Alan Riach on William Sydney Graham and George Campbell Hay

In “The Nightfishing” and “What is the language using us for?” the delicacy of his ear and sensitivity of his judgement is at its best. It is worth emphasising that “The Nightfishing” was recognised the moment it appeared as a work of breakthrough quality. Norman MacCaig, who, like Graham, had been published in the company of the poets of the “New Apocalypse” movement, once told me that he had read Graham’s early work with interest, but with the same suspicion he felt about his own first two books. “But then it all changed: you opened ‘The Nightfishing’ and on the first page the poem began with the words: ‘Very gently struck / The quay night bell.’ And you knew that something different had begun to happen in Graham’s poetry.”

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And Graham’s work has this strange restraint and steely tenacity, unlike anything else in modern Scottish poetry. And not only Scottish poetry. The poem entitled “Loch Thom” is one of the essential poems of the 20th century, a magnificent epiphany describing the “lonely, freshwater loch” in the hollow of hills above Graham’s native town, industrial Greenock, west of Glasgow, to which he said he would walk as a wee boy. As an adult, his return visit is chilly, restrained, solitary, heart-wrenching. Stylistically inimitable, he commented once when asked if he was still writing that he was, indeed, still beginning each line with a capital letter – in other words, he never relaxed into a merely conversational idiom but always maintained a fierce sense of the poem as a work of art, emphatically, a made thing. Yet each poem is alive as a fish on the line, and strong.

The essential theme in Graham’s poems is companionship and solitude. Again and again, his poems evoke distance and intimacy, loneliness and proximity. The concrete autobiographical data and the abstract implications of language and silence are central in everything he wrote. The primary consideration is language. The titles of poems clearly indicate the attention: “I Leave This at Your Ear”, “The Dark Dialogues”, “Language Ah Now You Have Me”, “Five Verses Beginning with the Word Language”.

The intensity of the contrast between Graham’s poems and the white noise, the silent page, the illimitable darkness that surrounds us all, is negotiated specifically by the reader, addressed as he or she might be in the future of their composition; or in their own time, in particular poems, by their specific addressee, such as the poet’s wife or the recipients of the poem-letters. The poems are sometimes addressed to particular people, either the historic persons of the biography or figures constructed by the text. In this regard, today it is almost as though readers overhear the poems. They create a hush and a sense of respect and wonder.

The contrast with MacDiarmid’s later poetry is evident: In Memoriam James Joyce (1955) is subtitled, “From a Vision of World Language” and that “Vision” may be described as a plenitude of languages – plural – evolving in different times in all the different places of the world. No single person could comprehensively understand all these languages, but MacDiarmid proposes that such an understanding might be imagined, and this work of the imagination vitalises particular engagements. This generates wonder, yes, but also prompts curiosity about the wide world, engagement with others, other people, languages, art forms, countries. It challenges you to exercise the optimism of curiosity.

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FOR MacDiarmid, languages – in the broadest sense – and the forms they take – in artistic constructions of all sorts, paintings, ballet, sculpture, symphonies and quartets, bagpipes and flutes – from the dancing of Fred Astaire to the Eddic manuscripts of five centuries before Shakespeare – all offer a wealth of cultural identities in endless correspondence. For Graham, the English language is fraught with ambivalence. Its solitary authority yields a wealth of sensitive appreciation, though, coming through in poems freighted with subtleties of “accent”, hard logic, great strength and wonderful tenderness. Read aloud, they offer a tensile, singular occupation of the air. In silence, their lines are steel on the page.

Also often too easily overlooked, George Campbell Hay (1915-84) grew up in Tarbert, Loch Fyne, with the fishing industry present as a fact of his society’s economics, and the materiality of salt, air, sea and the struggle of elemental realities, represented in the spoken language of the people around him. Enthusiastic energy is exuberant in “Seeker, Reaper”, a poem in praise of a boat at sea, full of a hard, muscular music, evocative not only of the resilience, grace and strength of the boat and her crewmen but also of the contending forces of sea and weather. In “We Abide Forever”, the Highland Clearances are seen as both particular history and as permanent symbol. Scotland’s specific history has a symbolic, mythic power in his poems.

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Then, in his experience of the Second World War, pain and horror at the devastation is felt most intensely in “Bizerta”. This is one of the key war poems of the 20th century: destruction, irreparable loss, literally the burning away of life, an incandescent Gotterdamerung, anti-heroic, concerned with common human purpose and a human need far beyond political, national, or any specific particularities. It is a vision of the ultimate consequence of war. The banal devastation, the destruction of human fact and human potential, is expressed in a poem that stands comparison and has an effect as lasting, deep and terrible as any war poem ever written.For Hay, heroic aspects are found in elemental things – conflicts of weather and language, difficult decisions, consequent pain – but there is also a binding force in the light that never falters, the voices moving unendingly like water, at times harsh, straining or mellifluous, coloured by humility or regret. This is what underlies his unfinished epic, “Mokhtar is Dougall” – a poem about different voices, different cultures in dialogue with each other, one from the Gaelic world, one from the world of Islam. This undeniable sense of plurality and value is in evidence in the multi-linguistic dimensions of Hay’s writing, in Gaelic, Scots and English.

HAY’S English-language poetry is related to that of WB Yeats and the tradition of the long-lined verse of Anglo-Irish poetry, a tradition inherited by Yeats predominantly from translations from the Gaelic. There is also an inherited tradition of the bardic voice, because at the heart of Hay’s poetry is an incremental tension between confidence and certainty, on the one hand, and on the other, anguish and doubt. Implicitly, the first-person singular of the poems is thinking about his audience or readership.

The bardic voice without listeners is a paradigm underpinning almost all the visionary poets of the 20th century. Some of Hay’s Scots poetry has its roots in the Ballad tradition: structuring principles are metrical and a narrative drive propels the movement.

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His poems develop over four chronological periods: (1) 1932-44, where poems of the sea and seafaring predominate, including such wonderful works as “The Old Fisherman” and “The Kerry Shore”, which have been set to piano accompaniment by FG Scott; (2) 1944-61, which includes the war poems, especially “Mokhtar is Dougall”, and a deepening of strength in the vision of the Gaelic world in poems such as “The Walls of Balclutha” (confirming “the old, sure ground on which our fathers stood…”), “The Fisherman”, “The Smoky Smirr o Rain” and “Seeker, Reaper”; (3) 1964-79, where nationalist politics is emphatically endorsed in “Nationalist Sang”, “Orion over Bute” (“Scotland will wake with the waking dawn / and step out from two centuries gone…”), “Howes an’ Knowes” (“The yird’s a hoose for aa oor race”); and finally (4) 1980-83, with more occasional verse: “Sunday Howffs o Morningside” may offer temporary release and relief when their doors open on an otherwise sober Sunday, but the Muse of Scotland, “Musa Caledoniae” continues forever: “In wind and rain the screes she trudges. / Hear but her voice! It nivar ages”.

The works of these poets form two contrasting worlds of discovery, one centred in the liminal space between self and utterance, the other engaged in a diversity of languages and experiences of conflict and confrontation, both in a fierce relationship with the tyrannies of silence, both Scottish to the marrow in different ways, both giving voices to experience we all can learn from, deeply.