawn?
When mediaeval kings issued a decree, they addressed it to five separate nationalities: Irish, English, Flemings, French, and Galwegian. (The first two mean Gaelic and Scots speakers, respectively.) Scotland is not a natural region, instead it was a state forged in the heat of the fight against English invasions in which quite disparate peoples were held together by a strong monarchy (or, alternately, ran bloody rampage under a weak monarchy). Since 1707 there has been only one State in Britain (after the personal union between two States in 1603); up till 1603 it was two; up till 1415 approximately it was four (counting Gwynedd and Powys); in 1066 it was perhaps ten. Up until 1263 there was a separate 'Viking' State of the Highlands, Isles, and Man, which was taken over, first by Norway and then by the Scottish crown. The area we know as Galloway and Cumbria was an independent group of earldoms in which the population most probably spoke a lost mixed language which we call Iro-Norse. The Scottish crown possessed the Cumbrian bit sporadically, forfeiting it to England as the result of a lost war in 1092. What we know as the Anglo-Scottish border has no ethnic reality, it did not, until after the depopulation caused by raids in wartime, form a dialect boundary; historically, the division occurred in the tenth century when a Scottish king conquered the Lothians while the Northumbrian kingdom was in difficulties from Viking invaders. South-east Scotland is a 'conquest', even though the Anglian speech of those parts became, mysteriously, the predominant speech of the whole country.
The fluid dynamics of languages in Scotland may become less baffling if we assume that the same factor which caused linguistic diversity also made linguistic uniformity desirable: the general harshness of the land made for a sparse population with generally poor communications, as it was unable to pay for elaborate road and bridge works. However, this also made trade vital, because the land did not produce everything necessary to life, and sparse settlement made the support of specialized craftsmen difficult. Further, it made large-scale movements desirable, most notably in the case of wandering pastoralists. Finally, there was a long coastline - the sea was, indeed, an excellent communication system. It was also by sea that new languages arrived - for example Anglian, Gaelic, and Norse. (A.C. Jackson points out the importance of the sea as an explaining factor of the known Pictish settlement pattern.) So we have a highly mobile population, strongly dependent on commercial towns, but in which broad areas have a very weak ability to form centres of cultural attraction or even any urban nuclei at all. This is the matrix which produces a linguistically divergent country with dynamic forces of linguistic convergence.
We can be sure that the first Irish missionaries who arrived in Western Scotland in the sixth century were literate, as they followed a religion of the book. However, the first continuous texts we have in Scots (Anglian) date from the end of the thirteenth century, the first Gaelic texts ('notitiae' of land grants from the Book of Deer, Deer being a monastery in Buchan) from the twelfth century; evidently the native social structure did not require written communication. Latin, Latin user, and texts, were a kind of enclave, selfreferential, leaning on foreign models and sources. The fifteenth century historian Hector Boece specifies, for the pre-Christian period: 'Thir constituciouns, and utheris devisit afoir be king Fergus, war collekkit to giddir in tabullis, and gevin in keping to the wisest and maist profounde clerk for the tyme...' We know Boece or his source was manfully fantasizing, because he says a few chapters later that no letters were known at that time. The failure to record native myths, laws, and histories implies a weakness of native institutions which is closely related to the failure of native languages to resist. Pictish and Cumbric are lost, but Scots and Gaelic are unrecorded (i.e. close to loss) in the centuries during which Pictish and Cumbric were still spoken. Since the writing and preservation of texts in other countries was reliant on institutions, and these again on the ownership of lands which yielded a surplus for the support of non-working monks, we can explain the dearth of texts either by the poverty of the land or the ability of the pastoral population to evade the kind of central authority which could ascribe serfs to monastic support. This lack of libraries and academies also tallies with some features of Celtic society; for example, the institution of 'dewar' (deoradh), the hereditary keeper of some relic or sacral object. The use of the family to do this implies the lack of other institutions capable of preserving culture across time. Again, we know that the church in Wales and Ireland used the hereditary principle, as authority belonged to the physical descendants of saints, as in Islam. Finally, the early Celtic church did not have academies (seminaries) or monasteries, but solitary wandering monks who trained novices (gwas, gille, ceile) as part of a personal bond. This process did not generate libraries or numerous literates. All of this sounds natural to a society which did not have towns or even (necessarily) permanent villages; the origin of Irish towns is ascribed to (later) monasteries, as the element Kil- (cella) reveals. I take it that, apart from the predominance of pastoralism (which did not lend itself to rich fiefs to be granted), the arable economy did not, because of the weather and perhaps poor equipment, allow a large expropriable surplus or even dense peasant settlement for tithing. It is striking how much of Anglo-Saxon literature, as we have it, is owed to the determination of a single king to turn writing and culture to a propaganda account. The physical survival of the texts is owed to the maintenance of the monasteries in possession of their lands - something else which depended ultimately on royal authority.
Target languages and folk languages
Many regions of Europe for long stretches of modern history have had a target language; that is, one different from the folk language but superimposed on it, used by the State and Church (or the towns, the valleys, etc.) and desired (more or less) by the folk as a means to social advancement and economic success. Since language is primarily a means of human communication (rather than of 'asserting cultural identity', which is a product of 19th century nationalism), the use of a language of merely local or rural currency is a serious obstacle in life. Anglian was at first the language only of the south-east, from the Forth to Berwick. Even this area has a strange history of Gaelic place-names and Gaelic legal documents during the gaelicizing period of the Scottish monarchy; the nobles of the south-east will at that time have spoken Gaelic, although evidently Anglian survived as the speech of the ordinary folk. ("as far as 'Lothian' is concerned, there is at most evidence of a temporary occupation and of the presence of a landowning Gaelic-speaking aristocracy and their followers for something like 150-200 years", Nicolaisen p.136). In the rest of the country, Caithness passed from Pictish to Norse to Gaelic (probably), thence to Scots. Aberdeen and Buchan passed from Pictish to Norse to Gaelic and then to Anglian. The Outer Hebrides passed from an unidentified language (probably Pictish or British) to Norse, and then in the sixteenth century to Gaelic, which is now giving way to English; the inner islands were Gaelicized from a very early stage, perhaps the sixth century. Galloway was colonised from Ireland, passing then from Cumbric to a Gaelic which may have been strongly influenced by Norse, (the Gall-Gael did not speak quite as the Irish), thence to Scots. Let's just speculate that the feature of Anglian which allowed it to triumph in the counties of Aberdeen, etc., was precisely its degradation (or simplification, or modernity) as a language. It was easier to learn than Gaelic. Or again, the winning factor may have been its similarity to the Norse which so many people and so many towns spoke in the twelfth century; Norse and Anglian are radically similar languages, and the winner will also have shed those features (phonetic, morphological, in tense structure) which Norse speakers found most puzzling.
Phantasmagoria
Let's start our discussion of aureate and fantastic language with William Drummond of Hawthornden:
Nymphae quae colitis highissima monta Fifaea,
Seu vos Pittenwema tenent seu Crelia crofta
Sive Anstraea domus, ubi nat haddocus in undis
Codlineusque ingens, et fleucca et skeeta pererrant
Per costam, et scopulis lobster mony-footus in udis
Creepat, et in mediis whitenius undis
(...)
Whistlantesque simul fechtam memorate bloodaeam,
Fechtam terribilem, quam marvellaverit omnis
Banda deum, et Nympharum Cockelshelleatarum...
('Polemo-Middinia inter Vitavam et Nebernam')
That was Latin syntax with Scots vocabulary; this is Latin vocabulary with English syntax: 'and from thence through the most graceful objects of all her intermediate parts, to the heaven-like polished prominences of her mellifluous and heroinal breasts, whose porphyr streaks (like arches of the ecliptic and colures, or azimuth and Almicantar-cirles intersecting other) expansed in pretty veinlets (through whose sweet conduits run the delicious streams of nectar, wherewith were cherished the pretty sucklings of the Cyprian goddess) smiled on one another to see their course regulated by the two nipple-poles above them elevated in each their own hemisphere.' (Thomas Urqhuart, from The Jewel) Just possibly certain habits of verbal ornament reached Scots literature via Gaelic, so that Urquhart would really be related to Joyce by a common influence. This would be the circulation of Irish bards, who went through a long and rigorous training and as a result of this not only enjoyed a vast prestige but also valued the technical tradition which had cost them so dear. Urqhuart was laird of Cromarty, which at that time I believe was still Gaelic-speaking (it had formerly been Norn-speaking); whether Gaelic bards penetrated to such remote parts, I cannot say. Their tradition in Ireland demised in the late 17th century as a result of English Protestants stealing the land which had been the economic basis of the Gaelic aristocrats who sustained the bards. (The Scottish end survived until shortly after the '45.) Let's not start counting the dead as I am not young enough to achieve this. However, after the Irish revival of Gaelic traditions in English, which began in the 1830s, Joyce was certainly familiar with various bardic poems and prose miscellanies. A third term in the series is the astounding 7th century prose tract Hisperica Famina. I don't want to invent any suprahistorical Celtic mentality, there is certainly no such thing, instead just to point out the continuity and conservatism and originality of the bardic profession until its forcible interruption by the English.
The shared element in Hisperica Famina, Urquhart, the mediaeval Irish tradition in general, and (probably) Joyce is simply diglossia. Writers composing in a language, which contains no elements of daily experience, explode, their divagations know no boundaries. To this we should add the low prestige in which Drummond and Urquhart undoubtedly held Scots. The foreign words in Scots were more prestigious than the native stock. Latin words were for them an extension (over-fulfilment) of refinement in speech.
Look at this piece of poetry by David Lindsay, from around 1540:
Sensualitie: O Queene Venus, unto thy celsitude
I gif gloir, honour, laud and reverence:
Quha grantit me sic perfite pulchritude,
That princes of my persone have pleasaunce.
I make ane vow with humbill observance,
Richt reverentlie thy Tempill to visie,
With sacrifice unto the deitie.
Count up how many aureate words, words plundered wholesale from French and Latin, absent from daily spoken Scots, it contains. Then at this piece of 18th C poetry by the Scot James Thomson (the first):
Evening yields
The world to Night; not in her winter-robe
Of massy Stygian woof, but loose array'd
In mantle dun. A faint erroneous ray,
Glanc'd from the imperfect surfaces of things,
Flings half an image on the straining eye;
While wavering woods, and villages, and streams,
And rocks, and mountain-tops, that long retain'd
Th'ascending gleam, are all one swimming scene,
Uncertain if beheld.
Evidently the structural role of aureate diction has been taken over by English diction. (The older mode appears a few lines lower down in the aureate phrase 'tremulous effulgence'; Thomson's treatment of light as an autonomous substance is like English poetry of the 1970s.) 'Poeticism' as the opposite pole from domestic realism, is here represented by anglicization. English was by then associated with education and social distinction just as knowledge of French and Latin had been in the 16th C. However, this decorative and artificial use of English is entirely different from using English in a confined, reality-bound, literalist way. Daily speech has never been adequate for externalizing experience. Experience has never been adequate for externalizing desire. English has represented for Scottish poets a phantasmagoric aureate language whose rules could be made up by the poet. Now we can turn to 'synthetic Scots' and appreciate that this too was a phantasmagoric aureate language.
Latent: germinant, the foetal, crescive dawn ablow
dull leiden cloud quickens, crepusculine.
Vital, brent-new, windbuff'd intill the
cauldrife, hyperboreal licht;
Sterling-midwived by the ferm-yaird's scaudin,
self-assignit muezzin,
Like Moslem Crier, mock minaret-poised
on his byre-vent prospect high.
(James Alexander McCash, from A bucolic nick-stick.)
These layers of vocabulary contain space - a psychogeography. They are identifiable because they do not belong to the stratum of everyday language, which belongs to everyday local experience. Literally, they belong to the Mediterranean; or at least the Greek and Latin words belong there, while the French and English words belong to those countries. But really they belong to an unreal geography - a phantasmagoric geography. The association of words with places, which a finely differentiated dialect geography makes possible, also makes it possible to create an imaginary terrain, and an imaginary history, by modification and distortion of the lexicon.
Writing in Lallans
The revival of writing in Scots can be studied via Hubbard's anthology The New Makars, which is only poetry in Scots. He also excludes dead poets; so while you get James Alexander McCash (b.1902) and Flora Garry (b.1900) you do not get MacDiarmid, Douglas Young, or Sydney Goodsir Smith. One can periodize the minority practice of writing in Lowland Scots as follows.
19th C. Lack of any serious poetry in Scots.
1920- MacDiarmid launches 'synthetic Scots' and revolution in poetry. Initially accompanied by people with no poetic gift, and also anti-modern. (Helen B. Cruickshank, Violet Jacob, Marion Angus, Lewis Spence, John Buchan.)
1940s. Emergence of first serious Scots poets formed by MacDiarmid; Douglas Young, Sidney Goodsir Smith; the so-called saicont swaw. Determined nationalist and socialist stance. use of 'synthetic Scots'.
1945-80. lack of significant new writers in Scots (possible exception: Alastair Mackie).
1980- arrival of Informationists; a new breakthrough. Possible link to exceptional national electoral unity against Thatcher.
This may be incorrect; the fragmented commercial presence of Scots, which has led to delays of several decades in some work coming out, and very slow and discrepant dissemination of other work. The trough around 1945-60 correlates with a low ebb in the fortunes of the Scots Nationalists, evidently the war and the building of the Welfare State induced a British attitude to life, which then crumbled under a different mixture of prosperity and adversity. The defection after 1945 of Douglas Young, chairman of the SNP, to Labour, is symptomatic. Clearly, few poets apart from MacDiarmid have used Lallans in a modern way, and they have all found the language hard to use; a few poems by Douglas Young, George Campbell Hay, and McCash are hardly a literature.
The problem of Scots literature needs to be put in the context of a general malaise of regional and dialect literature all over England. God help anyone whose literary diet consists only of dialect texts! The dialect of the south-east Midlands (! possibly Central Midlands, following M.L. Samuels) became the accepted national literary language during the 15th C; Scotland followed with a lag, so that anglicization was important in literature in the 16th C (Knox, Drummond, among others) and almost inevitable in the 17th C. Written English absolutely does not correspond to spoken south-eastern English. Imperialism is a matter of power relations, not surely of linguistic codes. Written English is archaizing, supra-regional, artificial, conservative of lost sounds. It is arguably closer to spoken Scots than to southern English. The more literally you read it, the more Scottish you sound. We know that Shakespeare still pronounced 'nicht' at the time of 'A Midsummer Night's Dream'. Shakespeare pronounced the 'r' in midsummer - like working-class Scots but unlike RSC actors. It is important to separate various strands of Scottish heteronomy; the language question, the import of culture, the emigration of talent, the question of government, and the ownership of Scottish business, need each to be analyzed in quite different ways. The success of Written Standard English can be challenged in roughly these terms: writing in dialect may have disappeared, but writers from Cheshire, Derbyshire, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Cumberland, Westmorland and Northumberland lost out both ways because they were unable to write Southern English effectively. (Possibly we should add the South-West and the Deep South.) Today we are used to classic writers from the North-east, such as Basil Bunting and Barry MacSweeney; but this is a new phenomenon; whether the reason is the difficulty north-easterners experienced in manipulating southern English (or indeed in having cultural faith in their own speech) or something more intricate, the parallel with Scots is depressing. Scottish writers would have gained nothing from being born a few dozen miles further south.
The former dialectal fragmentation of Britain was a product of a poor communications infrastructure. The levelling of speech differences since 1600 (to pick a date arbitrarily) has not been due to some kind of cultural imperialism, but to the improvements to the road system, subsequently including the canals and railways. We know that new speech forms spread out along roads. It's true there is a watershed at the border, as a report on research in Aitken, ed., The Scots Language, states. A paper by G.W.S. Barrow suggests why: the century of protracted war between English and Scots, from 1296, when laying waste the enemy's lands was a frequent tactic, created sufficient resentment and even empty land for a watershed to emerge, so that social contact and trade stopped dead at the border. Thus the boundaries of the States acquired some kind of ethnic reality. Nonetheless both dialects and placenames are very similar on either side of the border.
Imaginary and real geography
The stylistics of Scottish words might start with their nationality; for example in Tom Scott's poem:
On winter days, about the gloamin hour,
Whan the knock on the college touer
Is chappan lowsin-time,
And ilk mason packs his mell and tools awa
Ablow his banker, and bien fornenst the waa
The labourer haps the lave o the lime
Wi soppan secks, to keep it frae a frost, or faa
o suddent snaw
Duran the nicht...
('From Auld Sanct Andrian's', from Brand the Builder.)
hour bien touer mason time mell secks suddent duran are French, and we could label them +F in a lexicon; labourer is Latin, and we would label it +L (-F) (college is probably direct from Latin); most of the words are Old Scots (+S), and some of these are not English as well (-E). Rarely would we find a Gaelic word, but there is one lower down, partan, a crab (+G); often would we find a Norse word (+N), as lower down bigging, liggan, redds up. The number of (-E) words will always be low, because almost all (+F, +L, +N, +S) words are also (+E). We notice that all modern words are (+E), whatever their ultimate source; nationalism may take the form of avoiding all (+E) words, and this implies using no words younger than the 16th C. Strikingly, many rural writers don't want to name any objects younger than 1500. Regression to a static past brings timelessness, and is infantilism drawn out. Any poem could be analysed, first of all, by a frequency count of word origins. (An obvious refinement is to add the category of 'literary' or 'spoken': when Scott says 'Doun by the sea/ Murns the white swaw owre the rack ayebydanlie', the last word is obviously [+Lit]). [swaw=wave]). We should expect poetry to have a high proportion of foreign and literary words; courtly poetry, before 1603, was typified by its many (+L) and (+F) words. A lot of verse in 'realistic Scots' is unconscionably drab. Sociologically incomplete, Scots is an impoverished language. Not so, synthetic Scots.
Local difficulties, timeless stupidity
There is also an eternal stratum of deft, colourless, educated, writers, producing poems in the English (Oxford-London) manner of the day. Perhaps Scots do have problems with Standard English; the blandness of Andrew Young and Edwin Muir (1887-1959), administering eternal truths and painting out everything which changes, is hard to take. Martin Seymour-Smith says of Muir 'He could rarely develop a rhythm of his own: his poetry, traditional in form, relies too much on metrical norms; he often evades, one might say, the sound of his own voice'. Comparison with Kathleen Raine suggests an ideological link between a belief in timeless immanent principles and a distaste for the short-term uncertainty and change which we call rhythm. In terms of timelessness and the hopeful wearing of copes of spiritual authority, they aren't so far from Kenneth White. Muir explained his poetic problems, confusingly, as due to his not being a native English (southern English, he grew up in Orkney) speaker; as if English, by failing to contain local experience, was stultified (and contained Platonic essences instead?) This resembles a tendency in Lallans writers to go right back to the styles in use before 1603. This is not quite mediaevalism, because the high point of Scottish poetry (excluding ballads) had been in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Nonetheless it's odd to find twentieth century Scots writers writing inside the forms and world-view of those centuries. A variant of this is Robert Garioch (1909-81)'s reliance on the late 18th C poet, Robert Fergusson. I think the original intent was to write something vehemently Scottish, and avoid the accusation of writing in the English cultural ambit; nationalists are bound to suffer from this kind of fierce narrowness. But other critics have pointed out that this is a kind of cultural death, as it suggests that the poets' linguistic experience is not broad enough for them to work out their own forms, and so their poetry is a kind of quaint revivalism. The allure of folk forms, themselves archaic, was also treacherous. The revivalism goes along with a romantic antiquarian version of Scottish history, based on castles, Mary Queen of Scots, old churches, old bits of embroidery, hangings, etc., and tales about old noble families. Lewis Spence, trying to write 16th C Scots, is an extreme version of this. But Edwin Muir is not far away, even though he rejected Scots:
Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,
The sun looks from the hill
Helmed in his winter casket,
And sweeps his arctic sword across the sky.
'Casket' cannot mean 'coffin' here, but must be like French 'casquette' and mean a helmet. (The Concise Oxford gives 'casque', but as an obsolete word.) 'Helm' is an obsolete word. Why should the sun be conceived in fifteenth-century equipment, why not twentieth century? Muir expressed his love of the past as 'heraldry', i.e. the formal accoutrements of the nobility; because what has survived of the past is mainly from the possessions of the nobles, and their deeds (this would include culture I fear), a naive journey into the past means the elimination of every other class. This idea of beauty is, crudely, 'eliminating everyone who isn't rich'. Obviously you can achieve harmony if you leave out the class struggle. Obviously the nobility want to claim that their families were always noble and always held their lands. I find the implication that the poet cannot transact with twentieth century objects and social facts, but is close to fifteenth and sixteenth century objects, deeply alarming. Scottish land law makes it difficult for anyone to acquire land or buildings by purchase, and is in a sense feudal. Both Spence and Muir had rather murky mystical beliefs, and their go-back style is much like a belief in ghosts.
The reviewer KA (probably Kate Armstrong) in Lallans has defined three genres (casualties) of Scots poetry as 'Mingan Toun' (topographical hometown poem) 'Sair Heid' (poet gets roaring drunk to forget joys of home town) and 'Leids/Sair Hert' in which the poet blethers about how authentic Scots is (a variant of 'how good-hearted everyone in this pub is'). ('Leids' means 'languages'; 'mingan' is like 'ingan' [onion], pronounced min yain, i.e. my own.) Clearly there are common poetic gestures, stemming directly from the geo-linguistic relationships we have discussed, as streams do from the relief of a landscape, and the Scottish poet of quality is one who plays unexpected variations on these gestures, or finds a way of intensifying them or simply reverses them. The demand that a poet 'be Scottish' often means that they ought to write the most familiar tropes. I am inclined to list the Scottish ruralist, blethering about village life and native hills as if thought was inauthenticity; but these poems aren't always bad. Representationalist Scots writers, who stubbornly use language just like the speech of their home and home community, are stubbornly opposed to linguistic autonomists, who regard all the possibilities of the Scots language as legitimate, just as a composer might regard every chord possible on the guitar as legitimate. One sign of this is sarcastic comments in the pages of Lallans; for example that Robert Crawford is more at home in English than in Scots. Richard Price records 'uproar' at a conference where he suggested that 'MacD was writing against what was to become Lallans'. This may also be a sociological opposition between conservative rural communities and ambitious urban intellectuals.
It is possible to vaunt the Scots language on essentialist grounds: because it is the speech of the working class, because it is not English, therefore it is a repository of Goodness. As a corollary, English contains Badness. These attacks on English are not going to be heard by English writers. So their only import is to invalidate Scottish poets writing in English: the majority. The path to totalitarianism is to criminalize the way people actually behave, starting from abstract principles rather than from humble observation and empathy. I do not believe that Scottish English-speakers are (a) opposed to nationalism (b) immoral people (c) emotionally inauthentic. Unless these propositions are true, the theory of the essential Badness of English is clearly wrong. Do we not find, in fact, that the fanatical Nationalist writes off most of the nation's gifted writers? Without MacCaig, W.S. Graham, Mackay Brown, late MacDiarmid, Edwin Morgan, D.M. Black, and Frank Kuppner, modern Scottish poetry would be a wasteland. Isn't this unpatriotic? This self-deluding refusal to base Scottish Nationalism on the real people of Scotland is combined with a paralyzed realist aesthetic, whereby the language of poetry has to be photographically like the daily speech of a particular town or village. Thus creativity is inauthenticity, distance is alienation, and the poet's claim is 'I am more like you than you are'. No-one imbued with this aesthetic is ever going to write a single good line, never mind a good poem.
The anti-synthetic school of writers in Scots is addicted to a phonological literalism, where the poem is forced to be a photograph of speech praxis. Since dialects are the property of a 'community', and thought is the property of an individual, the conclusion has easily been reached that literalism is communal and authentic, whereas thought and style are immoral and seditious. This has infamously combined with the parochialism mentioned above, based on the observation that photographically precise Scots belongs to a specific place, to limit writing to the portrayal of a particular place. This eliminates readers who don't come from that place. (It is also an occult attack on 'placeless' Standard English.) It often combines with nostalgic doctrines about the authenticity of childhood (i.e. before the poet grew up and left his native midden to live in a city and speak English) to bring about the infantilising of Scots. Thought is alienation, adult life is alienation. This is combined with a vicious snobbery against Scottish artists: you can't be a Modernist because you don't live in Paris. But you can write couthy poems about village affairs. Parochialism is (also) a way of avoiding competing with 'international' artists, a collaborationist acceptance of marginality and inferiority. I take Scots poetry very seriously, and have studied Scots systematically to become a better reader of it, but my admiration is based always on the artistic quality of the poems, not on blind loyalty to a language.
Dr Anne King is reported in the Murdoch Times (1991) as having said that 'Lallans, thought by many to be the ancient language of Lowland Scots, was little more than the linguistic fakery developed by MacDiarmid and his friends during the 1920s as part of their nationalistic campaign.' The distortion may have been introduced by the Times reporter, but in any case the imputation is that 'synthetic Scots' is dishonest because it was not a photograph of the speech patterns of some village, but a synthesis of lexical material from all possible sources, with the aim of expanding the Scots vocabulary to equal the English one. There is a clear split between 'representationalist Scots' and 'synthetic Scots' up till the present day. MacDiarmid deserves credit, not for 'fakery', but for a mighty Modernist feat, transforming language much as the Cubists transformed vision. (The Lallans editor's riposte was 'Altho MaDdiarmid whiles used some gey auld-farrant words, the Scots he used in maist o his poems wes naitral eneuch.' ) Wordsworth said 'earth's diurnal round', Shakespeare said 'multitudinous seas incarnadine'. No-one thinks that is fakery. Some sixty years later, Bill Herbert was saying 'the dictionary is simply that part of the language we would have understood innately, had Scots not become a subject tongue, persecuted into rural corners and forgotten.' Of course you have to fill out your vocabulary with words ransacked from the dictionary and from the Scots of previous centuries. Of course a language needs to be cultivated when it is not used in schools.
David Kinloch, a young Scottish poet who spoke English at home, writes in Scots, and confesses (in Gairfish 4) to spending his time 'searching the dictionary'. 'Dustie-fute', the name of his first collection, is an old Scottish word for acrobat, and was found in just this way. I suspect that this practice is repugnant to English taste, and that the case against it could be summed up under three heads: 1) that poetic speech should follow the rules of domestic speech 2) the poet should not invent words or events or social structures 3) that linguistic creativity is tantamount to moral deceit, so that experience should always be recounted in the most everyday and common words. All three of these assumptions are wrong and disastrous.
The social stratum which speaks English (although with a Scottish accent) is also the only one which reads poetry. Poetry in Scots must be pressurized and contestatory while it is being heard by an audience of middle-class people who do not speak Scots. Literary Scots has tended to be the work of upwardly mobile individuals who are losing Scots at the same rate that they rise socially, and acquire education and culture. This glancing and discontinuous state has sometimes been the experience of very large groups, as the education system has taken on (in both senses) intakes from the working class both urban and rural. There remains the possibility that such dilutions (deluges?) will change the speech patterns of the anglophone middle class, and that a kind of Scots will become the stable speech of the majority of the Scottish middle class, as up till 1750 or so. Most probably both anglicization and emigration will continue unabated. I cannot at present explain why the expansion of higher education after 1958 did not produce a new generation of Scots poets.
Sociologically, the great division (I would argue) is between urban and rural rather than English and Scottish. A result of geolinguistics is that urban dialects are consistently more homogeneous and contain fewer distinctive (non-standard) words than the nearby rustic dialects from which their speakers come. On the basis that distinctiveness is authenticity, writers in rural dialects will depreciate urban dialects (or writers) as broken-down, levelled, massified. Urban Scots is ideally suited to bring off the Holy Grail of being socialist and nationalist at the same time. Since urban Scots is also eclectic and innovatory, the fortunate poet can bring off the third coup of being stylistically free, rather than imitating the speech norms of a given idealized community. Conversation is not poetry; poetry should develop autonomous norms. It is the Informationists who are in this precise position of writing urban radical non-representationalist Scots.
Scots has been retreating socially since the 16th C. This is a contradictory motion, because at the same time its speakers have been advancing. However great the attraction of English and American, the mass of Scots speakers in the great cities is absolutely greater and richer than ever before, and may be large enough to stabilize and unify the Scottish speech community around the norms of urban areas of the Central Lowlands. These cities are not socially archaic, and their speech is already a synthesis of the dialects of migrants. Such a consensual norm would be an innovation, it would have to be built out of piece parts of various existing dialects. One would expect literary works to be the laboratory where such a new common speech might be designed. The other new factor is the visible decline of England, a society at the end of its rope if ever there was one. How can a Thatcherite end zone exert any cultural appeal on anyone?
(This began as a review of Tom Hubbard, ed., The New makars: new poetry in Scots, and Douglas Dunn, ed., The Faber Book of Twentieth Century Scottish Verse. References are made to these in the text. The review was published in Parataxis 5.)
George Mackay Brown (1921-96) comes from Orkney, where people traditionally regard themselves as Scandinavians rather than Scots (transfer of control from the Norwegian Crown in 1469, but only as a pledge against a loan, of which the canny Scots turned down repayment). Brown has rarely left Orkney, but did manage to attend Edinburgh University, to meet Edwin Muir (another Orcadian and one of his main influences), and to hang out with Scottish poets. He converted to Roman Catholicism in 1961.
The fact that he published so little until the age of 40 is striking. I posit a period of intensive stimulation by the poetry of the 1940s, and of slow maturation during the 1950s, to blossom in the 1960s. The pattern for Brown is different from that of certain other poets, who were held back by an unsympathetic atmosphere in the 1950s, and reached artistic florescence in the 1960s; we can guess that he was profoundly affected, in the 1950s, by various pageants which tried to capture national history in verse and image, and by the publication of The Anathmata, a more complex attempt to do the same thing. His best poetry came in the late 1960s, which is what we usually find.
Brown has stated (in a Penguin Modern Poets volume) that his main influences are the Catholic service book, the Norse sagas, and the ballads , and also that 'It was then [at the time of the Reformation, AD] that the old heraldry began to crack, that the idea of 'progress' took root in men's minds. What was broken, irremediably, in the 16th century was the fullness of life in a community, its simple interwoven identity. In earlier times the temporal and the eternal, the story and the fable, were not divorced, as they came to be after Knox: they used the same language and imagery, so that the whole of life was illuminated... Innocence gave place to a dark brooding awareness... from that time, too, the old music and poetry died out, because the single vision which is the source of all art had been choked. Poets followed priests into the darkness.' (piece in Memoirs of a Modern Scotland, ed. Karl Miller.) For evidence, let's think of English poetry: in the 15th century, next to nothing; under the Tudors, after the Reformation, you get the Elizabethan poets, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Webster, Tourneur. Well, they don't count; because Brown isn't interested in evidence. Evidence is part of material reality. And also it's part of thinking - which he is against ('dark brooding awareness'). Brown didn't work out this coy little fable from evidence (hideous rationalistic Calvinist materialist stuff), he took it straight from the official Roman Catholic view of European history, which states that everyone was perfectly happy and golden until they stopped being Catholic. 'Darkness' is an occult reference to literacy: people gave up oral literature because they became literate, which as we all know meant they began reading the Bible and so became Protestants. For you, literacy and education may seem like light; for Brown, like other believing Catholics, it's darkness. Awareness is dark. Obedience is light. (A similar thesis was expounded in the 1930s by the Catholic novelist Fionn MacColla.) If B. believed in progress, would he have spent 40 years writing the same book?
The phrase 'ballad and the story' comes from his teacher Edwin Muir. For further details on the 'single vision', see the speeches of General Franco.
His most ambitious poetic work is his third volume, Fishermen with Ploughs. Sadly for us, he was reaching outside poetry, and his more ambitious works since have been in prose. Magnus is a beautiful novel, even if outside my subject. Brown has in the past twenty years expanded into plays, short stories, and novels. These are just the same material as his poetry. A number of his texts have been set by Peter Maxwell-Davies.Fishermen narrates the story of one village in Orkney, from its settlement in the 9th century by a tribe emigrating from Norway bringing seed corn, through witch trials in the Middle Ages, to nuclear disaster in the modern age, and resettlement by refugees who try to master low-technology agriculture enough to survive, and are ruled by a cruel but dominant leader. A long absence from poetry has followed; but Voyages came out in 1986, The Wreck of the Archangel in 1989.
Both Orkneys and Shetlands spoke a Scandinavian language (called Norn) until the late 18th C, possibly just early 19th; it was replaced by a dialect of Scots similar to that of Caithness and adjacent areas of the mainland, which had spoken Norn until the 16th C:
...da lift
Roefs in my soety haad an daurs
Ee quick blyde tocht o dee ta smoot
Trow da black gaird o nycht an time,
An hert an sowl an boady seem
Pickit wi aa da bloed an ime
O history
this sample of a poem from A Day Between Weathers by William J. Tait shows how different Shetlandic is from Southern Scots, but note that it (like Orcadian) is a dialect of Scots, absolutely not a West Norse language such as they speak in Iceland and the Faeroes. (The air roofs in my sooty head and dares a quick blithe thought of thee to slip through the black enclosure of night and time, and heart and soul and body seem specked with all the blood and soot of history.) Brown has always written in English, but the linguistic identity of the Orcadians (who are always his subject) is encoded indirectly. Since Scots reached the islands after the Reformation, it is probable that he would not use it on political grounds. As Brown must know, there are a large number of Norn words still left in island speech; but there is also a contact between a certain vein of language (not in the Orkneys, in fact) and the 'high', poetic, stratum of Old Norse vocabulary, as it appears in the skaldic poems: 'The fisherman from Shetland believed like the fishermen in Faroe and in western Norway that there were many words and names one must not mention while fishing at the haf. In Shetland this sea language was richer than anywhere else (...) Instead of the taboo words, the dangerous words, only noa-words, or haf-words, lucky words were spoken. The sea language was therefore quite unlike the language spoken ashore, and it could also vary from one boat crew to another.
The sea language has roots far back into early Norse times, with words and kennings taken from 'Alvissmal', a lay from the Elder Edda, which tells how things were called in the languages of the gods, the elves, the dwarves, and the giants. In the sea language the sea was known as djub, armar, log or holast. Alvissmal tells us that the dwarves called the sea djupan mar, the elves called it logr, and to the giants it was alheimr or alost.' (quoted from Catherine Schei, The Shetland Story.) Jakob Jakobsen collected the words in the 1890s; Alvissmal was written down in the 13th century but dates linguistically to an earlier time. Brown has occupied a Scandinavian/Old Orcadian identity by using kennings, which are nearly a living part of Old Norse in Orcadian speech (actually the Shetlands a century ago).
'A dove must fold your seed from dragon flame'.
This blind rune stabbed the sea tribe.
Fishermen sought a bird in the mountains.
Their axes kept them that year from the dragon.
Logs throttled a mountain torrent.
A goatherd gaped on the lumbering tons.
Saws shrieked, sputtered, were sharpened, sang.
Dunes were pale with strewment of boards.
Sprang from that spine, a vibrant cluster of ribs.
Forge and anvil begot a host of rivets.
Shavings, blond hair of excited children,
Curled from the combing adzes.
A woodman died of a rotten nail.
(Njal found, near falcons, an urn for his fires).
Obviously, the verbal ornament of this poem ('Building the Ship'), typical for Mackay Brown, is close to the kenning style of Norse scaldic poetry (it is less common in Anglo-Saxon poetry). An article on the poetic vocabulary of Eskimo shamans, used for speaking to the spirits, explains how they use a rich variety of special epithets for edible animals (they talk to the spirits entirely about the fortunes of hunting and fishing, it's a business meeting) which bear a striking similarity to Germanic kennings. So many of the kennings refer to fish, birds, or land animals; a lexical set closely related to the animal ornament on objects and of Hiberno-Saxon manuscripts. So it's quite possible that, as someone suggested in 1915, the idea of the 'kenning' came from the Geistersprache of North European shamans. Obviously words which can be safely overheard by the spirits (the haf-words of fishermen at sea) closely resemble 'words which it is licit to address to the spirits', i.e. the special language of shamans as intercessors.
I feel that Brown is a major writer because he isn't just re-creating an imaginary 15th century, but is drawing on genuine stylistic features of Insular speech and daily life. I think a lot of Scandinavian writing, and Northern Scottish writing for that matter, has strong similarities to Brown; he's not a mythomaniac. The effort of reconstructing the Brown style deserves comparison with MacDiarmid's Synthetic Scots; this is a very highly wrought linguistic object, and Brown hasn't had the credit he deserves. (Presumably one of the reasons he published late is that he was working out how to avoid populist Catholic literary clichs, which do not appear in his books.) The static quality of his poetic organization deserves comparison with a folk museum, and related writings, where there is an absence of history because the daily objects didn't change very much, often, for hundreds of years. The static feeling also has to do with the enveloping quality of monotonous work and the sacramental quality of objects. Once you decide that you don't look down, even in the guise of 'alienation', on fishermen and housewives, you are forced to attribute great virtues to the objects which sustain and shelter daily life. If unimportant work is done by unimportant people, work done by important people is important work. I am reminded of what Konrad Lorenz says about animals (the higher animals) establishing habits as a way of reducing anxiety, something pervasive in unfamiliar ground or if a routine is broken. This is the reassurance of monotony. Every text must have a latent lexical lattice of some kind. It is of great interest to understand where these come from and how they organize primary sense data. The lexicon is a static component of language, presumably in proportion to the turbulent quality of sense data. The study of wordfields relates them sometimes to a social structure. Brown approves of the elevation of everyday activities (the breaking of bread, but also harvesting and other kinds of work) in Christian liturgy. This aesthetic is the opposite of change and liberation. Brown is right to claim the influence of the Norse sagas, the first thing that struck me about his work was that the lexical structure (and even the sentence structure) would translate into Norse without effort. For him the enduring facts of Orkney life were already there in the thirteenth century (one of great importance to Brown), and he regards the enduring as the thing that counts. Work patterns are the part of social structure which relate to lexical structure; Scots reached Orkney, but he is demonstrating that speech patterns remained constant at a deeper level. Another related area is 'social reproduction', the transmission of social values to children partly by means of language; the central importance of this to the continuity of society underlies, perhaps, the Christian concentration on verbal texts as the centre of moral education and of the good society.
Obvious comparisons are, apart from Muir, Saunders Lewis and David Jones, who theorized the sacramental value of objects, more profoundly than Brown, in many loci, for example in the Introduction to the Anathmata. It is curious to compare Brown to the Shetland poet William J. Tait:
Furnenst da day
I hain my sairest loss
An caa my nain
Da heft I canna hae.
Da gold I yird
Oonseen dis simmer nycht
'S solya's sheen
On hairsts A'll never hird.
(Against the day I cherish my sorest loss and call my own the treasure I cannot have. The gold I bury unseen this summer night is a brief burst of sunshine on harvests I'll never gather in.) I find this obscure, but it does resemble Mackay Brown. Interesting is the use of objects which have become half-inner, that is, they are 'objects' but also emblematic of some emotional message, based on their role in everyday life. They are a lot more rich in meaning than literal objects. This method is also close to folk-song. Tait has written some important poems.
Brown has described more of Orkney's working reality than almost any other poet has of their district. Certainly I couldn't write about North London in such clear-cut terms, the social structure is too complex to think about and too much of the work is 'virtualized', it doesn't involve objects. Brown's poetry is simple because there are only 50,000 people in the society he lives in, and a great deal of the work is physical work, and can be described by pictorial methods. It's the urban poets who are beset by problems, affecting how well their subject matter can be either described or even thought about, and who have been miserable under-achievers in describing their societies. 'Community poets' have been one of the great literary disasters, resolutely refusing to verbalize or think; but only 80% of the population lives in cities, and I believe that human groups in somewhere like West Dorset, North Wales, or the Orkneys, probably do live like communities. When most poets write about objects, it's despair and bad faith because they don't believe their own theories about society, the evidence is too difficult; Brown describes objects, made by people, as parts of the human life-world. There is a good book about Brown by Alan Bold.
Edwin Morgan (1920- ) comes from a middle-class family in Scotland's largest city, Glasgow, the subject of many of his poems. He has worked as an Eng Lit academic at Glasgow University (now retired), and is also gay. He has always identified himself both with Socialism and with Scottish Nationalism (see his Essays on Scottish literature). His class origins imply that he has spoken English all his life, so obviously he has written in this language too, but he has also written in Scots with singular grace and dexterity.
One can classify his work into several distinct groups. One, the New Apocalyptic style of the 1940s; this is the style of his first (and unpublished) book, Dies Irae (1952), of The Vision of Cathkin Braes (1952), and of The Cape of Good Hope (1955). Cathkin Braes is already highly modified from the archetype, and might have been a 'second generation' of the Apocalyptics, if that school hadn't been rubbed out. A second group is translations; these merge with the group of poems produced by automatic procedure, for example the Emergent Poems and his concrete work. A fourth group, and no doubt the most important, is of phantasmagorias: novels (almost) in verse, dominated by magical transformations, and permitting an endless variety of procedures. In The Whittrick (1961, published 1973) we have a dialogue between Joyce and MacDiarmid, who never met; MacD recounts how he stumbled across a weasels' funeral. 'Aa roon aboot... Scampert ten jinkin hiccupin cousin-whittricks,/ A queer ill-sortit sosherie o usquebaugh,/ Lugubriositie, and fancy-fuddickin.' They are 'ten of the friskiest dustifit shennachies', curiously anticipating David Kinloch. A dowsing in whisky resurrects the dead beast, which races off with 'a flisk, a gliff, a glent'. This group would include Cathkin Braes and The New Divan. A fifth group is of realist poems, sometimes tender love poems, sometimes (as in 'The Flowers of Scotland', 1969) harshly political. These would shade off into topographical poems, a sixth group; where the poet's capacity to empty himself out and take on the characteristics of the environment is at its best.
The role of emotion is important in Morgan's originality. The key term is light on his feet - a vice in the eyes of those who resist change. One of the old things defined as authenticity in Scotland to define the old ways of doing things as authenticity. I suggest that this amounts, in real life, to being dour and gloomy; qualities, surely, of a bad lover. Morgan cleaves much more to the poetic virtues propounded by Allan Ramsay, of being 'blythe and gabby'. I suspect that emotion plays a much smaller role in life than is pretended, and that being a cheerful and constantly entertaining companion is far more important. There is a Scottish cultural ideal of being proud and also violent, and this intransigence is inarticulate, incapable of change, and unfavourable to the production of literature. In fact, being good with words has more to do with being 'blythe and gabby' than with the martial virtues of bragging, defiance, and abuse. Morgan is is not heroic, not stour, not given to verbal abuse, is not suspicious and threatening. He is a Socialist and Nationalist, of course. His ability to respond to the transient moment without carrying over any burden from previous moments makes him a poet of the Sixties par excellence. His work has been neglected because it lacks the obstinate, reductive, monotonous broadcast of personality which critics are attuned to: his characteristic is his quick-wittedness and immediacy. His early pamphlet, of about 20 pages, Cathkin Braes perplexes periodization by already showing many of the spontaneous, playful, and experimental features which we have attributed to the 1960s. In it, the play 'Ingram Lake' concerns five imaginary plays, by five real playwrights, about the same situation: this work of Pop Art reduces Jean-Paul Sartre to the dimensions of Marilyn Monroe in a Warhol silkscreen print.
Although born in 1920, he flourished in the Sixties, and formal trappings of the period, such as the 'instant' poem, blossomed in his hands. M.'s first full-length volume was published in 1968, when he was in fact 48; one recalls that MacDiarmid's poetic career ended when he was that age, in the self-destructive overreaching of 'Cornish Heroic Song'. Douglas Dunn remarks on the 'provincial decline' of mid-century Scottish poetry, so that 'Prior to 1968 Edwin Morgan's work was well-known in literary circles, but chiefly on the strength of magazine appearances and small press publications.' (introduction to Faber Book of 20th C Scottish Poetry). M. could at that time have been written off as a failure, someone who had shot his bolt with the discredited New Romantics and sunk back into affectless word-games in reaction. His response to this adversity is exemplary. I think all the poets of integrity and intelligence flourished in the 1960s, it's one of the telling signs. It is tempting to play with the idea, broached in certain interviews with the poet, that a new social atmosphere in the decade of liberation allowed him to form a rewarding and stable love bond for the first time, and so to find himself in poetry. The fascination of his Collected Poems (published in 1990 as Poems 1949-1987) is the trajectory one sees or imagines from the mournful, over-subjective, heavy poetry of Dies Irae to a major poetry of lightness which transcends personal problems in its joy at external forms. His poetry, like the tightrope-walker Cinquevalli in one of his best poems, is high up in the air playing with the possibility of falling only to defy it. He exemplifies the advance from melancholic and fatalistic youth to frivolous and polymorphous middle age. Abandoning the tragic sense of self and temperament seems like self-denial but proved a way of appropriating the loose energies and forms of the world. Aficionados of the gay cosmology may point to a traditional concern with theatricality, impersonation, and dressing up in his suites of transformations and illusions.
Morgan has written much ludic poetry, in a way which has little in common with the 'ludic' poetry fashionable in the 1980s. Morgan was the perfect ludic poet, he makes it impossible to write off the concept altogether. He also makes it clear that the 1980s poets, who are altogether too tedious to name, had no inner relationship to playfulness, but were picking it up as a feeble ideological gesture, due to the bankruptcy of domestic realism. They were twenty years late to the crease and trying to sell a weak dilution of what MacBeth and Morgan had been doing so long before. The commodification of the avant garde, therefore.
He and Ian Hamilton Finlay composed a flourishing Scottish school of Concrete poetry; the interest in artificial language is typically Scottish, and derives from the strained relations between official English and spoken Scots. If schoolchildren are punished for ever speaking Scots in school, they will become acute at analysing linguistic forms; this leads to insight into the material and arbitrary nature of language. So it was that the only good concrete poetry from Britain came from Scotland. Morgan's taste for the new is also a part of political belief in radical changes to the State and to social economy; he is in favour of the idea that you don't have to go on doing what you've been doing all your life. The poem as system bound by arbitrary rules, i.e. which are not the rules of natural language, is a testing-ground for human adaptability and power over your own fate. It suggests that the differences between Scots and English speech are material differences rather than essentialist, spiritual differences: within the decision area of living subjects now, not in the realm of irretrievable past events, such as hormonal make-up. Morgan is a considerable linguist, and this has helped him to understand the concreteness of language. Something like 'Spacepoem 1' is a pure sound poem, built round the syllables of various Russian rockets (sputnik, pchelnik, chernushka, zvezdochka) or their animal crew (belka, strelka, laika) linked and mutated in a kind of pure babble, which undeniably has a Russian flavour. (It's also reminiscent of Khlebnikov, if you happen to be engaged with Russian Futurism). The poem has neither syntax nor parts of speech, it makes no statements; even the vocabulary is unrecognizable (unless you happen to know Russian). (It's true that the conjunction 'raketasobakaslava' means 'rocket dog glory'; and that the dog's name, Layka, contains the verb which means to bark, which is perhaps what the sounds are also meant to be.) This is a considerably free poem; I think the point is that you can face freedom if you believe in your abstract ability to take decisions. Morgan finds the word 'balalaika', as an extension of 'layka', this has a pointing function as it suggests that babble and glossolalia are part of adult language, their structure is found in real nouns like 'balalaika' (which also contains the nonsense-sounds 'ba la la'). One is forced to consider that rhyme and metre are also rule-based procedures and also represent sound-patterns without meaning. (An allusion to the Sputnik-contemporary awopbopaloobopalopbamboom is not impossible.) Others, like The Computer's Dialect poems (in From Glasgow to Saturn) and 'Canedolia' (d and n transposed) play on the same ideas; in the second, the relics of disappeared languages which are Scottish placenames are concatenated as a phantasmagoric babble; it climaxes with 'Schiehallion! Schiehallion! Schiehallion!'; as M. must know, this mountain name contains (like Rohallion) the ethnic name Caledonii (a Pictish tribe) in altered form, and means 'barrow of the Caledonians'. M.'s phantasmagorias pursue this babbling freedom because they are autonomous language, following their own rules rather than those of reality. They are theatrical. The sureness of touch, the endless variety of invention, the light-heartedness, the foliation of layer upon layer of a fantasia, make these profoundly involving and exhilarating. His flexibility and inventiveness can be compared to George MacBeth.
Morgan is perhaps the supreme Sixties poet, with his belief in immediacy, in constant change, in the athletic skill of responding to transient unique complexes. His expertise in stripping down all poetic and intellectual trappings that could hamper his response to the instant points away from the old poetry as expression of temperament to a new idea of the personality as a series of processes, based on information and occurring in time, completing within time too: perhaps the repetition we are used to in poets is a mere accident, an equation which happens to draw the same curve a million times over, stuck in some mathematical pit from which it can't extricate itself. Perhaps the repetitiveness of artists is the need to exploit a brand image. We are expected to hail art for giving us an idea of the multiplicity of the universe: Morgan exfoliates this multiplicity in the part of the universe where it counts most. If the most stunning factor in depression is the belief that one's character is flawed and will endlessly bring about the same failed situations, this information is the most profoundly consoling and wise.
I find it hard to characterize D.M. Black (1941- )'s style, I think the reason is that it is deliberately photographic, careful description of an unusual situation, the energy goes into inventing the situation and designing the complex behaviour of the characters.
Black, brought up in Kenya, emerged in the 1960s, when he lived in Edinburgh. Black has described this time briefly (Gairfish #5), mentioning that in that period people used American culture in order to get away from English culture. He is a long-term resident in London, for perhaps the last 20 years. A long recent poetic silence was occasioned (I am assured) by him training successively as a Jungian, then a Freudian, analyst. If this training is over, we may see him return to poetry with a new maturity.
His work can be divided into two parts, the long narrative poems and the short poems. The latter are mainly in a 'defamiliarized' style, hard to evoke or summarize, fascinating to read, with a hard objective surface, strong on situation and plot. The absence of a personal voice is striking; he is not trying to express his personality, nor is he trying to be intimate with the reader. This urge to deal with emotion without dissolving into it is no doubt related to his decision to become an analyst. My attention was first drawn to him by 'The Red Judge'
We shut the red judge in a bronze jar
- By 'we', meaning myself and the black judge -
And there was peace, for a time. You can have enough
Yowling from certain justices. The jar
We buried (pitching and swelling like the tough
membrane of an unshelled egg) on the Calton Hill.
a surreal, intense, evocative work which I still don't understand fully. Who is the red judge? There are six poems about the Red and Black judges.
The six or seven narrative poems, rapid and smooth in style, are core narratives of the self in the sense that they encode the basic laws of human behaviour, by breaking them. They are preoccupied by incest, mutilation, violence, giving birth to animals... These are extraordinary poems. Black, a Sixties poet attracted by Indian religion and by Jung, adopted the most drastic methods to shake off accusations of trippiness: neatness of delivery, local clarity, elaborate organization, cogency of delivery. The venture into narrative, a string of unique events, represents a reaction away from the totality. If a writer identifies above all with a community, that writer must stand outside the community in order to evoke it in the text, which is otherwise vacuous. Resistance to consciousness is also resistance to verbalization. The reader may find they bear resemblances to the world of Alasdair Gray, Iain M. Banks, or Frank Kuppner. The title poem of The Happy Crow (1974); surely an idiotic name for a book, the poem is a Buddhist fable describing the condition of someone given over to the pleasures of this world as like a crow perched on the carcass of an elephant, floating down a river, gorging itself on every good morsel of flesh until it wakes up on a skeleton in the middle of the Indian Ocean. This implies feelings of confusion about sensual pleasure which seem to motivate the acerbity and briskness of his style. It also points to a latent religiosity which would safely write him off as a Scottish Hippie with the likes of Alan Jackson and Kenneth White; a fate he has avoided. Clearly the lush parts of his poetry are derived, unmutated, snatches of Indian scripture. Yet the product of shedding interest in pleasure could be an Old Scottish severity and glumness. Appearances of Sixties carefreeness and hedonism are belied by very strong traces of guilt and moralizing. Something else curious is the relation of the part-animal offspring of Melusine, in the narrative poem of that name, to Indian doctrines of reincarnation; the Jataka tales are about animals, and the strange children of that poem are (presumably) a visitation of Fate on the hero for his sin in sleeping with a creature who had no soul. The relation of the intellect (soul?) to the animal sensual drives could be his underlying theme. The simplification which allows part-selves to appear as animals resembles the simplicity of the myths he recounts with such prodigality; both resemble the 'preconscious sterotyped patterns' of Freudian psychology, which is now his profession (absorbing presumably his religious drive). The different parts of the mind are of different ages, their concord may be uneasy. The countenancing of animals and myth brings him close to poets such as Ted Hughes, Ken Smith, David Harsent, and Jeremy Reed.