18.3 Distinctive characteristics and Scots as a language for poetry

When asked what he thought Robert Burns’ best single line of poetry was, Hugh MacDiarmid said that it was the line, ‘Ye are na Mary Morrison…’ from the song, ‘Mary Morrison [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] ’. In context, the meaning is simple enough: the speaker, a young man at a dance, is looking around for the woman he has set his heart on and doesn’t see her. The women he sees are fine and good but none of them are Mary Morrison.

Norman MacCaig said he thought MacDiarmid’s choice was surprising, since he’d expected MacDiarmid to quote a politically charged line, such as ‘A man’s a man for a’ that…’ But MacDiarmid’s choice was deeply political in one important sense. He wrote elsewhere that he was committed to bringing to an end the idea of ‘superiority’ attached to one language and imposed over and above another. He was thinking not only of Scots and Gaelic but all the languages of the world which had been threatened, and some made extinct, by colonial conquest. He wrote: ‘All dreams of imperialism must be exorcised, including linguistic imperialism / Which sums up all the rest.’ (MacDiarmid, H. 1955.)

In this light, his preference for that line of Burns takes on a powerful significance, because there is all the difference in the world between saying ‘You are not Mary Morrison’ and ‘Ye are na Mary Morrison.’ Those two tiny, seemingly unimportant words ‘Ye’ and ‘na’ set the tone for the whole line; they combine regret, haunted urgency in the search for the beloved, loss and regret at not seeing her or finding her there, and a definite, optimistic sense of preference: other young women may indeed be fine, attractive, bright in various ways and beautiful to the eyes of various beholders, but none of them is the woman for him.

It’s in that vernacular, colloquial, intimate yet objective tone that the poetry of the line resides.

Alexander Runciman – Robert Fergusson, 1750–1774

Burns (1759–96) wrote his poems and songs in the culmination of the work of a number of writers which opened the ground for him, both in terms of a reading public in Edinburgh, who were well-educated in Scottish poetic tradition and eager for new work, and in terms of a broader public keenness for engagement with Scots vernacular poetry, first in Burns’ native Ayrshire, then further afield.

The key figure in this story is Allan Ramsay (1686–1758), whose two-volume anthology The Ever Green (1724) drew upon the Bannatyne Manuscript of poems from the 15^th and 16^th centuries collected by George Bannatyne in the 16^th century. When Ramsay published his anthology in the 18^th century, it reintroduced poets such as Dunbar and Henryson to a new readership.

The immediate successor in this story is Robert Fergusson (1750–74), whom Burns described as his ‘elder brother in misfortune, by far my elder brother in the Muse’: that is, Burns recognised that Fergusson, in his poverty and ultimate breakdown and incarceration in an asylum for the insane, was in more desperate conditions than himself but that nonetheless, he was as great or even a greater poet. Certainly, Burns gained from the writing and cultural presence these two predecessors had made.

In the 19^th century, poetry in Scots was sometimes found in the newspapers and periodicals of the cities, particularly Glasgow and Aberdeen. Tom Leonard’s anthology Radical Renfrew collects many of these poems of protest, demanding social redress. As the majority of the population of Scotland centred in the cities (especially industrial Glasgow) the vernacular speech idioms and literary forms that had been familiar and fluent in village politics and rural life were applied in city contexts. Important poets of this era included David Webster (1787–1837), Thomas Burnside (1822–79), and John Barr (1822–92) and Jessie Russell (1850–1923) both of whom emigrated to New Zealand.

After the First World War, the Scottish Literary Renaissance led by Hugh MacDiarmid foregrounded poetry in Scots, with the long, book-length poem ‘A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle’ (1926) galvanising the literary scene in its radical engagement with adult themes and ideas that most nineteenth-century Scots language poetry had been neglecting.

MacDiarmid took on an international range of reference in the priorities of politics and the economy described by Marx, ideas of psychology and sexuality explored by Freud, concepts of power and the refusal of a ‘slave-mentality’ affirmed by Nietzsche. In this, he had much in common with his contemporaries, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, but he delivered his most searching expositions of these ideas in poems written in vernacular Scots.

MacDiarmid’s younger Scottish contemporary, William Soutar (1898–1946), was equally dedicated to writing poems in Scots, both poems for adults such as MacDiarmid had pioneered, and brilliantly written poems for children, ‘Bairnrhymes’, riddles and ‘Whigmaleeries’.

These poets regenerated Scots poetry in the 18^th, and then again emphatically in the 20^th century. The extent to which Scots is available to anyone in the 21^st century through online sources as well as freely accessible archives means that the rich history of the subject can be more fully explored than ever before. At the same time, it will always be necessary to enhance and complement our study of the subject by experiencing Scots as a living language, which means venturing into the world beyond libraries and universities.

Having acquired some knowledge and experience of how Scots is spoken currently, it is equally necessary to return to our opening point, that words, language, forms of expression are different in poems than they are in everyday speech. This unit has done no more than introduce some of the range of different poetic forms and moments of urgency through history in which they have found expression.