THE Langholm Initiative’s fundraising to buy the Tarras Valley Nature Reserve is reaching its last weeks. There’s an urgency now. Hugh MacDiarmid, born Christopher Grieve in Langholm in 1892, has a poem about the valley itself that sets out its quality and temper vividly.

“Tarras” is a self-defining, self-sustaining poem created by the impact of its own contradictions: robust and hypersensitive, assertive and tender, exclamatory and rhapsodic, rough and meticulous, assertive and speculative, confirming and questioning, explicit and suggestive. Here is the opening verse-paragraph translated into English:

This Bolshevik bog! Suits me down to the ground!

For by over-fastidious fussiness the world is not run.

Let fools set store by a simpering face,

Others seek to keep the lower classes in their place

Or express their revulsion at vermin – but by heck

The purpose of life needs them – if us.

Little the bog and the masses understand

Of some nit-picker or pedant

Ho for the mother of usk and adder

Splitting and opening and spreading itself here in her black and scarlet

Far from Society’s tinkling chattering and meaningless babble.

The boggy moor is obstinate, stubborn, resistant to rule, disrespectful of establishment authority, opposed to class and privilege: it’s a “Bolshevik bog” and its character is attuned to that of the poet, or rather, his to its. The word “usk” is Estonian for faith, belief or religion in general but I suspect it’s a Scots word whose meaning I haven’t yet found. However, it’s possible that the poet means to indicate by “the mother of usk and adder” the kind of place that gives birth to both religion and the tempter, the snake in the Garden of Eden, and that; is itself an Eden with all ranges of virtue and sin rising out of it.

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To “spelder” is to spread or pull apart, to split a fish or gut a chicken, or open up an orange or a fig, so the moor itself is splitting itself open and letting all its inner creatures, angels, demons and devils, out into the air.

And this is the wilderness world, life beyond bureaucracy. But to get to that meaning intimately, to taste the juice and chew the gristle of it, you have to go to the original Scots language poem. Try it out in your own voice and give it every velocity, turn the volume up, have fun with the alliteration, assonance and rhyme, the fricatives and gutturals. Here it is.

This Bolshevik bog! Suits me doon to the grun’!

For by fike and finnick the world’s no’ run.

Let fools set store by a simperin’ face,

Ithers seek to keep the purale in place

Or grue at vermin – but by heck

The purpose o’ life needs them – if us.

Little the bog and the masses reck

O’ some dainty-david or fike-ma-fuss.

Ho for the mother of usk and adder

Spelderin’ here in her coal and madder

Faur frae Society’s bells and bladder.

And that’s only the opening. As the poem winds on across its expanses of exploration, it’s as if the strange, knarled, twisted language and phrasing, the complex sentences shouldering against the simple and straightforward ones, the exclamations interrupting the meaningful meditative ponderings, all become a slow metaphor for the moor itself, a natural wilderness, an ultimate resource: the wild world that’s out there still, alive, and moving all the time with its waters, animals, insects, plants and unresting currents of wind in the air, the shadows and the clouds.

In his 2020 book, Later That Day, Andrew Greig has a sequence of poems from New Zealand, including one with the rather unprepossessing title, “Looking at Stinkhorn”. Now, stinkhorn, as I’m sure you’ll know, is a kind of mushroom, “phallus impudicus”, which the Woodland Trust tells us is pungent and “a little indecent” so that certain Victorians would attack them with cudgels to protect any impressionable young women from seeing them, because they look like erect penises.

AN 18th-century minister, John Lightfoot, apparently suggested that dried and powdered and mixed in spirits they could make an effective aphrodisiac. According to some sources, at a certain stage of their lives their hearts are edible and, sliced finely, taste like radishes.

However, the dark olive-coloured, slimy head carries the spores dripping from its bell-shaped cap and the novelist Thomas Mann tells us they give off an unpleasant smell, “strikingly like that of a decaying corpse”.

Be all such things as they may, Andrew Greig’s poem begins very beautifully, reminding us of the bloody violence that is inevitably involved in giving birth, the very fact of new growth being dependent on the strength and willingness to give of the mother:

Little one, it is not nothing

from which you’ve come,

bloody head easing through forest floor.

The subterranean has given birth

to an outlandish crown,

raising its head to peek

in wonder at its own arrival.

Now, in the way of ambiguity, that might describe the stinkhorn mushroom accurately and literally but it’s also a set of images that seems apt for the birth of a baby, or for the rebirth of a long stretch of land, a moor and river valley, as a place of wilderness coming into its own self-possession, or it might even stand as an allegory of an independent nation, giving birth to itself from the inimical, enclosing jungle of the British Empire, that had sought to strangle it before it could be born.

As the poem goes on, Greig lightly sketches how the rain and “decomposing mulch” will give sustenance to this new growth, and the hight trees will look on from above, “grand admonishers” which, in their turn, will fall, “and their rot raise / ten thousand of your cousins.” And so, in growth and death, decay, and then rebirth, the cycle goes. And it’s good.

Greig’s poem, dealing as it does with such determined gentleness, is a cousin of MacDiarmid’s unmitigated brutalism: both are infused with love and life’s energy. The virr, smeddum, grit and gumption are inherent in Greig’s delicate pronouncements and MacDiarmid’s rebarbative language. The two poems are ultimately about the same thing.

But MacDiarmid’s greatest love poem to the earth is “Milk-Wort and Bog-Cotton”. It focuses on a particular place that looks very much like Tarras moor to me, but its vision extends from there to take in the whole earth in a declaration of love and commitment and investment in an earth that will never, really, let us leave.

In English, what the poem is saying is perfectly clear, but as with the extract from “Tarras”, its meaning also resides in the Scots language itself. The poet begins by addressing the countryside, the landscape before him, as a lover, following the long tradition of wishing to take his beloved away with him to somewhere they can live together, alone, undisturbed and in harmony, forever: “Come away, with your beautiful pale blue eyes, that shade of blue that belongs to the flower of the milk-wort, and your pale blonde hair, natural, white, like the waves of bog-cotton that grow on marshland and moor.”

He declares his love for the earth “in this mood, best of all” when the shy, tentative spirit moves over the surface of the land like a soft, low wind, and the sky is radiant with sunshine, empty of clouds or overarching trees that might have cast their shadows. There is nothing there to cast shadows over such beauty, the multitudes of blue eyes and the “milk-white cotton hair.”

But – and this is what makes the poem truly great – there are qualifications, shadows to come, darknesses to be aware of, as any adult must know.

If only – would that – no leaf should fall in autumn, wheeling over other leaves and casting shadows as they must! If only – would that – no root needs to bury itself in darkness under the earth, sacrificing itself for the blossom of the plant or tree it sends up nourishment into.

But the poet knows these things will happen, shadows will fall, roots do need to go down into the earth, for such blossoming beauty to be.

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And then there is a second turn, another “BUT”: The darkness that surrounds us all is deep, and that is the price of light, always and forever, caught in the contrast, expressive beyond computation, what illumination means.

And then two further turns emphasise the brilliance and intensity of the poet’s love, coming through a double negativity to express a positive affirmation: “If only light revealed nothing except you.” But he knows that light reveals a great deal more than only the beautiful things of the world, the loveliest landscapes.

And “if only night concealed nothing else” but he knows that the darkness does conceal many other things besides natural shadows and roots in the earth. Bad things go about in it.

This poem is a mature, adult understanding of the complexities and liabilities of the world, which, even so, is an endorsement and affirmation of the world’s rightness, the worth of it all. So now let the poem itself do its job.

Milk-Wort and Bog-Cotton

To Seumas O’Sullivan

Cwa’ een like milk-wort and bog-cotton hair!

I love you, earth, in this mood best o’ a’

When the shy spirit like a laich wind moves

And frae the lift nae shadow can fa’

Since there’s nocht left to thraw a shadow there

Owre een like milk-wort and milk-white cotton hair.

Wad that nae leaf upon anither wheeled

A shadow either and nae root need dern

In sacrifice to let sic beauty be!

But deep surroondin’ darkness I discern

Is aye the price o’ licht. Wad licht revealed

Naething but you, and nicht nocht else concealed.

The Langholm Initiative needs all the support you can give. The Tarras Valley Nature Reserve is – and will be – for those now and still to come a self-renewing resource, the only really reliable foundation for our independence. Our ownership changes the meaning of ownership. The Langholm Initiative page is at www.langholminitiative.org.uk/ and the donations page is at www.gofundme.com/f/langholm-moor-community-buyout-2