Poets From Scotland

"Sentiment is what I am not acquainted with."

"I hope I will be religious again but as for regaining my character I despare."

"The most devilish thing is 8 times 8 and 7 times 7 it is what nature itselfe cant endure."

"In Vishnu’s lotus-foot alone Confide! His power shall ne’er decay, When tumbles every earthly throne, And mortal glory fades away."

"Alas! that Scottish maid should sing The combat where her lover fell! That Scottish Bard should wake the string, The triumph of our foes to tell!"

"We have the evil spirits too That shake our soul with battle-din. But we have an eviller spirit than you, We have a dumb spirit within: The exceeding bitter agony But not the exceeding bitter cry."

"And we run because we like it Through the broad bright land."

"We swing ungirded hips, And lightened are our eyes. The rain is on our lips, We do not run for prize."

"We crazed for you, aspired and fell for you; Over us trod Desire, with feet of fire. Ah! the sad stories we would tell for you, Full of dark nights and sighing While—you were dying, Chrysola!Roundels and all rich rimes we rang for you; How from the plangent lyre pled our Desire! But the musicians vainly sang for you;— Through the dear music, crying That—you were dying, Chrysola!High on the golden throne love wrought for you With eyes enthrall’d of rest, tired of our best; You sat unheeding while we fought for you Glaive unto glaive replying; For—you were dying, Chrysola!Frenzied from out the jousts we came to you; ‘Can we love more, Dream-fast? Crown, then, at last.’ But love and hate were one dim flame to you; Strange things you smiled us—dying, O! You were dying, Chrysola!Great spoils of frankincense we burn’d for you, Round your death-chamber proud—then cursed aloud Christian or Pagan god that yearn’d for you, Till you were undenying.— O Dream undying, Chrysola!"

"As a dancer dancing in a shower of roses before her King (A dreamer dark, the King) Throws back her head like a wind-loved flower, and makes her cymbals ring (O’er her lit eyes they ring); As a fair white dancer strange of heart, and crown’d and shod with gold, My soul exults before the Art, the magian Art of old."

"‘Who are you that so strangely woke, And raised a fine hand?’ Poverty wears a scarlet cloke In my land.‘Duchies of dreamland, emerald, rose Lie at your command?’ Poverty like a princess goes In my land.‘Wherefore the mask of silken lace Tied with a golden band?’ Poverty walks with wanton grace In my land.‘Why do you softly, richly speak Rhythm so sweetly-scanned?’ Poverty hath the Gaelic and Greek In my land.‘There’s a far-off scent about you seems Born in Samarkand.’ Poverty hath luxurious dreams In my land.‘You have wounds that like passion-flowers you hide: I cannot understand.’ Poverty hath one name with Pride In my land.‘Oh! Will you draw your last sad breath ’Mid bitter bent and sand?’ Poverty begs from none but Death In my land."

"O ye that look on Ecstasy The Dancer lone and white, Cover your charmèd eyes, for she Is Death’s own acolyte. She dances on the moonstone floors Against the jewelled peacock doors: The roses flame in her gold hair, The tired sad lids are overfair. All ye that look on Ecstasy The Dancer lone and white, Cover your dreaming eyes, lest she— (Oh! softly, strangely!)—float you through These doors all bronze and green and blue Into the Bourg of Night."

"The Rose of the World hangs high on a thorny Tree. Whoso would gather must harrow his hands and feet. But oh! It is sweet.The leaves that drop like blood from the thorny Tree Redden the roads of the earth from East to West. They lie in my breast.O Rose, O Rose of the World, bow down to me Who can cleave no more, so pierced are my hands and feet. For oh! Thou art sweet."

"A bleezing ingle, and a clean hearthstane."

"A dish of married love right soon grows cauld."

"Let fowk bode weel, and strive to do their best; Nae mair's required—let Heaven make out the rest."

"You have sae saft a voice and slid a tongue, You are the darling of baith auld and young."

"For when I dinna clearly see, I always own I dinna ken, And that's the way with wisest men."

"When new desires had conquer'd thee And changed the object of thy will, It had been lethargy in me, ⁠Not constancy, to love thee still."

"It's all one thing — both tend into one scope — To live upon Tobacco and on Hope, The one's but smoke, the other is but wind."

"Her last book, The Living Mountain, was written in the years towards the end and after the second war, but it was not published until 1977. This volume celebrated the experience of climbing and hill-walking in the Cairngorms, one of Nan Shepherd’s life-long pleasures, and here, as in her poems, it is possible to identify the passionately metaphysical strain that underlies her creative prose and her sense of the nature of existence itself."

"The Cairngorm Mountains are a mass of granite thrust up through the schists and gneiss that form the lower surrounding hills, planed down by the ice cap, and split, shattered and scooped by frost, glaciers, and the strength of running water. Their physiognomy is in the geography books—so many square miles of area, so many lochs, so many summits of over 4000 feet—but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that matters to human beings, is a reality of the mind."

"Nan Shepherd was a leading writer of the Scottish Literary Renaissance, an interwar modernist movement which rejected sentimental stereotypes of Scottish rural life and embraced international avant-garde aesthetics. Her writing is defined by fascination with rural communities, the realities of women's lives, and the allure and mystery of the living world."

"She had given love and received only adoration: and love is so much bigger a thing than adoration — more complex and terrible. At its absolute moments it holds resolved within itself all impulses and inconsistencies, the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life, the spirit's agonizing."

"Light still lingered in the sky; the hills, that had been dissolved in its splendour, like floating shapes of light themselves, grew dark again."

"Even though there’s a massive amount of people of colour now living in Scotland…this country is 30 or 40 years behind any other English city in terms of racial attitudes and integration. There’s no proper acknowledgement of the slave trade and how many Scottish cities were founded on money from that. Our children are just not taught that history."

"I found that being pregnant was different from how I thought it would be…It shares a lot in common with writing in a way. You have an imaginary version of yourself pregnant, and an imaginary baby, an imaginary idea of yourself as a mother…"

"For me it was a lot of fun. It was exciting. There were lots of people who came to stay from different parts of the world. You would come down in the morning and there would be different bodies on the floor or on the sofa. There would be Party socials in the house where people would sing songs and recite poems. It was a very social upbringing…"

"I like the idea that stories are active, that if you stepped on them they would become alive, like plants, and that the same memory can grow new shoots and flowers, and can change over the course of people’s lives…"

"How many people know that the best living Scottish poet, by a whole head and shoulders, after the two major figures in this century, Edwin Muir and Hugh MacDiarmid, is not any of the English writing pocts, but Sorley MacLean? Yet he alone takes his place easily and indubitably beside these two major poets: and he writes only in Gaelic [...] That Sorley MacLean is a great poet in the Gaelic tradition, a man not merely for time, but for eternity, I have no doubt whatever [...] If MacLean is not a major poet, then I do not know what major poetry is."

"Sorley MacLean's mastery of his chosen medium and his engagement with the European poetic tradition and European politics make him one of the major Scottish poets of the modern era."

"My obsession was the preservation of the Gaelic language so that there would be people left in the world who could hear its great songs as they really were. No poetry could be translated, still less could song poetry, and the great language of Gaelic song made me fanatical about the beauty of the Gaelic language and its astonishing ability to indicate shades and positions of emphasis with natural inversions and the use of particles."

"I personally have a great sense of honour and gratitude just for knowing him... It's easier for us to trust in the utter reality of poetry, trust in it as a necessity because you feel it's verified by somebody like him. He saved Gaelic poetry... in this century and therefore in a sense, saved it for all time."

"He is gifted with what the Welsh call Hwyl, the power of elevated declamation, and his declamation is full of feeling."

"MacLean's voice had a certain bardic weirdness that sounded both stricken and enraptured."

"[T]he Celtic Twilightists achieved the remarkable feat of attributing to Gaelic poetry the very opposite of every quality which it actually has."

"Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig ("Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig")"

"The best poetry written in our generation in the British Isles has been in Scottish Gaelic, by Sorley MacLean."

"I believe Mull had much to do with my poetry: its physical beauty, so different from Skye’s, with the terrible imprint of the clearances on it, made it almost intolerable for a Gael."

"The whole prospect of Gaelic appals me, the more I think of the difficulties and the likelihood of its extinction in a generation or two. A ... language with ... no modern prose of any account, no philosophical or technical vocabulary to speak of, no correct usage except among old people and a few university students, colloquially full of gross English idiom lately taken over, exact shades of meanings of most words not to be found in any of its dictionaries and dialectally varying enormously (what chance of the appreciation of the overtones of poetry, except amongst a handful?) Above all, all economic, social and political factors working against it, and, with that, the notorious, moral cowardice of the Highlanders themselves."

"Although MacLean was very much cast as a representative of Gaelic Scotland when his writing was rediscovered and justly celebrated in the 1980s and afterwards, the resulting mix is comparatively unGaelic, elitist rather then populist, and permeable only with difficulty to the community which uses the language in its day to day existence."

"Justice is a constant uprightness in words and in deeds."

""I knew him, ere the roots of bitterness "Had grown to putrid cancer in his soul. "Then Revelation's light gleamed o'er his mind "In strange fantastic dreams of future bliss, "He saw the dawn, and this was quite enough"

""But he'll ne'er wake us mair, "For Hughie is deid" - Elegy on Wee Hughie - A Pet Canary"

""Lust is the offspring of a thousand sighs, "Intrigue, deception, and as many lies; "A strange compound of hidden, plotting ill, "To fire with rage, to torture, or to kill" -Lust"

"I am not asked out to drinking parties and have never been in a Rose Street pub. I can't be a poet."

"I mind o' the Ponnage Pool, The reid brae risin', Morphie Lade, An' the saumon that louped the dam, A tree i' Martin's Den Wi' names carved on it; But I ken na wha I am."

""It’s a cauld barren blast that blaws nobody good.” - title of poem."

"Bide the storm ye canna hinder, Mindin’ through the strife, Hoo the luntin’ lowe o’ beauty Lichts the grey o’ life."

""Thou representative of something great, What wert thou in thine unconverted state?" - Reflections on a Banknote"