The poetry of Sorley MacLean

Introduction

Sorley MacLean (1911–1996) is now regarded as one of the greatest Scottish poets of the twentieth century. However, until the 1970s, his verse was known by very few people. In that decade, publication of English translations of his work and the impact of his public readings established him in the eyes of poetry lovers in Scotland, Ireland and England, as well as further afield, as a major poet.

This OpenLearn course provides a sample of Level 3 study in Arts and Humanities.

Learning outcomes

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• understand the power of MacLean's poetry in its original Gaelic

• give examples of how such poetry engages with historical and cultural change.

1 Sorley MacLean

1.1 British poetry and language

To begin this course, look at the sheet of references linked below. You will see that the list includes books by Sorley MacLean and by two other important Scottish poets, Tom Leonard and Edwin Morgan. Not one title was published in London. None of these writers has ever published a collection of poems in London. Yet the prizewinning work of Edwin Morgan is widely used in Scottish schools, and Sorley MacLean's work has been translated into several foreign languages. By the 1980s, a shift of the centre of gravity of poetry publishing had occurred, with Carcanet and Bloodaxe, based in northern English cities, accounting for a very high proportion of acclaimed new books. The day when one major Scottish writer, Hugh MacDiarmid, languished out of print for years on end, and another, Edwin Muir, relied on the recognition of his quality by T.S. Eliot at Faber, were clearly over. The power of the ‘metropolis’ in British poetry had significantly weakened. This corresponded to the political weakening of the London centre with the end of empire.

Click to open the sheet of references.

In the twentieth century there has, in fact, been a conflict of two forces within British culture – one centripetal, making for a greater standardisation of language and attitudes, the other centrifugal, involving the assertion of national and regional differences within the United Kingdom.

Arguably, imperialism was at its apogee in Britain not before 1914, but from the 1920s through to the 1950s (see Mackenzie, 1984). Geographically the empire was larger than ever. The colonial civil service expanded markedly. And new means of communication – the aeroplane and, above all, radio – drew metropolis and possessions closer. While BBC broadcasts to the empire radiated the metropolitan viewpoint abroad, the BBC at home disseminated the ‘BBC accent’. Such eminent Victorians as Gladstone and Tennyson, as early gramophone records show, had strong regional accents (Lancashire and Lincolnshire respectively). Now the bland BBC voice became the badge of respectability.

Furthermore, there was a strong drive in education to elevate English literature from the 1920s – to impose a canon of Oxbridge approved ‘classics’ on the captive audiences in schools and universities. It is no accident that ‘Hugh MacDiarmid’ (the pen-name of C.M. Grieve) began a crusade on behalf of Scottish culture at just that time, nor that one of his chosen platforms was the Scottish Educational Journal.

Of MacDiarmid's most important contemporaries in the so-called ‘Scottish Renaissance’ (a label attached to a very divergent body of work by men who often disagreed strongly with each other), the novelist Neil Gunn wrote in Standard English, as did the poet Muir. But ‘Lewis Grassic Gibbon’ (J.L. Mitchell) wrote fiction in modified Scots, and – perhaps, in the long run, most momentously – Sorley MacLean proved that Gaelic could be the vehicle for powerful poetry fully engaged with contemporary politics and society.

An important outcome of MacDiarmid's renaissance was the growing widespread adoption of a pluralistic view of language and culture in Scotland. MacLean's first pamphlet was produced jointly with Robert Garioch (1909–81), who wrote in Lowland Scots (Seventeen Poems for Sixpence, 1940). But neither was necessarily more ‘radical’ or more ‘Scottish’ in attitude towards language than their friend Norman MacCaig (b.1910), Edinburgh-born but of Gaelic extraction, whose work is in elegant Standard English. The existence of fully accepted alternatives makes Standard English itself experimental! Other poets who have followed through the breach made by MacDiarmid include Edwin Morgan (b.1920), who writes as he pleases, in English, Scots and languages of his own invention.

Morgan's ‘First Men in Mercury’ can be read as a witty parable about language and imperialism. There are two voices. The leader of the Earth men seeks to communicate with the Mercurians. At the outset, his Standard English is calm and assured:

Faced with Mercurian truculence, the Earth man moves into pidgin:

Eventually it is the Mercurian who speaks assuredly, the Earth man who mouths gutturally:

This represents in miniature, one might say, the process by which the colonised learn to handle the English language better than their increasingly muddled and demoralised former masters. But the poem also suggests the situation in Morgan's home city, Glasgow, where a proletarian version of Scots is spoken that the English (and even many Scots) profess to find uncouth and incomprehensible.

Attempts to impose ‘BBC Standard’ through the educational system, on Glaswegians (or Geordies, or Liverpudlians, or Aberdonians) replicate the efforts of British colonialists educating elites to serve them in Africa. Nothing brings out the ruler–ruled factors of distance and domination better than the following poem in Glaswegian by Tom Leonard (b.1944):

So resistance to the south-eastern metropolis within the United Kingdom is not by any means conducted solely in the surviving Celtic languages.

Nevertheless, Sorley MacLean's work in Gaelic is particularly apposite to our theme of ‘end of empire’. From the sixteenth century, the drive of rulers in London (and Edinburgh) against Celtic cultures in the British Isles wore an aspect of cultural genocide. You may be aware of the animus displayed by that pioneer of Standard English, Edmund Spenser, against the Gaels whose land he was stealing in Ireland. At about the same time, James VI of Scotland attempted to colonise Lewis, in the Gaelic-speaking Hebrides, with Lowlanders. As Scottish Gaelic-speakers see their own history, they were deprived of their land, through the nineteenth century ‘clearances’ of people in favour of sheep and deer, by English and Anglicised capitalists, following which attempts to extirpate Gaelic culture intensified. Through acculturation and emigration Gaelic, a language once spoken over most of Scotland, is now reduced to some 80,000 speakers, chiefly resident in the Isles. Gaels find it easy to compare the fate of their people with those of West Indian Caribs, North American Indians and Australian Aborigines. Sorley MacLean, as the most famous of living writers in Gaelic, therefore represents not only a poetic tradition, but also direct resistance to capitalist imperialism. To use the language is to reject the empire and the muscle-bound metropolitan state which has survived it.

But that cannot be the only reason for using it. Protest can be expressed in English. Through that medium it will reach more readers. Why should a small language have any right to survive? What would be lost if it disappeared? After all, tongues spoken across the whole land mass from Ireland to Bangladesh have evolved from one used in the Volga basin less than 5,000 years ago. During that relatively brief time uncountable languages have died out as the groups which have used them have succumbed to new or more successful cultures. Even endurance into the age of print technology did not preserve Cornish – or Pruzzian, which was spoken in part of Eastern Europe until the eighteenth century.

Pruzzian was commemorated by the German writer Joannes Bobrowski (1917–65) in a poem which seems (to me) largely to answer my question. The italicised words are among the surviving fragments of that tongue:

What Bobrowski's poem suggests powerfully is that in our modern environments we are haunted by extinct languages. Only an extreme sentimentalist could argue that one language alone is appropriate to any one environment. But the fact is that cultures abiding for some time do create a language especially for the settled place. This has important implications for literature, especially for poetry. As a poet from Orkney, George Mackay Brown, has put it:

A fortiori, Mackay Brown's point applies to Gaelic. To lose the language would be to lose not only the Gaels' sense of their own history and culture, which is conveyed in its oral and sung traditions, but also the meaning of places, the ‘character’ of landscapes. MacLean's distinction had been not only to conserve but to extend the significance of Gaelic; to give tradition and locality new ‘aura’, and language fresh purchase on experience.

1.2 Grasping Gaelic

1.3 MacLean's Celtic roots

MacLean was born in 1911 in Osgaig, a small township on the Isle of Raasay, adjacent to Skye, the larger island where he went to school. His childhood was dominated by a majestic landscape. The woods of Raasay and the peaks of the Cuillin Hills on Skye are as central to his poetic universe as the hills of Cumbria to Wordsworth's. His father and mother combined work on a small croft with a tailoring business. The latter was severely hit by the great depression of the 1930s, and the family's relative poverty had a powerful effect on MacLean's early life. He studied English literature, not Celtic, at Edinburgh University because it offered better job prospects, and after he took a first class degree, he trained as a teacher so that he could help to support his family, rather than going to Oxford and Cambridge as a research student. He returned to Skye as a teacher, then moved on to the Isle of Mull, and then back to Edinburgh in 1939. In late 1940 he entered the Army. He was wounded three times in the North African campaign – the third experience at the Battle of El Alamein ended his war, since many of the bones in his feet were broken. After convalescence he returned to teaching English in Edinburgh, but in 1956 he went as headmaster to Plockton Secondary School in Wester Ross, a post from which he retired in 1972. For the greater part of his life, he was a hard-pressed and devoted teacher. Most of his poetry was produced in his twenties and thirties, during a long-term crisis when love affairs and politics tortured him equally.

MacLean was powerfully affected in the 1930s by his admiration for the poetry in Scots of Hugh MacDiarmid, whose close friend he became. Just as MacDiarmid brought into the faltering tradition of Scots verse the consciousness – philosophical and political – of avant-garde Europe, so MacLean revolutionised Gaelic poetry.

Gaelic, of which there are Scots and Irish variants, has the longest continuous literary tradition of any European tongue. It was in no sense a primitive or undeveloped medium.

Elaborate verse forms and complex patterns of rhyming (both internal rhyme and end-rhyme) were nourished by a very rich vocabulary. Its lexicon was adequate, in the 1930s, to express a modern consciousness: ‘I've invented a neologism once or twice, but very few’, MacLean has said (in Ross and Hendry, 1986, p. 216). It would seem, though, that MacLean's handling of the tongue owes less to his deep reading in the published Gaelic tradition of ‘high’ poetry than to oral influences.

Though MacLean cannot sing, his family were musically gifted. From his earliest years he was devoted to the songs of his people. ‘I am convinced’, he wrote, ‘that Scottish Gaelic song is the chief artistic glory of the Scots, and of all people of Celtic speech, and one of the greatest artistic glories of Europe’. He referred, in particular, to the songs ‘of the two and a half centuries between 1550 and 1800 – the songs in which ineffable melodies rise like exhalations from the rhythms and resonances of the words’. He detected in them ‘the simultaneous creation of words and music’ (Ris a’ Bhruthaich, 1985, p. 106). You will notice, listening to the recording, that his manner of reading his verse is highly declamatory. Many who have heard him have found the sound of his verse immensely moving, though they are without Gaelic. It has been inferred that he wrote poetry of such oral power precisely because, frustratingly, he could not sing. Yeats, whose verse certainly influenced MacLean, also declaimed his verse in an incantatory fashion, and was ‘tone deaf’.

Another important influence on MacLean was the Free Presbyterian Church, dominant in the Gaelic-speaking areas after it split from the Free Church of Scotland in 1893. Though at a very early age MacLean rejected its doctrines in favour of socialism, he defends it against Lowlanders and others who sneer at its strict practices, which include a complete prohibition of social and private pleasures on Sunday. Unaccompanied Gaelic psalm singing, fiercely passionate, is a feature of Free Presbyterian worship and MacLean has paid tribute to the powerful tradition of Gaelic preaching. Scholars have shown that much of his own poetry is saturated in the vocabulary of this strenuous, sincere and deeply emotional tradition.

2 Sorley MacLean recorded

2.1 Before the recording

Now you have the opportunity to listen to the recordings of Sorley MacLean. I hope you will find that it brings to life the poetry that you have looked at on the page, and that it helps you to grasp some of the differences between Gaelic and English that affect MacLean's translation of his own work, as well as elucidating particular references that may have puzzled you. Perhaps the best plan, if you have time, will be to listen to each section once, and then go through them again, stopping and restarting as you take notes on particular points.

The discussion of the poems will deal with them only as they appear in English.

2.1.1 Aims

The aims of these recordings, in which Sorley MacLean is interviewed by Iain Crichton Smith, are to:

• (a) help you to sense the power of MacLean's poetry in its original Gaelic;

• (b) assist your understanding of the English texts of the poems, translated by MacLean himself.

2.1.2 The poems

Your reading in this course has already prepared you to some extent, but please read the following poems (both the English and Gaelic versions are given) which are discussed in the recordings, and then listen to the recordings.

2.2 Background and recordings

Sorley MacLean, 1911–98, is now regarded as one of the greatest Scottish poets of the twentieth century. Until the 1970s, his verse was known by very few people. In that decade, publication of English translations and the impact of his public readings established him in the eyes of poetry lovers in Scotland, Ireland and England, as well as further afield, as a major poet.

Yet, curiously, this impact depended on work that mostly derived from a very specific conjunction of personal and political factors in the 1930s and 40s. A contemporary of Auden, of the major French Communist poets Éluard and Aragon, and of the great Chilean Communist, Pablo Neruda, MacLean somehow vaulted the generations to speak compellingly (in particular) to young Scots, mostly non-Gaelic-speakers, preoccupied with questions of home rule and nationalism in the era of Heath, Wilson, Callaghan and Thatcher. A passionate anti-imperialist of the forties made sense to Scottish patriots in the seventies.

Attempts have been made to present MacLean as pre-eminently the author of the poems addressed to an idealised ‘Eimhir’, a mythical Celtic beauty – a great poet of love whose politics were merely accidental and sentimental. This will not do.

His feeling for his own people, their culture, and the landscape of his childhood; his unhappy, frustrated love affairs in the late thirties with two women, one Irish, one Scots; and his passionate hatred of Fascism, capitalism and imperialism, formed one nexus of intense feeling. MacLean's cardinal political heroes were the Edinburgh-born Marxist, James Connolly, commemorated so powerfully by Yeats as a hero of Dublin's Easter Rising of 1916, and his fellow-clansman John MacLean, the Glasgow schoolteacher whose Marxist evening classes influenced many workers in the years of the so-called ‘Red Clyde’ (1915–19), who was hailed by Lenin as a great ally, and who was preaching for the cause of an independent Scottish Workers Republic before he died, in his prime, in 1923.

The crux of his crisis in the late 1930s was this: because he felt compelled to earn money as a teacher for his family, he could not obey his impulse to fight for the Republican side in Spain against Fascism. Iain Crichton Smith has argued, regarding MacLean's work of this period, that ‘there is a sense in which the Spanish Civil War does not form the background to these poems, but is the protagonist. The test of whether or not to go to Spain was a deep test of who he was, and therefore a test of the quality of his love’ (Ross, R.J. and Hendry, J. eds, 1986, Sorley MacLean: critical essays, Scottish Academic Press, p. 49).

2.2.1 The recordings

Click 'play' to listen to the interview with Sorley MacLean (Part 1, 7 minutes).

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Transcript: Interview with Sorley MacLean - Part 1

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Sorley, I heard you once saying something about that it's very very difficult to translate Gaelic poetry into English.

SORLEY MACLEAN

Well, I think fundamentally, there is the difficulty of the sound, because on the whole, and especially with our Skye dialect, there is a tendency for the vowel to be longer than it is in English, and therefore even the assonances stand out more than vowel assonances would do in, in English. Of course there is another syntactical difference, because I think Gaelic is wonderfully good at expressing degrees and places of emphasis with the use of natural inversions, and particles, than English is nowadays at any rate. I think that is a big difficulty, besides, of course so much Gaelic poetry is outside the main European traditions. I try myself to be as literal as possible, I mean, logically, but of course, the sound is awfully difficult.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Yes, I suppose that is what we have to remember about poetry, that you are translating not just words, but complete units of sound and words.

SORLEY MACLEAN

I think if you're doing a line by line translation, it is very desirable to have, you know, approximately the same number of syllables in a line, but that is terribly difficult.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

And since there is such a lot of assonance in Gaelic, there is a lot of music which English really cannot get at, and it sounds natural in Gaelic doesn't it? Assonance actually sounds more natural sometimes in Gaelic than in English.

SORLEY MACLEAN

Yes, mind you, it's very often inevitable in Gaelic, because there are so many fewer vowels than consonants.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

That's right, that's right, yes, yes, yes.

And therefore it is at once more natural, I think, and stands out more too, because of the relative length of the vowel.

SORLEY MACLEAN

CEANN LOCH AOINEART

Comhlan bheanntan, stoiteachd bheanntan, corr-lios bheanntan fasmhor, cruinneachadh mhullaichean, thulaichean, shleibhtean, tighinn 'sa' bheucadch ghabhaidh.

Elrigh ghleanntan, choireachan udlaidh, laighe 'S a'bhuirich chracaich; sineadh chluaineagan, shuaineagan srulach, briodal's an dubhlachd arsaidh.

Eachdraidh bheanntan, marcachd mhullaichean, deann-ruith shruthanach cathair, sleamhnachd leacannan, seangachd chreachainnean, strannraich leacanach ard-bheann.

Onfhadh-chrois mhullaichean, confhadh-shlios thulaichean, monmhar luim thurraidean marsail, gorm-shliosan Mhosgaraidh, storim-shliosan mosganach, borb-bhiodan mhonaidhean arda.

SIMON MACKENZIE

KINLOCH AINORT

A company of mountains, an upthrust of mountains a great garth of growing mountains a concourse of summits, of knolls, of hills coming on with a fearsome roaring.

A rising of glens, of gloomy corries, a lying down in the antlered bellowing; a stretching of green nooks, of brook mazes, prattling in the age-old mid-winter.

A cavalry of mountains, horse-riding summits, a streaming headlong haste of foam, a slipperiness of smooth flat rocks, small-bellied bare-summits, flat-rocks snoring of high mountains.

A surge-belt of hill-tops, impetuous thigh of peaks, the murmuring bareness of marching turrets, green flanks of Mosgary, crumbling storm-flanks, barbarous pinnacles of high moorlands.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Well, I suppose, even someone who doesn't know any Gaelic would notice that – in reading the Gaelic version – that there are all these similar sounds like "mhullaichean", "thulaichean", and "chluaineagan", and "shuaineagan" and so on. This gathering together of lots of adjectives and lots of nouns and so on, this is something that we find traditionally in Gaelic, isn't it, certainly in earlier Gaelic?

SORLEY MACLEAN

This poem is fundamentally semi-surrealist, with a confusion of the senses. I mean, in the sense of that things heard, things seen in terms of things heard, and vice versa, and there is also the fact that it is on a day of wind and rain and swirling mists, where mountains – tops – appear and disappear, and seem to move. Now in this poem, I've been asked again and again by Gaels where on earth the rhythm came from, and I think myself that the rhythm is, in spite of the great number of assonances and all that, that the rhythm is fundamentally original, and by the way, there is a bigger congregation of nouns than of adjectives.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Yes. I suppose really that the closest you might get to something like this in English would be, maybe some of the poems of Hopkins, where he draws from the Welsh. I think sometimes he has a series of nouns or a series of adjectives and so on.

SORLEY MACLEAN

Douglas Young always used to tell me that there's an awful lot of sprung rhythm in my verse. But I didn't agree with him, however it may be something like that.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

I notice also that in this particular poem, and I've noticed also in some of your other nature poems, that you've got quite a lot of comparison of mountains and so on to women, especially a kind of sexual mountains, like "impetuous thigh of peaks".

SORLEY MACLEAN

I wouldn't quite agree that it's here. You see I think there, you see, it was more the suggestion of the horse rider there, you see.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Oh yes.

SORLEY MACLEAN

I think. You see you have to say a word for "seangachd", "small-belliedness", you see that word "seang" in Gaelic, you know, is often used of a horse, the small belly of a horse, and it's a terribly difficult word to get an equivalent in English …

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Yes, yes, yes. Because it's specialised …

SORLEY MACLEAN

… You see this word seang, the adjective "seangachd", small-bellied, and it's used more of horses than of human beings, although it can be used of human beings too, and of course, it's a word that expresses great approbation.

End transcript: Interview with Sorley MacLean - Part 1

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Interview with Sorley MacLean - Part 1

Click 'play' to listen to the interview with Sorley MacLean (Part 2, 8 minutes).

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Transcript: Interview with Sorley MacLean - Part 2

SORLEY MACLEAN

CURAIDHEAN

Chan fhaca mi Lannes aig Ratasbon no MacGill-Fhinnein aig Allt Eire no Gill-Iosa sig Cull-Lodair, ach chunnaic mi Sasunnach 'san Eiphit.

Fear beag truagh le gruaidhean plulceach is gluinean a' bleith a cheile, aodann guireanach gun tlachd ann - comhdach an spioraid bu troine.

Cha robh buaidh air " 'san tigh-osda 'n am nan dorn a bhith 'gan dunadh", ach leoghann e ri uchd a' chatha, anns na frasan guineach mugach.

Thainig uair-san leis na sligean, leis na spealgan-laruinn bearnach, anns an toit is anns an lasair, ann an crith is maoim na h-araich.

Thainig flos dha 'san fhrois pheileir e bhith gu spreigearra 'na dhuilnach: is b'e sin e £had 'S a mhair e, ach cha b' fhada fhuair e dh' uine.

Chum e ghunnachan ris na tancan, a' bocail le sgriach shracaidh stairnich gus an d' fhuair e fhein mu 'n stamaig an deannal ud a chuir ri lar e, bial sios an gainmhich 'is an greabhal, gun diog o ghuth caol grannda.

Cha do chuireadh crois no meadal ri uchd no ainm no g' a chairdean: cha robh a bheag dhe fhoirne maireann, 'S nan robh cha bhoidh am facal laidir; 'S CO dhuibh, ma sheasas ursann-chatha leagar moran air a shailleabh gun dui1 ri cliu, nach iarr am meadal no cop 'sam bith a bial na h-araich.

Chunnaic mi gaisgeach mor a Sasuinn, fearachan bochd nach laigheadh suil air; cha br Alasdair a Gleannan Garadh - is thua e aal beaa air mo shuilean.

SIMON MACKENZIE

HEROES

I did not see Lannes at Ratisbon nor MacLennan at Auldearn nor Gillies MacBain at Culloden, but I saw an Englishman in Egypt.

A poor little chap with chubby cheeks and knees grinding each other, pimply unattractive face - garment of the bravest spirit.

He was not a hit "in the pub in the time of the fists being closed", but a lion against the breast of battle, in the morose wounding showers.

His hour came with the shells, with the notched iron splinters, in the smoke and flame, in the shaking and terror of the battlefield.

Word came to him in the bullet shower that he should be a hero briskly, and he was that while he lasted but it wasn't much time he got.

He kept his guns to the tanks, bucking with tearing crashing screech, until he himself got, about the stomach, that biff that put him to the ground, mouth down in sand and gravel, without a chirp from his ugly high-pitched voice.

No cross or medal was put to his chest or to his name or to his family; there were not many of his troop alive, and if there were their word would not be strong. And at any rate, if a battle post stands many are knocked down because of him, not expecting fame, not wanting a medal or any froth from the mouth of the field of slaughter.

I saw a great warrior of England, a poor manikin on whom no eye would rest; no Alasdair of Glen Garry; and he took a little weeping to my eyes.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Sorley, I think one of the obvious things here would be who MacLennan at Auldearn was, who Gillies MacBain at Culloden was, because I suppose for a reader outside the Gaelic tradition, I suppose they would want to know, first of all, why in particular you might have chosen these two. In Gaelic tradition of course, one would understand why you chose Alasdair of Glen Garry at the end, because he is of course mentioned in a great Gaelic poem, and one of these poems which says that the hero is always blue-eyed and very handsome and very generous and so on. I wondered why in particular you chose MacLennan and Gillies MacBain?

SORLEY MACLEAN

Well, Napoleon's Marshal Lannes was very very famous for his physical courage, he wasn't evidently the most clever of Napoleon's Marshals, but his physical courage was a by-word, and of course Browning's poem, you know, "We French Stormed Ratisbon" mentions him, at the storming of Ratisbon. Now MacLennan at the battle of Auldearn between the Royalists under Montrose, and the covenanters, the Mackenzie, Earl of Seaforth was on the covenanting side, but he was thinking of turning his court, and when he saw that the deal was likely to go with the Royalists, he ordered his men to retreat.

Now the head of the family of the MacLennans and Glen Sheil, who were the hereditary bannermen, said this banner has never gone back in the hands of one of my people, and it's not going back today. And the MacLennans stood and were absolutely decimated, and it is borne out by the Red Rose of Kintail. That was in 1645. Now, Gillies MacBain was second in command of the Clan Chattan regiment at Culloden, and his feats were almost unbelievable. I believe when he was found dead he had about 30 bayonet wounds. Of course Alasdair of Glen Garry refers to a man who lived about, died about 1720 and about whom there are a speight of Gaelic elegies attributing every possible physical and moral virtue, even wisdom, and of course the most famous of them, and the best, is by a distant relative, Cicely – or Julia – of, daughter of the chief of Keppoch, who begins and ends a poem "Alasdair of Glen Garry, today you brought weeping to my eyes". So one has to know quite a lot about Gaelic. Special Gaelic history.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Yes, I think this poem is fairly clear, that you've got this poor person who is physically very small and not at all handsome looking in comparison with someone like Alasdair of Glen Garry, but at the same time he had his courage, he had his kind of courage, so I don't think there's any other major problems of any kind in this particular one. The other thing in translation that you might get references in translation that you have to understand – or you could maybe get them footnoted – but it's better I think to get from the author himself, the idea why he chose these particular people.

Oh there is one other thing, the last line in the Gaelic, and the last line in the English. In the Gaelic it says:

SORLEY MACLEAN

is thug e gal beag air mo shuilean

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

and in English it says:

SIMON MACKENZIE

and he took a little weeping to my eyes.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Would you say that was a particularly Gaelic expression?

SORLEY MACLEAN

Ah, well, it is really almost a quotation. Of course the difficulty about that is, you see, "little" and "weeping" are both disyllables, whereas "gal" is a monosyllable and so is "beag", you know, for "little". Perhaps it would have been better if I had said "he took a small weeping" but that would be rather artificial, wouldn't it?

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Oh yes, yes, yes, yes.

End transcript: Interview with Sorley MacLean - Part 2

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Interview with Sorley MacLean - Part 2

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Transcript: Interview with Sorley MacLean - Part 3

SORLEY MACLEAN

GLAC A' BHAIS

Thubhairt Nasach air choireigin gun tug am Furair air ais do fhir na Gearmailte 'a' choir agus an sonas bas fhaotainn anns an arich'.

'Na shuldhe marbh an "Glaic a' Bhais" fo Dhruim Ruidhiseit, gill' og 'S a logan sios m' a ghrusidh 'S a thuar grisionn.

Smaoinich mi air a' choir 'S an agh a fhuair e bho Fhurair, bhith tuiteam ann an raon an air gun eiright tuilleadh;

air a' ghreadhnachas 'S air a' chliu nach d' fhuair e 'na aonar, ged b' esan bu bhronaiche snuadh ann an glaic air laomadh

le cuileagan mu chuirp ghlas' air gainmhich lachduinn 'S i salach-bhuidhe 'S lan de raip 'S de spruidhlich catha.

An robh an gille air an dream a mhab na h-Iudhaich 'S na comunnaich, no air an dream bu mhotha, dhiubh-san

a threoraicheadh bho thoiseach a1 gun deoin gu buaireadh agus bruaillean cuthaich gach blair air sgath uachdaran?

Ge b'e a dheoin-san no a chas, a neoichiontas no mhiorun, cha do nochd e toileachadh 'na bhas fo Dhruim Ruidhiseit.

SIMON MACKENZIE

DEATH VALLEY

Some Nazi or other has said that the Fuehrer had restored to German manhood the 'right and joy of dying in battle'.

Sitting dead in "Death Valley" below the Fuweisat Ridge a boy with his forelock down about his cheek and his face slate-grey;

I thought of the right and the joy that he got from his Fuehrer, of falling in the field of slaughter to rise no more;

Of the pomp and the fame that he had, not alone though he was the most piteous to see in a valley gone to seed

with flies about grey corpses on a dun sand dirty yellow and full of the rubbish and fragments of battle.

Was the boy of the band who abused the Jews and Communists, or of the greater band of those

led, from the beginning of generations, unwillingly to the trial and mad delirium of every war for the sake of rulers?

Whatever his desire or mishap, his innocence or maglignity, he showed no pleasure in his death below the Ruweisat Ridge

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

I like this poem very much because I think it shows a kind of, what you might almost call a Greek justice, especially in the last verse there:

SIMON MACKENZIE

Whatever his desire or mishap, his innocence or maglignity, he showed no pleasure in his death below the Ruweisat Ridge

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

It's very strongly focused, I presume this was an actual individual that you actually saw?

SORLEY MACLEAN

Oh yes, oh yes, oh yes. He, I was almost obsessed with the face of the boy. There wasn't a mark on him, and he looked so young. He was killed, obviously, by a bomb blast, or mine blast. The point is he was sitting up straight, which was curiously piteous in its way.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Yes. You decided to put this epigraph at the top:

SIMON MACKENZIE

Some Nazi or other has said that the Fuehrer had restored to German manhood the 'right and joy of dying in battle'.

SORLEY MACLEAN

I thought it was desirable at the time, because, you see, I had been struck by the phrase that I saw translated somewhere, before, before this.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Yes. Sorley, is the epigraph common in Gaelic poetry? I know that you've used it in "Hallaig" I think.

SORLEY MACLEAN

I can't think it is common at all in older Gaelic poetry.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

I can't bring to mind very many myself, no. The other thing is there are two verses here which run into each other without a break:

SIMON MACKENZIE

of the pomp and the fame that he had, not alone, though he was the most piteous to see in a valley gone to seed

with flies about grey corpses on a dun sand dirty yellow and full of the rubbish and fragments of battle.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Is it common for Gaelic verses to run into each other like that, and not be self-contained? Though I suppose it is quite common in modern English poetry, but is it common in Gaelic poetry?

SORLEY MACLEAN

Well, I suppose it has become fairly common nowadays. This was written in '43, or perhaps even in the end of '42, and certainly it wasn't common then.

SORLEY MACLEAN

AN TE DH'AN TUG MI …

An te dh' an tug mi uile ghaol cha tug i gaol dhomh air a shon; ged a chuirradh mise air a sailleabh cha do thuig i 'n tamailt idir.

Ach tric an smuaintean na h-oidhchr an uair bhois m' aigne 'na coille chiair, thig osag chuimhne 'g gluasad duillich, ag cur a furtachd gu luasgan.

Agus bho dhoimhne coille chuim, o fhrairnhach snodhaich 'S meangach rneanbh, bidh eubha throm: carson bha h-aille mar fhosgladh faire ri latha?

SIMON MACKENZIE

SHE TO WHOM I GAVE

She to whom I gave all love gave me no love in return; though my agony was for her sake, she did not understand the shame at all.

But often in the thoughts of night when my mind is a dim wood a breeze of memory comes, stirring the foliage, putting the wood's assuagement to unrest.

And from the depths of my body's wood, from sap-filled root and slender branching, there will be the heavy cry: why was her beauty like a horizon opening the door to day?

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

I suppose in this one again we come back to this relationship between nature, imagery and people.

SORLEY MACLEAN

Well, this poem came out of very, very unusual circumstances, which left me for over two years in a kind of perplexity. It is true that from the time I was a young boy, I was obsessed with woods and mountains. You see, we had those wonderful woods of Raasay when I was a young boy, with every kind of tree imaginable. Well, I suppose they're almost obsessive images in, in my verse. You will notice here, I think, the restraint of the assonances. And something almost like a dying foal, which I think actually suits the mood of the poem. There is about this poem a kind of hesitancy. A kind of coming down, a hesitancy suggesting, I think, a perplexity, and it was written in a time of great perplexity.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Yes, I think I understand what you mean, because in some of the other poems that you've done, some of the love poems, you get a kind of harmony which is given by the assonances, whereas here you don't actually use in the fourth line any kind of harmony with the second line in any of the verses. So I suppose this, this really replicates, in a way, the lack of harmony in the poem itself. I can understand that.

End transcript: Interview with Sorley MacLean - Part 3

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Transcript: Interview with Sorley MacLean - Part 4

SORLEY MACLEAN

FUARAN

Tha cluaineag ann an iomall sleibh far an ith na feidh ius biolaire; 'na taobh suil uisge rnhor reidh, fuaran leugach cuimir ann.

Air latha thainig mi le m' ghaol gu taobh a' chaochain iomallaich, chrom i h-aodann sios ri bhruaich 'S cha robh a thuar fhein tuilleadh air.

Rainig mi a' chluaineag chein a rithist liom fhein iomadh uair, agus nuair choirnhead mi 'san t-srulaich cha robh ach gnuis te m' ulaidh innt'.

Ach bha na glinn is iad a'falbh is calbh nam beann gun fhuireach rium, cha robh a choltas air na sleibhtean gum facas m'eudail ulaidhe.

SIMON MACKENZIE

A SPRING

At the far edge of a mountain there is a green nook where the deer eat water-cress, in its side a great unruffled eye of water, a shapely jewel-like spring.

One day I came with my love to the side of the remote brook. She bent her head down to its brink and it did not look the same again.

I reached the distant little green many a time again, alone and when I looked into the swirling water there was in it only the face of my treasure-trove.

But the glens were going away and the pillared mountains were not waiting for me: the hills did not look as if my chanced-on treasure had been seen.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

This poem of course shows again these assonances very strongly, I think, in this particular poem. I think this one, probably more than any of the others, shows these kind of assonances.

SORLEY MACLEAN

Tha cluaineag ann an iomall sleibh far an ith na feidh lus biolaire; 'na taobh suil uisge mhor reidh, fuaran leugach cuimir ann.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Is this incident, if we can call it a particular incident, is this based again on a real incident, or something that you actually imagined as a poem?

SORLEY MACLEAN

I don't think it is based on a real incident.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Remember that I mentioned about your way of humanising landscape. I notice that in this one for instance you've got

SIMON MACKENZIE

in its side a great unruffled eye of water

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

Is this something that happens in Gaelic poetry previous to your own?

SORLEY MACLEAN

I think it is a perfectly natural thing, I mean it's a very Gaelic thing, but for instance, if you take the word "ridge" in English, the Gaelic for that is "dhruim", and--

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

"dhruim" of course meaning, meaning--

SORLEY MACLEAN

"the back".

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

"the back".

SORLEY MACLEAN

And how you use the word for a neck and for an arm, the forearm, and the upper arm, and the knee, is so very often used, and the shin, for what you might call topographical features. I think it is very Gaelic but I think …

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

It's not exclusively Gaelic.

SORLEY MACLEAN

It's not exclusively Gaelic, but I think the Gaels are more inclined to it than other languages that I can think of.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

I was just wondering, looking at this poem again, when you're writing your poems were, there any particular poets that influenced you either in Gaelic or in English, even though you're writing in Gaelic?

SORLEY MACLEAN

Well, I find it very difficult to say, you see, when I wrote English as well as Gaelic I was affected by people like the early Pound and Eliot, and people like that. It's curious that I had a kind of youthful mania for Shelley, but I don't think he influenced my own verse in the least. Blake I think did, and of course in Gaelic it was more the anonymous song and probably William Ross.

IAIN CRICHTON SMITH

I suppose one of the differences that people would notice, if they could actually read Gaelic in comparison with modern English poetry certainly, is the musical quality of your poetry. Obviously you believe strongly in the oral side of poetry don't you?

SORLEY MACLEAN

Oh yes. Yes, I believe very strongly in the oral side of poery. I always have, and I think it is difficult for a Gael to be otherwise inclined. For instance, when you think that practically all Gaelic poetry up to this century, practically all, was meant to be sung or, in the case of the old heroic ballads, to be chanted. It's a very, very, very, very strong tradition in Gaelic, until this century, and after all, it's awfully difficult to get out of your roots altogether.

End transcript: Interview with Sorley MacLean - Part 4

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Interview with Sorley MacLean - Part 4

2.3 After the recording

It follows that sorting MacLean's poems out by ‘themes’ entails the risk of disguising the tight interlocking of ‘Politics’, ‘Love’, ‘Landscape’, ‘War’ and ‘History’ in all his poetry down to 1945. Nevertheless, for convenience's sake, I will do this.

2.3.1 Politics

MacLean was a socialist from the age of twelve, and a Marxist by the late 1930s, when he believed that the Soviet Union and the Red Army were the only agents that could defeat Fascism. However, he never joined the Communist Party, and by 1944 events in Poland had thoroughly disillusioned him about Stalin and the Soviet Union. One reason why he could never commit himself fully to Communism seems quite clear: he retained from his Calvinist heritage a deep pessimism about human nature and human action which recoiled from glib prophecies of a coming socialist paradise.

Please now look again at ‘The Turmoil’, linked below. You will see that it begins by reconsidering (but not dismissing) ‘Christ's suffering’, moves on to dismiss the ‘vapid dream’ of the Celtic Arcadia – ‘land of story’ – and finally presents a contest between the beauty of a fair-haired woman (an Irish friend, who never realised that the shy MacLean loved her, and married someone else) and the claims of politics. Politics involve pain – the plight of the poor is like ‘a bitter wound’ – ‘anger’, another strong feeling, and ‘intellect’, identified with Lenin. The last word, ‘anger’, seems to be directed against the ‘cloud’ cast by beauty as well as the ‘poverty’ suffered under capitalism.

Click to view the poem ‘The Turmoil’

Now please read ‘The Cry of Europe’, linked below. I think it will seem as obvious to you as it does to me that the answer to the poem's sequence of five rhetorical questions cannot be ‘love transcends politics’. The poem's fourth line exemplifies a trait of MacLean's voice which in English appears as wry understatement, undercutting his heady, passionate rhetoric: we will encounter this again.

Click to view the poem ‘The Cry of Europe’

The final image of the Slave Ship refers to the horrific event in MacLean's local Gaelic tradition, when in 1739, certain clan chiefs on Skye sold their own people by the shipload into indentured servitude in the New World. Rejection of the British Empire, for MacLean, is the logical outcome of the treatment of his own people by ‘Britons’, even by those of their own race.

2.3.2 Love

Please now read ‘Dogs and Wolves’.

This poem is amazing in its forceful, simple-seeming expression of an extraordinarily complex combination of thought and emotion. The ‘dogs and wolves’ are the speaker's ‘unwritten poems’. Why ‘unwritten’? One infers that other matters take priority over love poems. But – ‘unwritten’ – their latent presence assumes nightmarish form, as if the frustration of being unwritten makes them murderous. They race ‘bloody tongued’ across ‘the hard bareness of the terrible times’ – dominating, this implies, the poet's consciousness of embattled Europe and of poverty in Scotland. Yet these are the ‘mild mad dogs of poetry’. Paradoxically, their quest is for gentleness and loveliness. The ‘terrible times’ deny their release into actual poems: in their hunger they hunt ‘without respite’. At the risk of seeming banal – because this is a poem of truly tragic power which can only be the product of abnormally intense feeling – one could say that MacLean voices a frustration such as many people of conscience have felt in many contexts: a craving denied becomes rapacious, silently hysterical, yet the denial must continue.

Now please re-read ‘A Spring’ and ‘She To Whom I Gave’, and read ‘Spring Tide’.

Intensely lyrical as these poems are, the emotion – ‘love’ – which they express is involved with conflict, ‘shame’, regret. MacLean as ‘love poet’ has been compared with great English poets – with the Shakespeare of the Sonnets, John Donne. But Seamus Heaney's comparison of MacLean with Dante, who created in his poetry a figure, Beatrice, ‘who mediates between the heavenly and earthy worlds’, seems very shrewd. In MacLean's love poems, Heaney argues, the woman:

2.3.3 Landscape

You have heard this point discussed on the recording. ‘Kinloch Ainort’ is a rarity in MacLean's work – a poem ostensibly concerned with nothing but description of natural phenomena. Yet the erotic charge is unmistakeable. ‘Antlered bellowing’ is that of stags in rut. In ‘A Spring’, however, there is a conflict between love and landscape: the poet, obsessed with the image of his love in the water, is cut off from the glens and mountains which are indifferent to his obsession with her. ‘She To Whom I Gave...’ quietly evokes an immense tradition in European mythologies involving trees with human beings. Here the speaker's current rootedness is in tension with the ‘horizon opening the door to day’. ‘Spring Tide’ again identifies the speaker with stasis, touched by movement, which represents remembered love. The ‘ocean’, which is incomprehensible, briefly and deliciously floods over the sharp reefs and the ‘wrack of grief’.

2.3.4 War

MacLean's love poems present a situation where the speaker is baffled by stasis. He cannot act. Frustration in love is involved with political frustration.

Gaelic tradition values men of action – often heroes who died in defeat. The battle cry of the MacLeans, ‘Fear eile air son Eachainn’ (‘Another One for Hector’), recalls the battle of Inverkeithing in 1651, when the seventeenth chief of the clan, ‘Red Hector of the Battles’, fell in action. Clansman after clansman rushed in to protect him. Of 700 MacLeans engaged, only 40, it is said, survived.

The remarkable handful of poems which Sorley MacLean wrote about his own experience of battle show the resolution of fierce internal conflict in action. In a war when most British combatant poets produced no more than wry observations, small personal poems, MacLean's work is unique in its combination of stark detail with a convincing overview, and with astonishing moral certainty.

Of ‘Heroes’ some further discussion will be valuable. One of the inspiriting factors in MacLean's contribution to Gaelic morale has surely been his generosity towards other peoples. ‘Heroes’ pays tribute to an Englishman who displays valour worthy of Gaelic praise.

But as John Herdman has subtly argued (Ross and Hendry, 1986, pp. 173–4), the poem implies a criticism of the Gaelic ideal. The Nazi ideal of soldierly sacrifice is coldly mocked in ‘Death Valley’. The little Englishman in ‘Heroes’ is contrasted with the heroic but stupid Marshall Lannes. I remarked earlier on the trait of understatement in MacLean's rhetoric. We see it again here in the casual word ‘biff’ to translate the Gaelic expression for the blow that kills the Englishman. Whereas the hero of the 1715 Rising, Alastair MacDonald of Glengarry, was the subject of a famous Gaelic elegy which contains the line, ‘you brought tears to my eyes today’, the death of the little Englishman brings ‘a little’ weeping to MacLean's eyes. This does not derogate his courage. It opposes realism – a gruff businesslike sympathy for the common soldier – to the flowery praises of tradition.

Please now read ‘Going Westwards’ and ‘An Autumn Day’ presented below.

Click to view the poem ‘Going Westwards’

Click to view the poem ‘An Autumn Day’

'Shame’, in the first stanza of ‘Going Westwards’, seems to me to suggest both the misery of the Gael whose culture is demoted and derided, and the more general ‘shame’ of inhabitants of the British Isles who let their rulers appease Mussolini and Hitler. ‘The Clyde’ suggests that. MacLean is thinking of the heavy bombing of the burgh of Clydebank in March 1941 – but in his view the poverty of the Clyde region was a crime of imperialism, to be listed along with Nazi atrocities. Dmitrov was a Bulgarian Communist falsely accused in 1933 of setting fire to the German Reichstag.

Guernica, the undefended Basque town bombed by German planes serving Franco in 1937, is also distant from the innocent corpses of Nazis in the desert. One reads this as sardonic – dead men can do no harm. The last stanza might at first sight seem boastful. It isn't that. MacLean, for better or worse, whether he likes it or not, comes from a fighting tradition. But the old fighting pride of the MacLeans has been ‘ruinous’ on occasion. Heroism is invoked here, but not uncritically.

‘An Autumn Day’ deploys irony against another element in MacLean's heritage. The explosives that kill six comrades behave like the Calvinist God, deciding that these shall die – are ‘elect’ – irrespective of their human vices and virtues, while permitting the poet to survive.

Taking these war poems together, the overview is firm and clear. A necessary war is being fought by a clear-sighted poet. Yet the detail of the conflict suggests irony after irony. As in Greek tragedy, horror precedes calm: horror somehow generates clarity.

2.3.5 History

The census of 1911, the year of MacLean's birth, recorded 200,000 speakers of Scottish Gaelic. Fifty years later, the number had dropped to 81,000. If MacLean's vision is frequently pessimistic, this must surely derive at least in part from the dwindling of the culture and language to which he had committed himself as poet.

Please now read ‘A Highland Woman’.

Click to view the poem ‘Highland Woman’

The anonymous woman is symbolic of Gaelic history. The view of Jesus here has to be understood in relation to MacLean's view of the role of Christianity in that history. Ministers preached acceptance, on earth, of poverty, of tyrannous landlordism, of Clearances, of mass emigration. It was as if their Christ had seen only the poor of ancient Palestine, and paid no heed to the living poor in the glens.

Please now read ‘The National Museum of Ireland’ below. It was written in 1970, and is the latest example of MacLean's work in our selection. Of this poem, MacLean explained that ‘A Gael, if he is at all a Gael, must love Ireland as well as Scotland’ and that he could ‘think of no famous soldier who embodies as much as Connolly does my ideals of Gaeldom, socialism, heroism and martyrdom’ (Bell, R. ed. 1989, The Best of Scottish Poetry, Chambers, p. 112).

Click to view the poem ‘The National Museum of Ireland’

The last stanza indicates that it is from the working-class poor that future heroes as great will come. His politics have remained, in essence, revolutionary: his view of history, consciously proletarian.

Please now read ‘Hallaig’ below. The epigraph is not a quotation but a free-standing line by MacLean himself. The many proper names in the poem are – or were once – full of associations for local people, but we cannot share these. All that we need to know is that Mac Gille Chaluim was the name conventionally given to the clan chiefs of the MacLeods of Raasay, an island just off the Isle of Skye. ‘Hallaig’ balances reality and vision, despair and hope. The first two lines, suggesting that the house on Raasay in which the poet himself grew up is now deserted, are at once opposed by two more asserting continuity through the image of the birch, embodying the Gaelic tradition which MacLean loves. ‘The Sabbath of the dead’ is a phrase merging vision with actuality. The utter peace and quiet of the strict Free Presbyterian Sunday is not simply a negative phenomenon, a denial of life. An emphatic, wonderful silence is created: broken only by muted convergence of black-coated figures on the churches. The Sabbath of the dead would be even more powerfully silent. The silence which is characteristic of present-day, deserted Hallaig elevates the poet's vision of lost community, consecrates it.

Click to view the poem ‘Hallaig’

What does the vision of lost community in ‘Hallaig’ share with the heroic image of Connolly in ‘The National Museum of Ireland’? And with that of the English soldier in ‘Heroes’ and that of the ‘Highland Woman’? I would suggest anti-elitism is the common factor. One could relate this to MacLean's preference for anonymous, orally-transmitted Gaelic song over the more elaborate work of named and printed poets. Unlike Yeats (and unlike Eliot and MacDiarmid), MacLean is profoundly egalitarian. To his cast of mind, empire, and the habits of thought and feeling which go with it – authoritarian, racist, arrogant – are utterly antipathetic. His people were marched over by imperial troops, cleared off their land by their own chiefs, left with a deep mistrust for Established forces which was expressed in the truculent ‘freedom’ of Free Presbyterianism. MacLean took a step ahead of most of them, rejecting the Calvinist doctrine of election to grace as elitist, while retaining a puritanical contempt for mere worldly riches and power. Through his work, the oldest literary language of Europe challenges modern bourgeois values with urgent contemporaneity.

2.3.6 Credits

The contributors to the recordings in this course are Sorley MacLean and Iain Crichton Smith; the recordings were produced by G.D. Jayalakshmi for the Open University.

Conclusion

You have now had an opportunity to examine the poetry of Sorley MacLean. This should have helped you gain an increased sense of the power of MacLean's poetry both in the English and in its original Gaelic.

The provision of the English translations and the discussion by the poet himself during the interview with Ian Crichton Smith should have increased your understanding of the English texts.

References

Acknowledgements

This course was written by Dr Angus Calder

Except for third party materials and otherwise stated (see terms and conditions), this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence

Grateful acknowledgement and thanks are made to Michael Schmidt, OBE, FRSL, Carcanet Press Limited for permission to use the poems of Sorley MacLean in this course.

Course image: Kate Ter Haar in Flickr made available under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Licence.

These extracts are from A319 © Copyright 1991 The Open University.

© Dr Julian Toms

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