Poets and Pubs

7/29/2019 Poets and Pubs

1/16

MacLean first became aware of his work probably through his friends J. B. Caird and George E. Davie,

who introduced him to MacDiarmids poem, A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle. J. B. Caird

recollected that the three of them spent an evening either in Sorley MacLeans digs or in George

Davies reading and discussing the poem. It was George Davie who then introduced Sorley MacLean

to Hugh MacDiarmid in Rutherfords Bar in Drummond Street, a former haunt of Robert Louis

Stevenson, in May 1934 when MacLean was completing his studies at Moray House. Their meeting

established a friendship that continued until MacDiarmids death in 1978. By the time they first met,

MacDiarmid had already developed an interest in Gaelic poetry and, in particular, in the poetry of

the 18th-century Jacobite poet, Alexander MacDonald (Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdair). In a letter

written from Raasay on 27 July 1934, held in Edinburgh University Library, Sorley MacLean writes to

Hugh MacDiarmid to tell him that he has finished translating Duncan Ban MacIntyres Ben Dorain

and Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdairs Moladh Moraig, and that he is now engaged on translating

Alasdair MacMhaighstir Alasdairs Birlinn

Old Town Bookshop 8 Victoria Street, Edinburgh, Midlothian EH1 2HG

Sorley MacLeans view on the influence of Hugh MacDiarmid is complex. In a letter to Douglas Young

in 1941, he stated: I immediately recognised the lyrics of Sangschaw and Penny Wheep as supreme.

There is nothing on earth like the greatest of these lyrics. He referred to MacDiarmids early lyrics

as having a tremendous influence on me, but at the same time he wrote, I wouldnt say that these

lyrics of Hugh MacDiarmid influenced my own poetry much though they had a kind of catalystic

influence Elsewhere, he wrote, I was committed to Gaelic poetry before I had read a single poemby MacDiarmid. The two men remained close friends although geography made it less easy for them

to meet frequently after Sorley MacLean moved to Plockton. MacDiarmid contributed a note to the

sleeve of the first published recording of Sorley MacLean reading his own work, Barran agus

Ashbuain, in 1973, and MacLean visited the older poet at his home at Brownsbank, near Biggar, in

February 1977. By this time, MacDiarmid was in failing health, and at his death on 9 September

1978, Sorley MacLean wrote a moving obituary, Lament for the Makar, in The Times Educational

Supplement on 15 September 1978

ROBERT GARIOCH (1909-1981)


2/16

Sorley MacLean first made the acquaintance of Robert Garioch, the poet, when he was an

undergraduate in the University of Edinburgh. Robert Garioch Sutherland, who wrote under the

name Robert Garioch, was educated at the Royal High School, Edinburgh, and the University of

Edinburgh. Then, later, on his return to Edinburgh in 1937 to take up a teaching post at Boroughmuir

High School, he renewed his friendship with Garioch, who, in turn, invited him along to the weekly

gatherings of poets that took place in the Abbotsford Bar in Rose Street. J. B. Caird, another friend

of Sorley MacLeans, describes how he met Robert Garioch in the Freeman office at the top of India

Buildings in the West Bow in Edinburgh, and of how his friend George Davie had spoken of a young

Edinburgh teacher called Sutherland, who was making effective poetic use of the language of the

Edinburgh streets. Robert Garioch had his own hand press and from it there appeared a slim

pamphlet by Sorley MacLean and Robert Garioch, 17 Poems for 6d, with the imprint date 1940. This

was Robert Gariochs first publication from his press. Seventeen Poems for Sixpence, a second issue,

with corrections, was published a few weeks later. During the Second World War, Robert Garioch

served in the army, and was imprisoned in Italy and Germany between 1942 and 1945. He spent his

career teaching for a while in Edinburgh but mostly in the south in London and Kent, returning to

Edinburgh upon retirement in 1964.

J. B. Caird has commented that Sorley MacLeans relationship with Garioch was not as close as his

intellectual friendship with Hugh MacDiarmid, but that they liked, respected and appreciated one

another. At one level, Garioch was inclined to view both poets as politically nave, and in a letter to

Sidney Tremayne on 15 August 1977, he wrote that he saw MacDiarmid as a woolly lamb, and Sam

Maclean also, intelligent all right, but so soft emotionally that they give up thinking when their

feelings take over As a poet, Robert Garioch had a special affinity with the 18th-century

Edinburgh poet, Robert Fergusson. His single prose work was Two Men and a Blanket (1975): and his

Collected Poems (1977) was followed by The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Robin Fulton in 1983, and

in 2004 by Robert Garioch. Collected Poems, ed. Robin Fulton, which restores entirely Gariochs own

ordering of his poems.


3/16

SYDNEY GOODSIR SMITH (1915-1975)

Sorley MacLean was introduced to Sydney Goodsir Smith, the poet, by Robert Garioch in 1939, as

one of the coterie of poets who frequented the Abbotsford Bar in Rose Street in Edinburgh. Theybecame firm friends. Sydney Goodsir Smiths father was a New Zealander, who held the Chair of

Forensic Medicine in the University of Edinburgh, and his mother was Scottish. The young Goodsir

Smith was educated at Malvern College and started on the medical course at the University of

Edinburgh.

His distaste for practical anatomy, however, eventually led him to abandon the medical course at

Edinburgh, and to move to Oxford to study at Oriel College before returning to Edinburgh. Sorley

MacLean married in 1946, and after his marriage he and his wife, Renee, became close friends with

Sydney Goodsir Smith and his wife, both families sharing a house in Craigmillar Park for about

eighteen months, before the MacLeans then moved to Atholl Place. This period is written about in

Goodsir Smiths Under the Eildon Tree (1948). During this time Sorley MacLean entered actively into

the literary life of Edinburgh, and he saw a lot of Sidney Goodsir Smith. J. B. Caird recollects how

whenever he saw Sorley MacLean during this period, he was full of amusing stories about his fellow

poet, The Auk, as he was known, and he comments on how Goodsir Smiths unconventional ways

and witty conversation intrigued Sorley MacLean. Goodsir Smiths first book was Skail Wind (1941),

and he also published Carotid Cornucopius about life in Edinburgh in 1947.

DOUGLAS YOUNG (1913-1973)


4/16

Douglas Young was born in Tayport, Fife, on 5 June 1913, and spent his early years in India, where

his father was involved in the jute industry. He was educated at Merchiston Castle School, and

afterwards studied classics at the University of St Andrews and New College Oxford. In 1938 he was

appointed to lecturer in Greek in the University of Aberdeen.

By 1940, he was in correspondence with Sorley MacLean, and some months before going abroad on

war service in 1941, Sorley MacLean commented in a letter to Hugh MacDiarmid that he had left his

poems with Douglas Young in Aberdeen and John Macdonald, then lecturer in the Department of

Celtic in the University of Aberdeen. Christopher Whytes introduction to his edition of Din do

Eimhir (2002) offers the most detailed account of the correspondence surrounding Youngs

preparation of the poems for publication. Douglas Young was imprisoned in 1942 because of his

repeated public objection to the British Governments authority to conscript in Scotland, and while

he was imprisoned, the task of overseeing the publication fell to the Rev. John MacKechnie. Douglas

Young was, however, able to continue his work of translating Sorley MacLeans poems into Scots

while he was in prison, and these were published in Auntran Blads in 1943. Douglas Young, in a letterwritten to Sorley MacLean on 21 April 1943, refers to him as a consummate Gaelic poet. Sorley

MacLean, too, admired Douglas Young whom he described as of an aristocratic mind and

temperament. In her essay on Sorley MacLean: the Man and his Work (Sorley MacLean. Critical

Essays), Joy Hendry has commented that Sorley MacLean did not feel the same sense of political

kinship or intimate feeling of closeness politically with Douglas Young as he did with Hugh

MacDiarmid. After the war, Douglas Young went from Aberdeen to Dundee and thence to the

University of St Andrews, where he lectured in Greek. He was active in Nationalist politics both

before and after the War, leading the Scottish National Party for some years. He followed a

distinguished career as a scholar, and was known as a poet and writer, until his death at an early age

on 23 October 1973

Dain do Eimhir is a series mostly of love poems. Eimhir was Setanta, Cuchulainn's wife, and

represented to Sorley more than one woman who passed though his life at that time. There was an

Irishwoman, Nessie O'Shea and two Scotswomen. Culturally he makes references to Celtic

mythology with Dierdre and Diarmad but also European mythology e.g Diana the Greek goddess. He

seems to have been very interested in William Butler Yeats and his infatuation with the Irish

Republican heroine Maud Gonne who never returned his love. Yeats' "Politics" has echoes of Gaoir

na h-Eorpa (The cry of Europe):


5/16

How can I, that girl standing there,

My attention fix

On Roman or on Russian

Or on Spanish politics?

Yet here's a traveled man that knows

What he talks about,

And there's a politician

That has read and thought,

And maybe what they say is true

Of war and war's alarms,

But O that I were young again

And held her in my arms


6/16

(DDE ltd. 27)

University gave him further influences and he mentions Shakespeare, Blake and Baudelaire as his

favourites though he rated Hugh MacDiarmid just as highly though he never influenced the way

Sorley wrote. In terms of metres and rhythm he stuck reasonably close to traditional metres with

heavy use of end-rhyme and aicill (rhyming between an end-word on one line and a word in the

middle of the following line), differences in line length and stress, but the subject matter and

symbolism was new. Sorley felt traditional Gaelic poetry had become staid, cliched and parochial.

Sorley broke the mould by taking in a much wider subject matter and expressing his poetry through

his native Gaelic. However he did keep close to traditional metres but they were not overly

complicated, as perhaps this would have led to a fettering and narrowing of his thoughts;

"however slack the rope of auditory shape may be, there nevertheless has to be some kind of

tightrope on to -which the poet goes. I am not prepared to allow to the word 'rhythm' the vagueness

sanctioned by much contemporary theory in Britain, Europe and America. Metre does not make

poetry, but I am not satisfied that poetry can exist without it. " (DDE ttd. 150)

Am Mur Gorm (The Blue Rampart) (XLIII):

End-rhyme in even lines and aicill.

Mura b 'e thusa bhiodh na cuantan

'nan luasgan is 'nan tamh

A' togail cair mo bhuadhan,


7/16

Ga cur air suaimhneas ard

(But for you the oceans in their unrest and in their repose

would raise the wave crest of my mind

and settle it on a high serenity)

MacLean here uses the landscape of Skye to represent desirable states all transcended by Eimhir's

edict. Sorley's pain resulting in great poetry

Agus air creachainn chein fhasmhoir

Chinn blathmhor Craobh nan Teud,

'na meangach duillich t' aodann,

mo chiall is aogas reil.


8/16

(And on a distant luxurious summit t

here blossomed the Tree of Strings

among its leafy branches your face

my reason and the likeness of a star)

An uair a labhras mi mu aodann (When I spoke about a face) (XXXIV):

End-rhyme in couplets. More use of the landscape of Skye to express the hardships he knows the

Spanish people are suffering and his painful decision on whether to go and fight. Interesting to note

that in the Dain do Eimhir version there is a line,

"sa bheil a' bhuirdeasachd a' bathadh ". (in which the bourgeoisie are drowning)


9/16

In Nua-bhardachd Ghaidhlig "a' bhuirdeasachd (the bourgeoisie) " is changed to "dochas (hope) ".

Does this reflect the defeat of the Spanish Republic, which at the time the poem was written was stillundefeated by the forces of reaction? (DDE ttd 241)

Gaoir na h-Eorpa (The Cry of Europe) (IV):

End-rhyme in six quatrains. In this poem the Irishwoman is addressed directly. The heavy use of

adjectives could be a pointer to MacLean's respect for William Ross as there are similarities with his

poem "Oran air gaol na h-oighe do Chailein " e.g

Bha fait cama-lubach, boidheach,

Bachlach, or-bhuidhe, 'na dhuail,

Cas-bhuidhe, sniomhanach, fainneach


10/16

(Her hair cross-looped, pretty

Crook-like, golden, in curl

Crisp-yellow, twisted ringlets)

compared with MacLean's:

A nighean a'chuil bhuidhe, throm-bhuidh, or-bhuidh

fonn do bheoil-sa 's gaoir na h-Eorpa

(Girl of the yellow, heavy-yellow, gold-yellow hair the song of your mouth and Europe s shivering

cry)

The mention of the Asturian Miners Revolt of 1934 and also the slaves sold from Skye to the

American colonies reveal Sorley's wide political knowledge combined with his own native Highland

background and his superb ability to link these events distant in time and location. (DDE ltd 163)

An Roghainn (The Choice) (XXII):


11/16

Mostly aicill rhyming again. A song and a conversation between himself and his understanding. The

dilemma is finally addressed in this poem. If he goes to Spain he may well die and never have thelove of the woman he desires. If he doesn't go then he may not be worthy of her love anyway. A no-

win situation.

Choisich mi cuide ri mo thuigse

a-muigh ri taobh a' chuain;

bha sinn comhla ach bha ise

a'fuireach tiotan bhuam.

(DDE ltd 220)

(I walked with my reason

out beside the sea

we were together but it was

keeping a little distance from me)


12/16

The next set of poems are not from the Dain do Eimhir sequence and show much more use of nature

as a symbol and are less self-conscious in the subject matter. A change in Sorley's attitude to his own

poetry can be detected in his letter to Douglas Young from North Africa dated March 15th 1942;

"nowadays I am always finding my own stuff false, shallow and meretricious... I am very much

ashamed of my preoccupation with my own private troubles and think of many of the other

enthusiasms of my poetry as silly idolatries. I could now write a pretty crushing review of all my own

poetry, especially of 'my highfalutins of love'but they are probably fairly harmless. "

Hallaig

This poem speaks about the cleared village of Hallaig on the eastern side of Raasay on a steep-sided

slope down from the volcanic summit of Dun Cana. Here Sorley uses a pre-Christian Celtic, pagan

view of nature, the connection between the underworld (Tir nan Og), the earth and all living things

coming from it e.g the trees, caves, spring and cairns belonging to both the world above ground and

the world below it. We see below a comparison between the generations of the Clearances and howSorley sees them in the landscape of the trees,

Nafir 'nan laighe air an lianaig

Aig ceann gach taighe a bh ' ann,


13/16

Na h-igheanan 'nan coille bheithe,

Direach an druim, crom an ceann

(the men lying on the green

at the end of every house that was,

the girls a wood of birches

straight their backs, bent their heads)

The comparison between the indigenous trees and the imported Scots Pine forests is likened to the

generations that were cleared and the new settlers who arrived. Sorley also uses an almost

Buddhist-like concept of time being circular. He reveals how Highland he actually is here as opposed

to his more Euro-centric appearance in the Dain do Eimhir poems

A' Chorra Ghritheach (The Heron)


14/16

It was during the writing of this poem that ; Sorley realized he could write better in Gaelic than in

English though it was written before ; the Eimhir series in 1934. In this he meditates on the simple

existence of the Heron and the animal kingdom compared to the sometimes painful human

existence.

For me personally Sorley MacLean is my favourite poet for several reasons. Not only are his views on

independence and socialism concurrent with my own although set in a different timeframe, but I

admire the way he expressed these concepts in his own native Gaelic using local imagery and

symbolism.

Bibliography:

Whyte, Christopher (2002) Dain Do Eimhir. Glasgow:

The Association of Scottish Literary Studies.


15/16

MacAmhlaigh, Domhnall (1987) Nua-bhardachd

Ghaidhlig. Edinburgh: Canongate

MacIlleDhuibh, Raghnall (1999) An Tuil. Duanaire

Gaidhlig an 20mh Ceud. Edinburgh: Polygon

(This article orginally appeared in the Scottish Workers Republic, Spring 2005


16/16

Foakies (Edinburgh)

Twenty minute spots featuring a singer-songwriter and then a poet followed by a forty minute spot

featuring the main act, usually a singer-songwriter. First Saturday of the month, 1-3pm, meeting at

The Royal Oak, Infirmary Street, Edinburgh. If you're a poet interested in performing at Foakies,

please contact Tom Fairnie. Email:[email protected].

The Inky Fingers Open Mic takes place on the fourth Tuesday of the month, from 8-11pm, at The

Forest, which can now be found at 141 Lauriston Place, Edinburgh. Its free to come and free for

anyone to perform, regardless of style, experience, or identity. We want to hear from everybody.

We want your poems, your rants, your ballads, your short stories, your diaries, your experimental

texts, your heart, your mind, your body. We want the essay on your summer holidays you wrote

when you were four, your adolescent haiku, and extracts from your eventually-to-be-completed epic

fantasy quadrilogy. We want to hear your best new work as well. And we want people to care about

the way words are performed.http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com/.

Scottish Poetry Library, 5 Crichton's Close, Canongate, Edinburgh need borrowing form.
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]:[email protected]://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com/http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com/http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com/http://inkyfingersedinburgh.wordpress.com/mailto:[email protected]

Poets and Pubs

Documents

Transcript of Poets and Pubs