What a poetic journey through Glencoe tells us about culture

“Since writing this essay, I have spent a great deal of time studying the 2014 Scottish independence referendum campaign and spending the week of the vote in Scotland.

A striking fact about Scotland’s sense of its distinctive culture and identity is that, whether I talked with No or Yes voters, they all identified first or entirely as Scottish.

“In fact, in several decades of writing on Scottish literature, and living there for many periods, I have never heard a Scot say ‘I’m British’. Many No voters now add it as a second identity, but in my experience that is a recent impulse to make it a significant point.

“Though they may differ on how Scottishness can best face the future, within or without the Union, they are intensely aware that their history, culture, language, and politics are different from England’s and are, for most, a source of pride and self-definition.

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“Despite the 55%-45% win for No, Eliot’s encounter with difference seems as central to understanding Scotland and Scotland’s culture today as in 1932. That, in itself, attests to the power of Scottish national identity, which cannot be equated with any simplified definition of nationalism.

“Thus, when Eliot spoke of a Scottish national seeing Scotland as a ‘region’, he used a term I, at least, have never seen in the writing of a Scot: they do not see themselves as a region but as a nation. For Scots, Scotland is, and has always remained, a nation, however allied with the other nation in the Union.

“And, ironically, English nationals are finding it essential to consider what has been called ‘the rise of Englishness’. Thus a gap appears, in the poem, between Eliot’s intellectual claims and his rich artistic imagination, a recognition compelling, in his own terms, a move beyond dissociation to what Schneider calls the ‘desolation that in spirit includes the personal with the geographical and historical, the moral with the cosmic’. It remains, I think, the source of this poem’s ‘great’ lyric power.”

And, one might add, it is a contribution to our own sense of national distinction. Thank you, Mr Eliot, and thank you, Professor Gish.

Back in St Conan’s Kirk, the first poem I read at the afternoon’s commemoration of Glencoe was

On the Massacre of Glencoe, 1692 by Walter Scott. It was published in 1814, the same year as his first novel, Waverley, the first of the whole series of Waverley novels; the same year Byron published his poem

Scottish novelist and poet Walter Scott

The Corsair, as he was taking over from Scott as the most popular author of long narrative poems; the same year Jane Austen published Mansfield Park.

The same year George Cockburn’s British army forces burned down the Library of Congress and all its books in Washington (burning books was a British initiative there, although Thomas Jefferson re-established that library in 1815); the same year Patrick Sellar commenced his Highland Clearances in Sutherlandshire.

The point is that such atrocities were still happening in Scotland and across the world 122 years after Glencoe, just as they are today. The poem is a dialogue. The Poet asks the Harper if he’s playing only to the empty Glen: the mists, the deer, the eagle are there, but no people. And then the Harper replies.

“O, tell me, Harper, wherefore flow

Thy wayward notes of wail

and woe

Far down the desert of Glencoe,

Where none may list their melody?

Say, harp’st thou to the mists

that fly,

Or to the dun-deer glancing by,

Or to the eagle that from high

Screams chorus to thy minstrelsy?”

“No, not to these, for they have rest, —

The mist-wreath has the

mountain-crest,

The stag his lair, the erne her nest,

Abode of lone security.

But those for whom I pour the lay,

Not wild-wood deep nor

mountain grey,

Not this deep dell that shrouds from day,

Could screen from treacherous cruelty.

“Their flag was furled and mute their drum,

The very household dogs

were dumb,

Unwont to bay at guests that come

In guise of hospitality.

His blithest notes the piper plied,

Her gayest snood the maiden tied,

The dame her distaff flung aside

To tend her kindly housewifery.

“The hand that mingled in the meal

At midnight drew the felon steel,

And gave the host’s kind breast

to feel

Meed for his hospitality!

The friendly hearth which warmed that hand

At midnight armed it with the brand

That bade destruction’s flames expand

Their red and fearful blazonry.

“Then woman’s shriek was heard in vain,

Nor infancy’s unpitied plain,

More than the warrior’s groan, could gain

Respite from ruthless butchery!

The winter wind that whistled shrill,

The snows that night that cloaked the hill,

Though wild and pitiless, had still

Far more than Southern clemency.

“Long have my harp’s best notes been gone,

Few are its strings and faint

their tone,

They can but sound in desert lone

Their grey-haired master’s misery.

Were each grey hair a minstrel string,

Each chord should imprecations fling,

Till startled Scotland loud should ring,

‘Revenge for blood and treachery!’”

WALTER Scott fills out his poem with the full emotional power of a great Romantic declaration. He defines a situation and gives it a complete expression. After Scott, it seemed only fair to go to TS Eliot and bring out the contrast between the full-blown Romanticism of Scott and the hard-line Modernism of Eliot. But it wasn’t a lecture. I briefly introduced the poems and then let them speak for themselves.

The third poem was by Douglas Stewart, a different kind of thing altogether. It speaks very clearly of the universal or more literally global symbol that the massacre of Glencoe represents.

Stewart (1913-85) has been described as a major 20th-century Australian poet, and short story writer, essayist and literary editor, “the greatest all-rounder of modern Australian literature”.

Be that as it may, he was born in Eltham, Taranaki Province, New Zealand, so he was in fact a Kiwi. But his name alone suggests an undeniable Scottish – and more particularly, Gaelic – ancestry. He studied at the University of Wellington, beginning with law but changing courses to writing and journalism.

He fell in love with the New Zealand countryside. And in 1938, after moving to Australia, he fell in love with the Australian bush.

Landscape was essential to him, so we might speculate that the landscape of Glencoe itself might have haunted his imagination.

He married the painter Margaret Coen in 1945 and they had a daughter, Meg. They lived in Sydney until 1953, then moved to the rural northern suburbs.

He won a Unesco travelling scholarship to Europe and the family of three spent eight months there in 1954. He wrote his first poetry at 14 years of age, while he still lived in New Zealand, became the literary editor of The Bulletin in Australia in 1938 and only left in 1968, joining the publisher Angus & Robertson and the advisory board of the Commonwealth Literary Fund, 1955-70.

As well as writing poetry, Stewart also wrote radio drama. The Fire on the Snow, his verse play dramatising Scott’s Antarctic journey, was broadcast in 1941 to great acclaim.

So much information – gratefully selected from that font of wisdom, Wikipedia – I note here to give some background to the distances covered by the imagery of Glencoe, and the profundity of the effect of the place and the event of the massacre, to a poet hard at work on the other side of the world. Here it is, Glencoe by Douglas Stewart:

Sigh, wind in the pine;

River, weep as you flow;

Terrible things were done

Long, long ago.

In daylight golden and mild

After the night of Glencoe

They found the hand of a child

Lying in the snow.

Lopped by the sword to the ground

Or torn by wolf or fox,

That was the snowdrop they found

Among the granite rocks.

Oh, life is fierce and wild

And the heart of the earth is stone

And the hand of a murdered child

Will not bear thinking on.

Sigh, wind in the pine,

Cover it with snow;

But terrible things were done

Long, long ago.

The last poem I read was very different again. John MacDonald, or rather, Iain Lom (c1624-c1710), a contemporary of the event itself, was a Tacksman of Allt a’ Chaorainn from Clan MacDonald of Keppoch. He was appointed by King Charles II as the first Poet Laureate of Scotland.

His family was of minor nobility within Clan MacDonald of Keppoch. “Lom” is Scots Gaelic for “bald” or “shaved” but it might also suggest “bare-faced”, as in, “brazen”, speaking your mind openly, vehemently, violently, and there’s no doubt Iain was capable of that, as we’ll see. He composed a song about the 1645 Battle of Inverlochy – he was there. And he wrote of the Treaty of Union of 1707. (Find that poem!)

Many stories pertain to his sharp wit and violent verbal felicity.

It’s said that as a young man, he attended the Royal Scots College at Valladolid in Spain and was expelled for “indiscretion”.

He was a passionate man and a ferocious poet. And this is most evident in the sheer hatred expressed towards Clan Campbell in this poem. For reasons of space I’m not reproducing the original Gaelic here, but this is my English-language version of his poem Glencoe:

On the Campbells, complete devastation.

Let them feed their greed on that.

No generations further than this. Lead them to utter extinction.

Let them die out. End them all. Every poisonous rat.

Each one of them. And every last bit of their land

Must go to my people, Clan Donald. By my hand,

This I’d bring down upon all.

All of Argyll goes to Ranald of Keppoch

And all of Breadalbane’s land goes to MacIain

Such is deserved after all they have suffered.

Nothing less, after one single night of such pain,

Such villainy, treachery, concentrate sin,

Betrayal, murder, bloodshed, disdain.

This is my call.

Remember the Laird of Achtriachan –

Keep him sharp in your memory now –

He goes to Cowal where the big sheep are –

And Campbell of Ardkinglass: how

He’s approved in the light of the sun and

The moon, confirmed by the King’s hypocritical hand –

Let them fall.

If goodness returned to the land and was sure,

I’d be content, empty-handed and pure,

And if suddenly death should arrive like a cure,

And if none of the goods of the world were for me,

I would not want them to be.

I know I’d be welcome in heaven’s good grace.

Sufficient for vengeance to fall in its place.

This is all.

IN the concluding remarks at the end of the whole afternoon, we returned to the fact that such villainous actions are still going on, perpetrated by people who pass themselves off as the official legislators of the world – and the portraits around us were witness to their self-importance.

So what is it that brings out the worst in people, in such ways as we had witnessed in the presentations? Ultimately, perhaps, it is the human desire for order and uniformity violently enforcing its priorities over the living human communities we try to be part of.

This reminds us that the forces that gave rise to Glencoe have never gone away. They never do. They are with us now. And they were certainly in Hugh MacDiarmid’s mind when he addressed his poem on the Spanish Civil War to the South African poet Roy Campbell. The name was enough to prompt him. Anyone who speaks of aspects of MacDiarmid’s “Fascism” should remember his vehement opposition to it, expressed in this poem.

Do you remember Glencoe,

Roy Campbell,

Fit panegyrist of Franco’s abominations;

History repeats itself – the evil spite of Breadalbance and Stair

You walking inferiority complex!

Is identical with yours. “Enraged that so many

They had hoped to enmesh in their pride and so ruin

Should have escaped by stifling that pride

They vented all their evil fury upon the few

A legal technicality left at their mercy.

Vile as this was, viler still

Was the method employed to execute their will,

The treachery, the abuse of hospitality.”

So here again, in regard to Spain

All true men, as all true Scots

In regard to Glencoe, swear an oath

To take no rest nor thought for their own concerns

Till the authors of these abominations shall have been brought to account,

To spend themselves without stint to accomplish this,

And shrink from nothing that shall forward the sacred task.

I ended by quoting another passage from MacDiarmid, which, while it endorses his condemnation, offers perhaps a sensitive appraisal of what it might actually be that comes through all this devastation that we are, all of us, still fighting for.

All soldiers are fools.

That’s why they kill each other.

The deterioration of life under the régime

Of the soldier is a commonplace; physical power

Is a rough substitute for patience and intelligence

And co-operative effort in the governance of man;

Used as a normal accompaniment of action

Instead of a last resort it is a sign

Of extreme social weakness. Killing

Is the ultimate simplification of life.

... The animus of war is to enforce uniformity

– To extirpate whatever the soldier

Can neither understand nor utilise

... [But] The effort of culture is towards greater differentiation

Of perceptions and desires and values and ends,

Holding them from moment to moment

in a perpetually changing but stable equilibrium

That’s what those villagers of Glencoe were living within, I think, and what they had hoped to continue living within. That is what was betrayed, along with the brutality of slaughter, of children, women and men, the killing of animals, the burning of houses, the contempt of hospitality given, the scorn of human generosity, warmth and welcome.

This is what was shot in the back, stabbed in the throat, raped in the snow, left to die in the ice-cold air. And that spells out exactly what the opposition is that we’re faced with today. And what we continue to fight for. This is what “the effort of culture” means.