Scots and English

The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse. Chosen by John MacQueen and Tom Scott. (0.U.P., 45s.) The Frog Prince and other poems. By Stevie Smith. (Longmans, 30s.) Fresh Water, Sea Water. By Peter Levi, S.J.

(Black Raven Press, Andr6 Deutsch, 21s.) The Force and other poems. By Peter Redgrove. •

(Routledge, 159.)

Positives. By Thom and Ander Gunn. (Faber, 32s. 6d.) I Burn For England. An Anthology of the poetry of World War 11. Selected and introduced by Charles Hamblett. (Leslie Frewin, 50s.) 'Bums is a beast, with splendid gleams, and the medium in which he lived, Scotch peasants, Scotch Presbyterianism, and Scotch drink, is re- pulsive.' Matthew Arnold's words sum up the response of many English readers. Poetry in Gaelic is beyond their comprehension; poetry in Lowland Scots is merely a degraded form of English, too difficult to bother with, except per- haps for a few of Burns's great lyrics. T. S. Eliot has said that Lowland Scots is 'a language related to English—quite incorrectly considered a dialect of English—but which is perhaps the one language in the world which no Englishman has ever been able to learn to speak properly.'

It's not just Englishmen who are responsible for this contempt. In the eighteenth century David Hume was ashamed of the Scottish vernacular, and led a movement to abandon this so-called corrupt language. Burns stands at the end of a literary tradition, representing a Minority movement only temporarily resisting the forces of anglicisation. In 1936, to the disgust of Hugh MacDiarmid and the supporters of the Scottish Renaissance, Edwin Muir argued that the Scottish writer should forget the vernacular, and write in English : 'The curse of Scottish literature is the lack of a whole language, which finally means the lack of a whole mind.'

The publication of The Oxford Book of Scot- tish Verse should provide a powerful weapon for those who condemn the ignorance of English readers and the treachery of the Scots. It in- cludes no Gaelic or Latin, and so concentrates on four great achievements—the golden fifteenth- century period of the so-called Scottish Chaucerians, the ballads, the eighteenth-century revival of Ramsay, Fergusson and Burns, and

e modern successes of poets such as Sydney oodsir Smith, Edwin Muir and Hugh Mac- Piarmid. The editors have tried to choose poems in the Scottish tradition: the poems of Drummond of Hawthornden, who spoke Scots but wrote in English, are excluded. But the shifting relation- ship between Scots and English has made this principle difficult to apply, and Norman Mac- Caig, Kathleen Raine and Burns Singer, for example, who all seem closely allied to English forms, are well represented.

Although there are sad, dark periods of little achievement, particularly after the Reformation, when, as Edwin Muir says, 'Knox and Melville clapped their preaching palms and bundled all the harvesters away,' this anthology magnifi- cently justifies the editors' confidence in the Scot- tish language. Hugh MacDiarmid has written that

'English is incapable of affording means of ex- pression for certain of the chief elements of Scottish psychology'; the poems here in various forms of Lowland Scots have an animation not found in the verses of those who bow down to English usage. Great poetry results as much from the ability to perform something new with language as from profound experiences; Mac- Diarmid's own position as the greatest contem- porary Scottish poet justifies his 'literary' synthetic Scots, or Lallans, in which he chooses words from all dialects and periods. A new vocabulary brings new vitality—bubbliejock for turkey, for example —or in this opening stanza of MacDiar- mid's well-known 'Crowdieknowe':

Oh to be at Crowdieknowe

When the last trump blaws,

An' see the deid come 1oupin' owre The auld grey wa's.

If we substitute 'blows' for %laws,' and 'leap- ing' for loupinV much of the energy is lost. How far this Oxford Book can promote Scottish verse I don't know; it's enough to say that it includes some of the greatest poems in the world.

Stevie Smith's verse demonstrates some of the problems facing those in the English tradition. She uses simple, apparently naive verse forms with amazing versatility, from lines suitable for a Christmas cracker:

A couple of women is one too many,

Oh, how I wish I could do without any!

to imitations of nursery rhymes, fairy stories, Wordsworth and Blake. But one feels, as with many English writers of the 'fifties, that her wit is used with desperation like a magic incantation to avert inevitable disaster: 'It is curious to be caught in a moment of pause like this, As a river pauses before it plunges in a great water- fall.' This book, including sixty-nine new poems together with a scattering of others previously published, is abundantly illustrated with Stevie Smith's macabre drawings. Almost hysterical perhaps, these verses are bitter, gay, eccentric, pathetic—not more so than in the sad poems on Christianity.

Peter Levi writes with elegance and charm, though at times it's as if he's so aesthetically dis- tanced from his poems he's disappeared altogether. In his main poem, 'Thirty Ways of Drowning in the Sea,' consciousness seems en- gulfed in indistinct aesthetic impressions. And yet I feel Levi is close to a striking development in style, seeking a moment of metaphysical vision which still just dudes him. Peter Redgrove's new book is disappointing—very much the mixture of heady rhetoric as before; everything shakes, throbs, shoots, flings, crashes, until our senses are bemused by the whirling animation of nature. I feel his great promise will never find its proper fulfilment unless he curbs his delight in force—the title of his book—and develops a new astringency.

The photographs in Ander and Thom Gunn's compilation take us from a new-born child, creased skin aglow in his bath, to a mouldering old woman, stirring in the sun. Set by their side are Thom Gunn's verses, conceived as adjuncts to the pictures, and not to be judged in their own right. The photographs are superb, particularly the portraits. Pictures and verse interact with a rich expressiveness; this is a book to browse through with pleasure many, many times. Finally, Charles Hamblett's new anthology offers further evidence for the growing interest in the literature of the last war. He's unlucky to follow so quickly Brian Gardner's excellent collection, The Terrible Rain, but there are many different poems here well worth their inclusion.