International Thistle

Collected Poems. By Hugh MacDiarmid. (Oliver and Boyd, 42s.) Smith. Hugh MacDiarmid: a Festschrift. Edited by K. D. Duval and Sidney Goodsir (Duval, 35s.)

ONE by one, like Merlins released from the rock, the Celtic (let us use the term generally to begin with) poets are emerging from the obscurity into which they were forced by several decades of metropolitan poetry. Stretching a point, one might say that Robert Graves was the first, for, by his own testimony, he owes more to Mad Sweeney and the Hag of the Mill than to Spenser or Milton. But it is often hard to discriminate in Graves between a genuine identification with early Irish poetry and a desire to flabbergast his English readers.

A more clear-cut example is R. S. Thomas, whose dialogue with the hill people of Wales began as long ago as 1946, though his reputation dates from Song at the Year's Turning, ten years later. Then there was Mr. Austin Clarke, whose Collected Poems was described in the recent British number of Poetry (Chicago) as 'the literary event of 1961.' And now we have Hugh MacDiarmid, in many ways the most ambitious and interesting of the lot, the only one who has sought to reconcile defiant adoption of a local or special tradition with the international claims of modern poetry.

The opening, 'A Moment of Eternity' (1923), gives little hint of the struggle which dominates these Collected Poems. A Shelleyan intuition of the universe of light, it seems of interest only in showing that MacDiarmid had already en- dured one of the two primary poetic experiences (it is not only Moses who saw the Burning Bush). But the language is weakly conventional: I was a multitude of leaves Receiving and reflecting light, . . .

Only two years later, with the adoption of Scots idiom, MacDiarmid's energies were released. I do not intend to enter into the usual confused controversy about Lallans: Sangshaw and Penny Wheep showed that for MacDiarmid (as for Burns) certain effects were possible in it, which were not in English. What seems worth remarking is the variety of these effects. The reel-loud vigour of a ballad like 'I Heard Christ Sing' is balanced, as in early Pound, by the imagistic delicacy of Trompe-l'oeil.' Marvellously coarse farmyard detail is succeeded by a vision of interstellar worlds where . . Earth, the bare auld stane, Glitters beneath the seas o' Space, White as a mammoth's bane. But it is in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) that MacDiarmid's early powers are on full show. One is a little in despair at the idea of introducing a work of this stature, so late in the day: it is not merely the best Scottish poem since Burns's Tam o' Shunter, but one of the most ambitious in modern literature. The influence of the Night-town scene in Ulysses would seem clear even if we did not know (from Albert Mackie's essay in the Festschrift) that Mac- Diarmid was one of Joyce's earliest admirers. A fairer comparison might be with Hugh Sel- wyn Mauberley, another sequence where a poet examines the civilisation in which he is involved. There are the same dazzling scene changes, from the weariness of the opening I amna' fou' saw muckle as tired—deid dune.

to the famous love-lyric, '0 wha's been here afore me, lass,' and the sound of a local cele- bration, 'Drums in the Walligate, pipes in the air.' But there is a dimension in Macniarmid not conspicuous in Pound: comic detachment.

(I kent a Terrier in a sham fecht aince,

Wha louped a dyke and landed on a thistle.

He'd naething on ava aneth his kilt.

Schonberg has nae notation for his whistle.)

But, the exasperated non-Scots reader may say, not merely is the subject barbarously pro- vincial, but enclosed within the barbed-wire of dialect. The glossary provided is laughably in- adequate, glossing 'glower' and `galliard,' but leaving us helpless before The Sauchs in the Reuch Heuch Hauch.' Nevertheless, the effort is more than worthwhile, renewing our contact, through MacDiarmid, with Burns and the powerful tradition of medieval Scots poetry.

Besides, at every point, English co-exists with Scots: one of the best poems in Sangshaw, 'A Herd of Does,' is purest Sassenach. In fact, MacDiarmid's later work is preoccupied with the desire to extend English, not through the wordplay of Finnegans Wake, but by multiplying references to other cultures and sciences. In To Circumfack Cencrastus (1930) he curses his `dooble life and dooble tongue,' and yearns for the imagined simplicity of Celtic Islands/Where the wells are undefiled.' And here, as Douglas Sealy indicates, emerges a central irony in Mac- Diarmid's career: his inability to come to terms with the Gaelic tradition, except through the medium of his superb English translations.

The magisterial opening cadences of 'Laineot for the Great Music':

Fold of value in the world west from Greece Over whom it has been our duty to keep guard A Have we slept on our watch; have death Lula

dishonour Reached you through our neglect and left You in lasting sleep?

are dissipated by the poet's excessive claims .for his subject. Compared to the subtle technical adaptations of Austin Clarke, MacDiarrind s use of Gaelic seems even more ostentatious than that of Graves.

Another poetically dangerous area of exPe.r,i' ence, politics, appears to suit MacDiarmid talent much better. 'In the Slums of GlasgoW seems to me the best of its kind in modern English. The rather wearying 'bonnie fecht.er aspect of his character stilled, the over-arching compassion of his vision emerges, shining over the city like a rainbow:

I have caught a glimpse of the seamless garment And am blind to all else for evermore.

The immaculate vesture, the innermost shift,

Of high and low, of rich and poor. . . • Which restores us, unexpectedly, to 'A Morrie.° of Eternity,' and the single unifying percept of MacDiarmid's career: the ideal order he seeks for Scotland is only an aspect of a greater design. In his later poetry, like In Memortatt! James Joyce, he tries to detail this endless Yet ordered universe: he has reached that stage, (valuable to the mystic, dangerous to the Pall; where everything seems relevant. Here again. La". comparison with Pound becomes imperativc.:1 both have tinkered despairingly with S01 Credit and other less attractive forms of 001, revolution: both seek (to quote Pound on Cavwr canti) a poetry 'where one thought cuts anntile„ with clean edges' while obscuring their 01:: tracks with the pedantry of mad hedge-scho masters. Nevertheless, as with The Cantos, 00 .5 lagging faith is revived by a suddenly Pell°, passage, like 'The Glass of Pure Water; elt cellently analysed here by George Bruce. t would be a pity of MacDiarmid the world- were finally to seem more provincial than i'v1,3ct Diarmid the conscious Scot, because his inst111ct is right: in this day and age one should be ou merely a local, but an international thistle. JOHN MONTAGU