Other Scottish poems
TRANSLATION
Am fear a chailleas a chanain, caillidh e shaoghal – Gaelic proverb
Every year a language dies
and with it a way of looking at the world.
More than a species, we have lost
a universe.
Everything we see is colored
by a lens of language, heavy
with the weight of those before
who saw and spoke it into being.
Avicenna, ibn Sina,
translating his own ideas
from his native Persian
into the language of the Q’ran,
found he’d made a new philosophy
like making ice into water -
that there was no change
in substance is immaterial.
People say that poetry
is what gets lost in translation.
Plato said that poetry
is translation. Both are right.
DECORUM
…the old lie, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori – Wilfred Owen
1
Gun carriages and shotgun cartridges
are the sort of half-rhyme
that doesn’t bother people anymore.
I imagine my grandfather Shakes
messing with them at the front,
between bombardments, wondering
how much license he could take
with the rules of rhyme and prosody.
Gun carriages were his daily bread
on the banks of the Somme,
where they practiced death
giving and receiving equally,
and later used them for a bier
transporting the accomplished
like drunks with dignity
to their rest in a new world.
Here the cartridges are all shot,
the birds have flown.
We grouse in urban armchairs
about how much better things had been
in an age of civilized gentility,
when art looked like art
and young folks followed all the rules
of rhyme and prosody to their just reward.
2
Shakes or Shakespeare got his name
at Edinburgh before the war,
when chosen as the university Bard,
for making Gaelic verse, like Ossian:
Fingal defending the land
against the men of Lochlann,
when there was a land to save.
A world of honor and sacrifice
wrapped close around him like a plaid,
Shakes lay deep in his tradition, like a grave.
The Highland code of blind obedience
served the Empire well
from India to the Heights of Abraham.
“Cannon to right of them, cannon to left,”
onward into the dark.
And “No great mischief if they fall,”
as General Wolfe remarked.
“Theirs not to reason why,
theirs but to do or die.”
We were all taught Tennyson’s jaunty rhyme
and did our best not to think
as we covered the globe in pink
like roses’ blooms,
like thin blood drained
dried and prettified
for Victorian drawing rooms.
“Do or die.” It’s just right and still wrong
that he stole the phrase from a Scottish song.
3
One day an order came
from some high ups,
reading maps
behind the lines, lines
neatly drawn in parallel
with ruler and protractor, lines
violently coupling,
an heroic rhyming couplet
without end.
“Advance to this position with your men.”
Matter closed.
The trouble was, by then
the spot lay open and exposed,
below the German guns.
It meant certain death for most
of them.
Shakes refused,
believing that his own disgrace
and execution was the nobler course,
a necessary sacrifice
for the men in his command.
Like Sassoon, he chose to take a stand.
The greater courage lay in doing
what the world called cowardice,
the higher duty in ignoring duty.
The only thing that saved him
was the intervention of a general
who happened to be passing
as the firing squad was being assembled.
4
After the armistice
men struggled to rebuild their lives.
Something more than war was ending.
Shakes returned to the university
but gave up writing.
What was the point of pretending
there was order and beauty
and beauty in order, anymore?
He gave up poetry for politics.
Siegfried Sassoon had given up
his stand against the war
and returned to the front.
What difference did it make?
When it was over, his memoirs
were everywhere, like bodies
strewn across a battlefield.
I asked my grandmother if she knew him.
“We’d see him at dinner parties now and then.
Terrible table manners.”
THE FORTINGALL YEW
In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…
And God said, Let the earth bring forth grass, the herb yielding seed, and the fruit tree
yielding fruit after his kind, whose seed is in itself, upon the earth: and it was so.
And the earth brought forth grass, and the tree yielding fruit, whose seed was in itself,
after his kind: and God saw that it was good…
And God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and
female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish
the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
the air, and every living thing that moveth upon the earth.
And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face
of all the earth, and every tree…to you it shall be as meat.
And so was born the Doctrine of Dominion, whose seed was in itself, after its kind.
And when this was written, the Tree of Fortingall was already old. Hundreds, even
thousands of years old.
The Fortingall Yew is as old as the stone circle at Callinish or the Ring of Brogbar; it is
older than David and the Hebrews, older than Hector and Troy, older than Homer and
the Greeks, older than the beginnings of Western Civilization.
The tree was ancient before the Hebrew decided it belonged to man. It was honored, it
was revered and it was protected by our ancestors.
Centuries passed, and then Jesus was born. And Pontius Pilate was born and is
said to have played beneath the shade of this ancient tree. And Pilate ordered the death
of Christ upon a tree;
and Jesus rose again and is to us as meat. Every Sunday we consume him, for this is how we remember.
And the Doctrine of Dominion came to these islands, and we were saved. Its seed was in
itself, and it was planted here and took root.
And missionaries ventured out to the people of Europe. Boniface felled the Sacred
Oak of Donar and brought salvation to the heathens.
And a church was built beside the Fortingall Yew. The ancient tree was encased within
its churchyard as an emblem of immortality.
Centuries passed, and the church was empty and dried out; it was hollow and its
sap was gone, and all that remained in these islands of the faith of the Hebrews was the
Doctrine of Dominion.
Man had multiplied and subdued the earth and every living thing that moveth upon the
earth, and the tree saw it.
And it was not good.
And men started coming from the cities to visit the tree because it was ancient and
famous. And being famous is cool. And they broke off a branch to take home, for this is
how we remember.
And one man tried to put it on his dining room table, but his wife or mother
said it made a mess, and it was soon thrown out and burned or carried away to be buried.
And the tree tried to rise again; it grew more branches.
But another man came, and another. And they kept taking branches or hanging little
beads and ribbons from its branches. For this is how we remember. And the ancient tree
has become stressed.
It is as if Pilate, who played beneath its branches, had ordered its execution. The
soldiers have pierced its side and life itself is seeping slowly out. It will not rise again.
But we will wash our hands and take our seat at the table.
And this is how we remember.
THOUGHTS ON READING “UIG REGISTRAR”
BY RICHARD HUGO, FROM HIS BOOK,
“THE RIGHT MADNESS ON SKYE.”
1
The Uig Registrar, official bard
of an unheroic age, records
a Hebridean birth, marriage, death,
stoically, laconically,
as befits both craft and subject matter,
each event accorded equal status,
like a row of gravestones, which contrive to be
both fully factual and completely
uninformative; earnest, even
deadly serious, but flat,
like schoolboys reading poetry.
How was the wind that day? Did the bride smile?
Two-dimensional (name and date),
his entries stand still and make
a Wallace Stevens poem of themselves,
things as they are with no description,
stones in a stream without water,
plays where the curtain merely
rises and falls,
sentries, stiffly shielding from our eyes
each individual prize.
2
“No in-between. The news is good or bad.”
Out of the west, the new world,
the land of individuals,
Hugo’s here on a quest.
I see him stand
on a stony island beach,
dreaming off deep waters
and dangerous extremes,
while adjectival, between the hills,
qualifying his most statuesque convictions,
a real mist rolls over the valley
like a veil, and a real rain falls,
washing convenient metaphors down to the cold sea.
3
Myself, I’m an incomer in my children’s home
in a mythical Texas, where no-one’s defeated.
The spaces are all wide open, the sky
is not cloudy, the land is dry,
and a man’s a man without description,
without external reference.
In our full churches,
in this West beyond West,
the future falls softly
on the Aisles of the Blest,
but my own soul turns to face the east.
And when I’m in the islands,
I’m at sea, an outsider,
caught between continents,
an island in a sea of islanders.
4
I am a seal-pup whose parents never
taught it to swim. I sit on a rock
like a creature of new land
mourning his lost gills, while the Gaelic sea
seethes, spills, ebbs from my feet, and I long
to duck my head back into the watery womb
of its old ways, below the waves
where I no longer know how to breathe.
Or an archaeologist, back from the dead
to dig for a tradition which still lives
around me, while my children played
among gravestones and sacred stones
and stone circles.
I need help.
The people are going under the ground,
the fairies back into their mound, the great
stone is being rolled shut. Behold
the man, standing, turning to stone.
5
So little survives, only the kelp
clinging to the hard rock.
The harvesters are all harvested,
the gatherers gathered up
and sent to the west, where the sun sets
below the waves.
So little thrives but kelp: the trees
make no headway and wither
in the salt wind, the peats tease
with warm, wispy tales of golden times.
So little remains: our tradition was oral,
and the language is sailing away from us,
falling away, failing.
What records there were in the Western Isles,
of those who fell foul of the law or kirk,
a minister planned
to take to the mainland
for safe-keeping,
but his boat fell foul of the weather
and the murdering Minch, and foundered.
The Uig Register, at least,
has a kind of treasure, like driftwood found
and fetched from the water, drying on the beach,
one by one, like bones, sun-bleached.
6
Shall these stones live?
Perhaps, when the stream is restored,
the current flows strongly again
from known source towards
a million unknown springs,
when all becomes the one song
an unborn child sings.
Our task, therefore, as poets and parents,
is to stand in-between the past and the future.
It is first, like the doctors, to do no harm;
first, to ensure that nothing which reaches us
fails to be passed on. And second,
to unblock channels that can still be breached
and refloat whatever was beached.
And third, and only third, each may presume
to be heard himself, to add some tune
of his own making.
Notes:
A Journey to the Western Isles: the title of a travel narrative by Dr. Samuel Johnson, published in 1775. Johnson, as it happened, never actually reached the Outer Hebrides – he made it no further than Skye. The most famous moment in his book came when he trashed the Ossian epic of James Macpherson as a forgery, challenging the translator to come up with an original text. Ossian was hailed by Thomas Jefferson as the greatest poet who ever lived, and Napoleon kept a copy with him at all times. But Johnson refused to believe the poems could have sprung from what he considered an inferior and unlettered society, ironically not unlike Homeric Greece. The Ossian stories had been circulating orally for centuries, and in verse arguably more musical and complex than anything being produced in the literate London of his day. Calling Macpherson a forger is like calling Homer himself one, or Ezra, who collected and edited the Torah.
Those interested in reading more about Second Sight should try to find the excellent book, Ravens and Black Rain, by Elizabeth Sutherland, or the reissued Highland Second Sight, edited by Norman MacRae with an introductory study by the Rev. Wm. Morrison.
Translation: The epigraph may itself be translated, “a man who loses his language, loses a world/loses his reality.” I owe this quotation to the Gaelic scholar, Michael Newton.
Decorum: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori, a line from the Roman poet Horace, meaning “it is a sweet and fitting thing to die for one’s country.” The horrors of the First World War made this sentiment an obscenity. Owen’s poem calls it “the old lie.” Pound too, in Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, writes: “Died some pro patria/non dulce…non et décor/walked eye-deep in hell/believing old men’s lies.” Following all the rules in WW1 led to mass slaughter. More than 300,000 died at the Battle of the Somme alone. My grandfather went into the war after two years at university, where he had planned to be a poet. He returned five years later to a life in law and politics. ‘The birds have flown:” spoken by King Charles I when he went to Parliament to arrest the Five Members in January 1642. The response of the Speaker, denying his authority, was a classic case of civil disobedience. Grouse shooting is a popular activity among the landed gentry in England, the people most likely to complain that things were better in the old days. “Covered the globe in pink:” British maps always showed the Empire, and later the Commonwealth, in pink, as if to demonstrate visually that the “sun never set” on its glorious extent
The Fortingall Yew: Fortingall is a village in Perthshire, Scotland. Its ancient yew tree (taxus baccata), believed to be several thousand years old, was recently reported to be stressed and even dying because of the attentions of tourists. The first three verses are excerpted from the Book of Genesis in the King James version. The story that Pilate played under the tree as a boy is thought to have been made up in the 19th Century to attract tourism. Boniface (c.675-754), born in Devon, became the Apostle to the Germans and is today the patron saint of both Devon and Germany.
Uig Registrar: Throughout the Gaidhealtachd, the Highlands and Islands of Scotland, many of the people were driven off the good farming land around 1800, made to collect kelp or seaweed for the laird’s profit, and then, when that market collapsed, shipped unceremoniously to the Americas. This was known as the Clearances. Uig is the port on Skye, from which the ferry leaves every day for Lochmaddy in North Uist. The Minch is the famously rough sea between the two.