Exploring the 20th-century evolution in Gaelic poetry

IN the 20th century there were four major tides of poetry in the Gaelic tradition, rising alongside and washing into the provenances of poetry in English and Scots. They form a corrective complement to the legacy of more familiar Scottish writers extending from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Perhaps two defining images from that time are encapsulated in verses from two poems suggesting two deep, pervasive priorities influencing the developing myth of “Scottishness” as a Unionist fiction: patriotic self-assertion and respectful piety. Here’s a verse from Walter Scott’s “Land of the Mountain and the Flood” from The Lay of the Last Minstrel (1805):

O Caledonia! stern and wild,

Meet nurse for a poetic child!

Land of brown heath and shaggy wood,

Land of the mountain and the flood ...

This might read today in the context of British nationalism, a militant, demonstrative prioritisation of “Caledonia” as a supplement of imperialism. It might be the sort of thing exclaimed by proud Scots who are also proud Brits: Scotland as holiday camp.

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At the other end of the spectrum, the domestic, conservative stability of the humble family gathered around for a communal reading of the Bible depicted in Burns’s “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” (1786) summarises a pastoral, reactionary, nuclear humility.

And O! be sure to fear the Lord alway,

And mind your duty, duly, morn and night;

Lest in temptation’s path ye gang astray,

Implore His counsel and assisting might:

They never sought in vain that sought the Lord aright.

Not even the biological urgencies of youthful lust can shake the securities of hierarchy depicted here. When a young neighbour lad arrives to visit the daughter of the house, “The wily mother sees the conscious flame / Sparkle in Jenny’s e’e, and flush her cheek” but the youth is identified as “nae wild, worthless rake” so the family welcomes him, an appropriate suitor behaving impeccably.

To an unsympathetic eye, healthily derisive laughter might be prompted by such an idealised pastoral scene but there isn’t much evidence of that in the poem. It would be inappropriate. Piety rules.

These two examples set up two images of priority whose legacies might lead on to endorse Unionist militarism and homely subservience. In this context, Gaelic poetry is a corrective. Priorities of locality and communal responsibility, inhabited landscapes, not visited but lived in, an understanding of the immaterial world, revulsion from the pathos of war, not only human liabilities but unembarrassed virtues too.

The most marvellously comprehensive modern collection is An Tuil: Duanaire Gàidhlig an 20mh Ceud / Anthology of 20th Century Scottish Gaelic Verse (1999) edited by Ronald Black, who introduces the book by saying that each quarter of the century offers variations on the related themes of tradition and innovation.

The first begins with Carmina Gadelica, a collection of poems and songs of religious and folk significance, translated by Alexander Carmichael (1832–1912) in the second half of the 19th century. Two volumes were published in 1900, a further four through the 20th century. With extensive notes and stories added to the songs and poems, Carmichael’s book was a great gathering of Gaelic culture.

(It should be read alongside the folklore of superstitions, second sight and witchcraft collected by John Gregorson Campbell (1834-91), collected in The Gaelic Otherworld (2012) also edited by Ronald Black.)

The devastations of the First World War, when so much of Gaelic-speaking Scotland was disproportionately depopulated, broke across Carmichael’s accumulated achievement. The war is the subject of poems by Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna / Donald MacDonald (1887-1967), “Oran Arras” / “The Song of Arras”, “Air an Somme” / “On the Somme”, “Dh’ fhalbh na gillean grinn” / “Off went the handsome lads” and “Oran a’ Phuinnsein” / “The Song of the Poison”:

Fhearaibh, a bheil cuimhn’ agaibh

An là thàinig am puinnsean oirnn

’Nar seasamh anns na truinnsichean

’S gun nì ann gus ar còmhdach?

Lads, do you remember

The day the poison came

As we stood in the trenches

With nothing to protect us?

The second major period is centred on the Second World War and when Donald MacDonald returns to his earlier subject of war, the threat has escalated with new technology in “Oran an H-Bomb” / “The Song of the H-Bomb”: the lightning from the enemy will come without bias: “Théid gach duine ’s brùid a thàrradh / ’S théid gach càil a smàladh còmhla...” / “Each man and beast will be caught / And everything snuffed out together...”

Gaelic poetry of the Second World War and its aftermath was centred in the work of Sorley MacLean and George Campbell Hay. Their poetry arose from that war and comes forward well in to the second half of the 20th century, both men facing and addressing the matter of tragedy which that century – and ours – makes unavoidable, inescapable.

No matter how misleading the priorities of a particular culture over a specific historical period might be, some poets and artists will not permit us to live in denial. The most courageous and insightful of them present us with permanent truths, even when these can be terrifying.

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The third major period in 20th-century Gaelic poetry is characterised by new beginnings in the poetry of Derick Thomson and Iain Crichton Smith.

The fourth is led by poets such as Aonghas MacNeacail, Meg Bateman, Angus Peter Campbell, Fearghas MacFhionnlaigh, Rody Gorman and Anne Frater.

Throughout this story there is a growing distinction between the “traditional” forms and subjects of Gaelic poems, songs and stories, and those distinctly “modern”. So much traditional work was composed either as songs to be sung or stories to be told, designed for oral performance.

INCREASINGLY, Gaelic work was being written to be read on the page. Unrhymed, open or free verse superseded regular stanza structures although the oral tradition continued alongside the written one.

As with the contemporaneity of oral and print-based forms in the 18th and 19th centuries in the works of Burns, Hogg and Scott, in Gaelic there is a difference as well as an overlap. Four decades after the first publication of his poems, Sorley MacLean became eagerly sought to give public readings, at many of which his delivery, including the introductions he gave to each poem, created an immediate atmosphere of intensity, attentiveness and respect for the passion the poems themselves possess.

Public poetry readings brought the written texts into an air where the sounds of the words could be heard. This is a very different practice from the commercial priorities of celebrity festivals.

However modern the subjects (explicit treatment of sexual passion, modern warfare, technological developments, mass media) or however traditional (love, anguish, personal commitment, political liberation from oppression), all poems are made out of language, images, tones and structures. And however different from earlier conventions poems of the 20th century might look on the page, their value remains undiminished.

There’s more than one way to read those poems of Burns and Scott we began with but jingoistic superficial patriotism and reactionary domestic pieties are the wrong priorities when opposition to the absolutes of nuclear threat and the authority of empire is essential, pervasive and urgent. Never more so than now.