Hugh MacDiarmid

Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle I saw yon antrin thing, A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht Ayont the on-ding; An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied Afore ye deed! There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose That nicht—an’ nane i’ mine; But I hae thocht o’ that foolish licht Ever sin’ syne; An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken What your look meant then.

(To William and Flora Johnstone) Wheesht, wheesht, Joyce, and let me hear Nae Anna Livvy’s lilt, But Wauchope, Esk, and Ewes again, Each wi’ its ain rhythms till’t.

(In Memoriam: Charles Doughty, 1843-1926) Under no hanging heaven-rooted tree, Though full of mammuks’ nests, Bone of old Britain we bury thee But heeding your unspoken hests Naught not coeval with the Earth And indispensable till its end With what whom you despised may deem the dearth Of your last resting-place dare blend. Where nature is content with little so are you So be it the little to which all else is due. Nor in vain mimicry of the powers That lifted up the mountains shall we raise A stone less of nature’s shaping than of ours To mark the unfrequented place. You were not filial to all else Save to the Dust, the mother of all men, And where you lie no other sign needs tells (Unless a gaunt shape resembles you again In some momentary effect of light on rock) But your family likeness to all her stock. Flowers may be strewn upon the grave Of easy come easy go. Fitly only some earthquake or tidal wave O’er you its red rose or its white may throw But naught else smaller than darkness and light —Both here, though of no man’s bringing!— And as any past time had been in your sight Were you now from your bed upspringing, Now or a billion years hence, you would see Scant difference, eyed like eternity. How should we have anything to give you In death who had nothing in life, Attempting in our sand-riddles to sieve you Who were with nothing, but the sheer elements rife? Anchor of truth, facile as granite you lie, A plug suspended in England’s false dreams. Your worth will be seen by and by, Like God’s purpose in what men deem their schemes, Nothing ephemeral can seek what lies in this ground Since nothing can be sought but the found. The poem that would praise you must be Like the glass of some rock, sleek brown, crowded With dark incipient crystal growths, we see; Or a glimpse of Petavius may have endowed it With the tubular and dumb-bell-shaped inclusions surrounded By the broad reaction rims it needs. I have seen it in dreams and know how it abounded —Ah! would I could find in me like seeds!— As the north-easterly garden in the lunation grows, A spectacle not one man in ten millions knows. I belong to a different country than yours And none of my travels have been in the same lands Save where Arzachel or Langrenus allures Such spirits as ours, and the Straight Wall stands, But crossing shear planes extruded in long lines of ridges, Torsion cylinders, crater rings, and circular seas And ultra-basic xenoliths that make men look midges Belong to my quarter as well, and with ease I too can work in bright green and all the curious interference Colours that under crossed nicols have a mottled appearance. Let my first offering be these few pyroxenes twinned On the orthopinacoid and hour-glass scheme, Fine striae, microline cross-hatchings, and this wind Blowing plumes of vapour forever it would seem From cone after cone diminishing sterile and grey In the distance; dun sands in ever-changing squalls; Crush breccias and overthrusts; and such little array Of Geology’s favourite fal-de-lals And demolitions and entrenchments of weather As any turn of my eyes brings together. I know how on turning to noble hills And stark deserts happily still preserved For men whom no gregariousness fills With the loneliness for which they are nerved —The lonely at-one-ment with all worth while— I can feel as if the landscape and I Became each other and see my smile In the corners of the vastest contours lie And share the gladness and peace you knew, —The supreme human serenity that was you! I have seen Silence lift his head And Song, like his double, lift yours, And know, while nearly all that seems living is dead, You were always consubstantial with all that endures. Would it were on Earth! Not since Ezekiel has that faw sun ringed A worthier head; red as Adam you stood In the desert, the horizon with vultures black-winged, And sang and died in this still greater solitude Where I sit by your skull whose emptiness is worth The sum of almost all the full heads now on Earth —By your roomy skull where most men might well spend Longer than you did in Arabia, friend!

(For George Reston Malloch) There’s teuch sauchs growin’ i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch. Like the sauls o’ the damned are they, And ilk ane yoked in a whirligig Is birlin’ the lee-lang day. O we come doon frae oor stormiest moods, And Licht like a bird i’ the haun’, But the teuch sauchs there i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch As the deil’s ain hert are thrawn. The winds ’ud pu’ them up by the roots, Tho’ it broke the warl’ asunder, But they rin richt doon thro’ the boddom o’ Hell, And nane kens hoo fer under! There’s no’ a licht that the Heavens let loose Can calm them a hanlawhile, Nor frae their ancient amplefeyst Sall God’s ain sel’ them wile.

(To James H. Whyte) All is lithogenesis—or lochia, Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree, Stones blacker than any in the Caaba, Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces, Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige, Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform, Making mere faculae of the sun and moon, I study you glout and gloss, but have No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again From optik to haptik and like a blind man run My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr, Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles, Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear, An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns, Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world, Deictic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn? What artist poses the Earth écorché thus, Pillar of creation engouled in me? What eburnation augments you with men’s bones, Every energumen an Endymion yet? All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems, But where is the Christophanic rock that moved? What Cabirian song from this catasta comes? Deep conviction or preference can seldom Find direct terms in which to express itself. Today on this shingle shelf I understand this pensive reluctance so well, This not discommendable obstinacy, These contrivances of an inexpressive critical feeling, These stones with their resolve that Creation shall not be Injured by iconoclasts and quacks. Nothing has stirred Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago But one bird. The widest open door is the least liable to intrusion, Ubiquitous as the sunlight, unfrequented as the sun. The inward gates of a bird are always open. It does not know how to shut them. That is the secret of its song, But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful. I look at these stones and know little about them, But I know their gates are open too, Always open, far longer open, than any bird’s can be, That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer Than all birds put together, let alone humanity, Though through them no man can see, No man nor anything more recently born than themselves And that is everything else on the Earth. I too lying here have dismissed all else. Bread from stones is my sole and desperate dearth, From stones, which are to the Earth as to the sunlight Is the naked sun which is for no man’s sight. I would scorn to cry to any easier audience Or, having cried, to lack patience to await the response. I am no more indifferent or ill-disposed to life than death is; I would fain accept it all completely as the soil does; Already I feel all that can perish perishing in me As so much has perished and all will yet perish in these stones. I must begin with these stones as the world began. Shall I come to a bird quicker than the world’s course ran? To a bird, and to myself, a man? And what if I do, and further? I shall only have gone a little way to go back again And be like a fleeting deceit of development, Iconoclasts, quacks. So these stones have dismissed All but all of evolution, unmoved by it, (Is there anything to come they will not likewise dismiss?) As the essential life of mankind in the mass Is the same as their earliest ancestors yet.

(To John Gawsworth) The rose of all the world is not for me. I want for my part Only the little white rose of Scotland That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart.

Aulder than mammoth or than mastodon Deep i’ the herts o’ a’ men lurk scaut-heid Skrymmorie monsters few daur look upon. Brides sometimes catch their wild een, scansin’ reid, Beekin’ abune the herts they thocht to lo’e And horror-stricken ken that i’ themselves A like beast stan’s, and lookin’ love thro’ and thro’ Meets the reid een wi’ een like seevun hells. ... Nearer the twa beasts draw, and, couplin’, brak The bubbles o’ twa sauls and the haill warld gangs black. Yet wha has heard the beasts’ wild matin’-call To ither music syne can gi’e nae ear. The nameless lo’enotes haud him in a thrall. Forgot are guid and ill, and joy and fear. ... My bluid sail thraw a dark hood owre my een And I sail venture deep into the hills Whaur, scaddows on the skyline, can be seen —Twinin’ the sun’s brent broo wi’ plaited horns As gin they crooned it wi’ a croon o’ thorns— The beasts in wha’s wild cries a’ Scotland’s destiny thrills. The lo’es o’ single herts are strays; but there The herds that draw the generations are, And whasae hears them roarin’, evermair Is yin wi’ a’ that gangs to mak’ or mar The spirit o’ the race, and leads it still Whither it can be led, ’yont a’ desire and will. I Wergeland, I mind o’ thee—for thy bluid tae Kent the rouch dirl o’ an auld Scots strain, —A dour dark burn that has its ain wild say Thro’ a’ the thrang bricht babble o’ Earth’s flood. Behold, thwart my ramballiach life again, What thrawn and roothewn dreams, royat and rude, Reek forth—a foray dowless herts condemn— While chance wi’ rungs o’ sang or silence renshels them. (A foray frae the past—and future tae Sin Time’s a blindness we’ll thraw aff some day!) ... On the rumgunshoch sides o’ hills forgotten Life hears beasts rowtin’ that it deemed extinct, And, sudden, on the hapless cities linked In canny civilisation’s canty dance Poor herds o’ heich-skeich monsters, misbegotten, ... Streets clear afore the scarmoch advance: Frae every winnock skimmerin’ een keek oot To see what sic camsteerie cast-offs are aboot. Cast-offs?—But wha mak’s life a means to ony end? This sterves and that stuff’s fu’, scraps this and succours that? The best survive there’s nane but fules contend. Na! Ilka daith is but a santit need. ... Lo! what bricht flames o’ beauty are lit at The unco’ een o’ lives that Life thocht deid Till winnock efter winnock kindles wi’ a sense O’ gain and glee—as gin a mair intense Starn nor the sun had risen in wha’s licht Mankind and beasts anew, wi’ gusto, see their plicht. Mony’s the auld hauf-human cry I ken Fa’s like a revelation on the herts o’ men As tho’ the graves were split and the first man Grippit the latest wi’ a freendly han’ ... And there’s forgotten shibboleths o’ the Scots Ha’e keys to senses lockit to us yet —Coorse words that shamble thro’ oor minds like stots, Syne turn on’s muckle een wi’ doonsin’ emerauds lit. I hear nae ‘hee-haw’ but I mind the day A’e donkey strunted doon a palm-strewn way As Chesterton has sung; nae wee click-clack O’ hoofs but to my hert at aince comes back Jammes’ Prayer to Gang to Heaven wi’ the Asses; And shambles-ward nae cattle-beast e’er passes But I mind hoo the saft een o’ the kine Lichted Christ’s craidle wi’ their canny shine. Hee-Haw! Click-Clack! And Cock-a-doodle-doo! —Wull Gabriel in Esperanto cry Or a’ the warld’s undeemis jargons try? It’s soon’, no’ sense, that faddoms the herts o’ men, And by my sangs the rouch auld Scots I ken E’en herts that ha’e nae Scots’ll dirl richt thro’ As nocht else could—for here’s a language rings Wi’ datchie sesames, and names for nameless things.

I’ the how-dumb-deid o’ the cauld hairst nicht The warl’ like an eemis stane Wags i’ the lift; An’ my eerie memories fa’ Like a yowdendrift. Like a yowdendrift so’s I couldna read The words cut oot i’ the stane Had the fug o’ fame An’ history’s hazelraw No’ yirdit thaim.

The function, as it seems to me, O’ Poetry is to bring to be At lang, lang last that unity ... But wae’s me on the weary wheel! Higgledy-piggledy in’t we reel, And little it cares hoo we may feel. Twenty-six thoosand years ’t’ll tak’ For it to threid the Zodiac —A single roond o’ the wheel to mak’! Lately it turned—I saw mysel’ In sic a company doomed to mell, I micht ha’e been in Dante’s Hell. It shows hoo little the best o’ men E’en o’ themsels at times can ken— I sune saw that when I gaed ben. The lesser wheel within the big That moves as merry as a grig, Wi’ mankind in its whirligig, And hasna turned a’e circle yet Tho’ as it turns we slide in it, And needs maun tak’ the place we get. I felt it turn, and syne I saw John Knox and Clavers in my raw, And Mary Queen o’ Scots ana’, And Rabbie Burns and Weelum Wallace, And Carlyle lookin’ unco gallus, And Harry Lauder (to enthrall us). And as I looked I saw them a’, A’ the Scots baith big and sma’, That e’er the braith o’ life did draw. ‘Mercy o’ Gode, I canna thole Wi’ sic an orra mob to roll.’ —‘Wheesht! It’s for the guid o’ your soul.’ ‘But what’s the meanin’, what’s the sense?’ —‘Men shift but by experience. ’Twixt Scots there is nae difference. They canna learn, sae canna move, But stick for aye to their auld groove —The only race in History who’ve Bidden in the same category Frae stert to present o’ their story, And deem their ignorance their glory. The mair they differ, mair the same. The wheel can whummle a’ but them, —They ca’ their obstinacy “Hame,” And “Puir Auld Scotland” bleat wi’ pride, And wi’ their minds made up to bide A thorn in a’ the wide world’s side. There ha’e been Scots wha ha’e ha’en thochts, They’re strewn through maist o’ the various lots —Sic traitors are nae Langer Scots!’