Hugh MacDiarmid’s Patriotism
In biographical terms, Hugh MacDiarmid’s patriotism is at odds with his long dedication to the International Communist cause. But the mystery in the poetry is not felt in such starkly political terms. MacDiarmid does not ask how it is possible to affirm solidarity both international and national; this, perhaps, is because there is no necessary contradiction between the two. At any rate, the patriotism is not taken up as a problem to be solved. Instead, the patriotism is taken as a given, a fact of MacDiarmid’s life, which provokes astonishment that occasions his poetry—its starting point rather than its end.
Scotland, for MacDiarmid, is what he would hold fast to as a certainty in the world, all the more when he imagines how the world might fail to hold together. Scotland, for him, contains the possibility of its own endurance, when all else fails; he does not merely love it for what it is, or for what it might become, but for the thought that it has within it the possibility of remaining, solid and itself, when nothing else does.
It is a common function of the imagination to discern, in everyday life, possibilities within what it holds to be actually the case. In a work of literature, what is “actual” is itself a fiction, but it is a fiction the depth and veracity of which depends on its relationship to the possibilities that open within it—possibilities that give the actual its shape, as water shapes a peninsula.[i] For the imagination to fully apprehend a situation, it must apprehend what is possible in what is actual, present but not defined there, suggested but not fully realized. This requires imaginative strength, but it also underwrites the freedom inherent in experience: the freedom from certainty, even if things are determined; that the fact of physical determinism cannot deprive thought of possibilities that derive from the very limits that constitute thought; there is no thinking or speaking of the actual without speaking or thinking of the possible; every factual statement is shadowed by a counterfactual statement; every “is” entails a “might.” Any situation worth imagining—perhaps any situation we can name as such—is a compound of both the actual and the possible, and our attunement to situations is fundamental to what it is to be in the world.
MacDiarmid takes this as his starting place. All artists do, maybe, and not just in the Romantic tradition, where the power of the imagination is drawn out for celebration. But it is this tradition that MacDiarmid grows out of, most of all in his celebrating the nation as a product of the imagination: it compounds the actual and the possible, so that thinking of it requires and inspires a constant movement between the two.
Abstract as the notion of “possibility” is, everyone knows what it looks like on the page, in a novel or poem: instances include uncertain motivations of characters, ambivalences of feeling, ambiguities of judgment (their unity or relation being undetermined), ironies, or half-revealed aspects of a world. Sometimes possibility is experienced in a text as a lacuna, sometimes a withholding, sometimes a refusal to reconcile or resolve. It is not commensurate with whatever a reader summons to mind but is disciplined by what is actually the case. One of the tasks of criticism is to map out the spaces of possibility opened by a text’s designs, to help others see where it opens into suggestion, doubt, and opaqueness.[ii] Analogously, one of the ambitions of MacDiarmid’s poetry is to see into the possibilities of the very idea of Scotland. Meeting that ambition requires technical care, and the techniques vary from poem to poem, but in one of his greatest and longest poems, “A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle,” he finds recourse in the idea of a symbol: not just a symbol, but in the selection and approach to something in the world that both is and is not a symbol, that is actually one thing and possibly always also many more.
In this poem, his patriotism does not merely attach to Scotland and its possibilities; his love for what is actual in Scotland allows for him to imagine those possibilities, and the possibilities of love allow him to embrace what he presents as Scotland’s actual existence. The healthy strength of the patriotism requires a balance of the two sides of this circular equation; too much to either side and it becomes sentimental or else colorless. (It may be that the strength of poetry—its will to strength—lies ultimately in variations of just this relationship, bracing the possible and the actual, determining the one in the relation to the other).
Published in 1926 and running over 2,500 words, “A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle” is MacDiarmid’s definitive statement of Scots poetry, with the Scots dialect of the poem a language that he reinvented from a variety of lexicographical sources. It was never a living language. A modernist masterpiece, the poem has received less attention in the United States than it deserves, perhaps because of the challenges of Scots—though these are soon overcome, especially in the Selected Poems, where the poems receive same-page glosses. The conceit of the poem is announced in its title: a drunk man walking home stops to examine a specimen of the national flower of Scotland, a thistle. The reflection is wide-ranging, about the thistle, but also about what attaches to it, metonymically and synecdochally, so that the thistle stands in for Scotland, but then also for other objects associated with it, including other European poems where it is mentioned, and which MacDiarmid freely translates into Scots and includes in the poem. At times, the poem is a dialogue to a woman, Jean, the speaker’s fictional wife (sharing a name with Robert Burns’ wife, Jean Armour), at times, to Dostoevsky, who MacDiarmid takes as a Russian counterpart. The Scots is more dense in some portions, and less in others, where it is displaced by other registers, other dictions; the poem moves through a range of verse forms and rhyme schemes, though rhyme is consistent. Throughout, the thistle is something actually there before the poem, drawing him back to its present, and a symbol of enormous scope.
The man is drunk because—the poet tells us (“To prove my saul is Scots I maun begin | Wi’ what’s still deemed Scots and the folk expect,” ll. 21-22)—he is Scottish and enjoying whisky before his stroll home, but also—from the perspective of the poem as a designed thing—drunk because inebriation is a form of inspiration (taking in too many spirits) that allows for the free-play of possibility against the dogged rootedness of the thistle, the actual thing that is never only an actual thing.
The poem proceeds in a suitably meandering fashion, and the great announcement of what the thistle could be only takes place around line 300. I’ll translate the first stanzas I quote for orientation and do so periodically throughout for single words and phrases, as seems suitable:
I dinna ken and nae man ever can.
I might be in my ain bed efter a’.
The haill damned thing’s a dream for ocht we ken
--The Warld and Life and Daith, Heaven, Hell ana’.
[I do not know and no man ever can. I might be in my bed after all. The whole damn thing’s a dream for all we know—the World and Life and Death, Heaven, Hell and all.]
We maun juist tak’ things as we find them then,
And mak’ a kirk or mill o’ them as we can
--And yet I feel this muckle thistle’s staun’ in’
Atween me and the mune as pairt o’ a Plan.
[We must just take things as we find them then, and make the best or the worst (a church or a mill) of things as we can manage—and yet I feel this big thistle’s standing in between me and the moon as part of a Plan.]
It isna there—nor me—by accident.
We’re brocht thegither for a certain reason,
Ev’n gin it’s naething mair that juist to gi’e
My jaded soul a necessary frisson.
[It’s not there—nor me—by accident. We’re brought together for a certain reason, Even if [gin] it’s nothing more than just to give my jaded soul a necessary frisson.]
I never say afore a thistle quite
Sae intimately, or at sic an’ oor.
There’s something in the fickle licht that gi’es
A different life to’t and an unco poo’er.
[I never saw before a thistle quite this intimately or at such an hour. There’s something in the fickle light that gives a different life to it and an uncanny/remarkable power.]
‘Rootit on gressless peaks, whaur its erect
And jaggy leafs, austerely cault and dumb,
Haud [Hold] the slow scaly serpent in respect,
The Gothic thistle, whaur the insect’s hum
Soon’s fer aff, lifts abune [above] the rock it scorns
Its rigid virtue for the Heavens to see.
The too’erring boulders gaird it. And the bee
Mak’s honey frae the roses on its thorns.
[These lines are translated from a French poem by Belgian poet Georges Ramaekers.]
But that’s a Belgian refugee, of coorse.
This Freudian complex has somehoo slunken
Frae Scotland’s soul—the Scots aboulia-- [aboulia: pathological indecision]
Whilst a’ its terra nullius is betrunken [drunk].
And a’ the country roon’ aboot it noo
Lies clapt [pressed down] and shrunken syne like somebody wha
Has lang o’ seven devils been possessed;
Then when he turns a corner tines them a’,
Or like a body that has tint [lost] its soul,
Perched like a monkey on its heedless kist [chest],
Or like a sea that peacfu’ fal’s again
When frae its deeps an octopus is fished.
I canna feel it has to dae [do] wi’ me
Mair than a composite diagrams o’
Cross-sections o’ my forbears’ organs
--And mind—‘ud bring a kind o’ freen’ly glow.
.
And yet like bindweed through my clay it’s run
And a’ my folks’—it’s queer to see’t unroll.
My ain soul looks me in the face, as ‘twer,
And mair than my ain soul—my nation’s soul!
And sall a Belgian pit it into words
And sing a sang to’t syne, and no’ a Scot?
Oors is a wilder thistle, and Ramaekers
Canna bear aff the gree [win the prize]—avaunt the thocht!
To meddle wi’ the thistle and to pluck
The figs frae’t is my metier, I think.
Awak’ my muse, and gin you’re in puir [poor] fettle,
We aye can blame it on the’inferior drink.
T.S. Eliot—it’s a Scottish name—
Afore he wrote ‘The Waste Land’ s’ud ha’e come
To Scotland here. He wad ha’e written
A better poem syne—like this, by gum! [ll. 293-348]
.
George Gordon, Lord Byron, is another Scottish name, and his spirit animates the movement of these lines, their syntactical play, polyglot scatterings, and casually audacious rhymes. From Byron too, he borrows the wonderful aptitude for something that resembles digression but is more a pacing out of a field larger than we would otherwise suppose him to inhabit; it is all part of the same property. In MacDiarmid’s case, it is a barren field as he sees it, both the Scottish nation and his own life, but in the thistle he sees the prospect of something renewed. He cannot work out how; the possibility is there, though, and at its kindling, he invokes the muse, not to make it actual, but to see into it more searchingly. “To meddle wi’ the thistle and to pluck | The figs frae it” alludes to Jesus’ sermon on the mount: “Do men gather grapes of thornbushes, or figs from thistles?” (Matthew 7:16). To do so, the question says, would be unnatural, but this breaking of nature is just what MacDiarmid proposes he will accomplish, going beyond what is natural to something else, gathering what is not in the thistle from what is there: making a symbol of the actual, perceiving possibilities that nature would deny.
Though a less worked out symbolic scheme than is found in Yeats’ poetry, and even less developed than what Wallace Stevens works up, MacDiarmid’s is comparable to both in setting the actuality of the thistle against the transfiguring power of the moonlight, the “fickle licht” of which invests it with an “unco’ poo’er.” The poet, drunk between the moon and the thistle, is granted a perception of what it is and what it might be, feeling it meets him as “pairt o’ a plan.” Here it is Shelley who asserts his influence, which runs profoundly through MacDiarmid’s poetry, the Romantic poet with a passion for scientific discovery, with a cosmopolitan outlook and commitment to the plight of the working classes and the poor—but the tempering influence of Byron’s comic self-dramatization, and the deep grounding bass of Burns, set him apart from his contemporaries. What is most powerful in these lines is the harmonizing of the tactful sensitivity with enthusiastic exorbitance:
It isna there—nor me—by accident.
We’re brocht thegither for a certain reason,
Ev’n gin it’s naething mair that juist to gi’e
My jaded soul a necessary frisson.
I never say afore a thistle quite
Sae intimately, or at sic an’ oor.
There’s something in the fickle licht that gi’es
A different life to’t and an unco poo’er.
“Certain” and “something” hold back, set scrupulous (and not coy) limits to what he understands of the experience that sweeps over him. “Intimately” and “fickle” glance towards his love for Jean, who is earlier figured as the moonlight; “brocht thegither” and “frisson” leave as an apprehended presence both what directs him and where he has been directed. The language enacts the possible, opens onto it, rather than merely affirming it.
It is a long poem with many wonderful passages, and it is around four-fifths of the way through that an idealized vision of Scotland is most vivid:
The munelicht that owre clear defines
The thistle’s shrill cantankerous lines
E’en noo whiles insubstantialises
Its grisly form and ‘stead devises
A maze o’ licht, a siller-frame [silver-frame],
As ‘twere God’s dream frae which it came,
Ne’er into bein’ coarsened yet,
The essence lowin’ [glowing] pure in it,
As tho’ the fire owrecam’ the clay,
And left its wraith in endless day.
These are the moments when a’ sense
Like mist is vanished and intense
Magic emerges frae the dense
Body o’ bein’ and beeks [shows] immense
As, like a ghinn [djinn/genie] oot o’ a bottle,
Daith rises frae’s when oor lives crottle [crumble].
These are the moments when my sang
Clears its white feet frae oot amang
My broken thocht, and moves as free
As souls frae bodies when they dee.
There’s naething left o’ me ava’
Save a’ I’d hoped micht whiles befa’.
Sic sang to men is little worth.
It has nae message fro the earth.
Men see their warld turned tapsalteerie [topsy-turvy],
Drookit [drenched] in a licht owre eerie,
Or sent birlin’ [spinning] like a peerie [top]—
Syne in turns a’ they’ve kent till then
To shapes they can nae langer ken.
Men canna look on nakit licht.
It flints them back wi’ darkened sicht,
And een that canna look at it,
Maun draw earth closer roond them yet
Or, their sicht tint [lost], find nocht instead
That answers to their waefu’ need.
And yet thisn essence frae the clay
In dooble form aye braks away,
For, in addition to the licht,
There is an e’er-increasin’ nicht,
A nicht that is the bigger and
Gangs roond licht like an airn [iron] band
That noo [now] and then mair tichtly grips
And snuffs it in a black eclipse,
But rings it moistly as a brough [halo]
The mune, till it’s juist bricht enough—
O wull I never lowse [loose; set free] a licht
I canna dowse again in spite,
Or dull to haud within my sicht?
The thistle canna visit quite.
Inside a’ licht its shape maun glint,
A spirit wi’ a skeleton in’t.
The world, the flesh, ’ll bide in use
As in the fire the unburnt buss [bush],
Or as frae sire to son we gang [go]
And countless corpses in us thrang.
And e’en the glory that descends
I kenna [know not] whence on me depends,
And shapes itsel’ to what is left
Whaur I o’ me ha’e me bereft,
And still the form is mine, altho’
A force to which I ne’er could grow
Is movin’ in’t as ‘twere a sea
That lang syne [long ago] droned [drowned] the last o’ me
--That drooned afore the warld began
A’ that could ever come frae Man.
And as at sicna times am I,
I wad ha’e Scotland to my eye
Until I saw a timeless flame
Tak’ Auchtermuchty for a name, [Town in Scotland]
And kent that Ecclefechan stood [Town in Scotland]
As pairt o’ an eternal mood.
Ahint [after] the glory comes the nicht
As Maori to London’s ruins, [New Zealander looking on the ruins of London]
And I’m amused to see the plicht
O’ Licht as’t in the black tide droons,
Yet even in the brain o’Chaos
For Scotland I wad hain a place,
And let Tighnabruaich still [Small coastal town]
Be pairt and paircel o’ its will,
And Culloden, black as Hell, [Site of the 1746 Jacobite uprising]
A knowledge it has o’ itsel’.
(ll. 1903-1983)
This sublimates what is solid into light; it is authentically sublime. Just as the poem reaches the limits of what it can say of light—the loftiest sublimity of which poetry is capable—and turns to darkness and futility, the thistle returns: “The thistle canna vanish quite.” This in turn throws him back into himself, finding himself as the ground of what he has thought, but also recognizing himself as a ground drowned by a flood alien to him, present within the form of the thistle that he perceives. But it’s not light he craves or sets out as the end: “I’m amused to see the plicht | O’ Licht as’t in the black tide droons.” It’s Scotland, instead, that persists beyond the light, in the chaos. When he writes to “let Tighnabruiach still| Be pair and paircel o’ its will” the “its” is the will of Scotland but also, more strangely, the will of chaos; likewise “Culloden, black has Hell” is to be part and parcel of the knowledge that Scotland has of itself (its history, since Culloden was the location of the Jacobite uprising of 1746) but also Chaos’ knowledge of itself: he yearns for these names and places to persist after creation has come undone. Their history and identity become a part of the self-knowledge of all things, but not lost in its frothy sameness. Though the lines roll forward in a vision of the future, they lack the self-seriousness of fantasy; instead, the style recalls a winking Chaucerian dream vision. That is not to say there is nothing serious in the comic spirit, foremost, the joyful assertion of those places, those names, and all they contain, which he holds back from the poem. They sound out with the depths of history both national and personal. Actual places, they hold forth a value that cannot but be prospective, an object of faith born out of experience.
A metaphysical puzzle lurks in the lines, and elsewhere in the poem: how does the part relate to the whole? How much of the identity of the whole does the part contain? Just what part of the whole is a particular part, in terms beyond what we know it to be (if we see a part as a part-of-a-whole, does that affect how we see it)? This is the question about symbols, but also a question raised by the innocuous “pairt and parcel,” which places the Scottish towns in Chaos, but also asks how much of Scotland is in any of these towns? The questions are fatuous if we expect they can be answered neatly or with any certainty; what matters for MacDiarmid is that the relation of part and whole opens before the imagination so that by attending to the particulars of Scotland more can be seen. As fatal as denying Scotland to be part of any whole would be to equate it with the whole:
Whatever Scotland is to me,
Be it aye pairt o’ a’ men see
O’Earth and O’Eternity
Wha winna [will not] hide their heids in’t till
It seems the haill [whole] o’Space to fill,
As ‘twere an unsurmounted hill.
He cannot Scotland see wha yet
Canna see the Infinite,
And Scotland in true scale to it. (ll. 2521-2529)
If you cannot see the Infinite and Scotland in scale to it, you cannot see Scotland. But this is not to the detriment of Scotland. True patriotism is possible, he suggests, because of the greater thing that surrounds a nation, just as the surrounding greatness is only known by attending to the nation contained within it.
The lines, however, are not as dogmatic as this paraphrase makes it seem. They are generous and light, not insisting that his Scotland is the Scotland of everyone: “Whatever” allows not only that the specific meaning it has for him may differ from what it holds for others, but it even grants that it may change for him, year to year, even hour to hour, as the thistle changes under the moon. Nor are those who fail to see doomed to never see: “wha yet” acknowledges they might one day see, where the hopefulness of “yet,” stretching into the unbounded future, aptly rhymes with “Infinite.”
The word that veers closest to dogmatism, though, is “true”: but it cannot mean that the “true scale” is determined beforehand like the answer provided to a math problem in the back of an exercise book. That would, even in mathematical terms (the proportion of an object to what is infinite) be impossible: “true” here points to an older more expansive sense, a “true scale” being truthful, honest, right in the calibration of judgment that can only ultimately be true to judgment, that remains itself a possibility rather than a certainty. The true scale of Scotland to the infinite is true in so far as it admits possibilities that any relation of a small part to a greater, universal whole must admit. What is actual in Scotland can be loved in relation to the possibilities for all that is not only, solely, or merely Scotland, and that it exists within.
In his allegiance to Scotland, MacDiarmid refuses, as the poem draws to its close, to take up the mantle as a poet for Scotland, even if he is a poet who loves Scotland. He imagines an encounter out of Dante’s Inferno, encountering the shades of Scots past, who speak to him:
A Scottish poet maun assume
The burden o’ his people’s doom,
And dee to brak’ their livin’ tomb.
Mony ha’e tried, but a’ ha’e failed.
Their sacrifice has nocht availed.
Upon the thistle they’re impaled.
You maun choose but gin ye’d see
Anither category yet
Maun tine your nationality’
And I look at a’ the random
Band the wheel leaves whaur it fand ‘em
‘Auch, to Hell
I’ll tak’ it to avidzandum’ [I’ll take it under advisement]
O wae’s me on the weary wheel,
And fain I’d understand them!
And blessin’ it on the weary wheel
Whaurever it may land them!...
But aince Jean kens what I’ve been through
The night, I dinna doot it,
She’ll ope her airms in welcome true,
And lack nae mair aboot it…
* * * * *
The stars like thistle’s roses floo’er
The sterile growth o’ Space ootour,
That clad in bitter blasts spreids oot
Frae me, the sustenance o’ its root.
O fain I’d keep myhert entire,
Fain hain [preserve] the licth o’ my desire,
But ech! the shinin’ streams scend,
And leave me empty at the end.
For aince it’s toomed my hert and brain,
The thistle needs maun fa’ again.
--But a’ it’s growth’ll never fill
The hole it’s turned my life intill!...
Yet ha’e I Silence left, the croon [crown] o’ a’.
No’ her, wha on the hills langsyne I saw
Liftin’ a forehead of perpetual snaw.
No’ her, wha in the how-dumb-deid o’ nicht
Kyths [appears], like Eternity in Time’s despite.
No’ her, withooten shape, wha’s name is Daith,
No’ him, unkennable abies to faith
--God whom, gi e’er He saw a man, ‘ud be
E’er mair dumfooner’d at the sicht than he
--But Him, whom nocht in man or Deity,
Or Daith or Dreid or Laneliness can touch,
Who’s deed owre often and has seen owre much
O I ha’e Silence left
--‘And weel ye micht,’
Sae Jean’ll say, ‘efter sich a nicht!’ (ll. 2638-2685)
Quoting from this beautiful poem is irresistible, and the sustained momentum of these lines shows why. There is so much that could be said: Dante’s whose Florentine pride becomes MacDiarmid’s Scottish pride, and whose vision of the divine light becomes MacDiarmid’s sense for a universal whole beyond comprehension. And the falling and rising, the dying and growing of the thistle through worldly history, become the objects of devotion, instead of a heavenly God; Jean, not Beatrice, is the poem’s final figure; “nicht” and not “stella” the final word, and the final note of the poem is colloquial, “such a nicht” meaning all it could mean, as little as “a very drunk evening” and as much as a “a dream vision of extraordinary poetic power.” Jean must have the last word since he is left only with silence. And her final word must be imagined, projected, since he has not yet arrived home, this being a poem that refuses completion, that always looks ahead to the infinite, to what “yet” remains to happen and be said. Most apt, the final rhyme joins “night” and “might,” the night being, as MacDiarmid has shown, a span where “might” is given as much sway as “is,” and where he feels most assured that:
Our universe is like an e’e [eye]
Turned in, man’s benmaist [inmost] hert to see,
And swamped in subjectivity. (ll. 2572-74)
So much rides on, and courses through, that “like”: for what would it be for the universe to be like this? And is this to say that the universe is like an eye swamped in subjectivity, or that the universe is, like an eye turned in, itself swamped in subjectivity? And is this, as the online Dictionaries [yes, plural] of the Scots Language allows, “swamped” as in “imprisoned,” or is it Scots as in “to relax after a meal” or both, the universe sated at leisure and also bound? All at once, they are all actual possibilities, tinctures of sense falling across the actual poem we encounter. Then, a further hesitation:
.
But whether it can use its sicht
To bring what lies withoot to licht
To answer’s still ayont my micht. (ll. 2575-2577)
.
This “micht” is the “might” of strength, but it is also the “might” of possibility, since these are the same: the might of the poet is the might of the poet; the strength of the poet is the possibility of the poem; potential is power, potential is possibility.
When, at the poem’s end, the speaker imagines that Jean allows that he has only Silence left, and imagines her to say “weel ye micht,” this other “micht” stirs: he might have only silence left, or he might not, for even in imagining her last words, he shows he has strength for something more. The silence that is the “croon o’ a’” [crown of all] resembles the crown of the thistle itself; its silence no less rooted in the land than MacDiarmid’s; his silence no less a part of the thistle than Scotland is a part of it, and it of Scotland, and he of both; the silence promises more, being something infinite.
[i] Among the differences between literature and history: the former is written to crystallize possibilities from an arrangement of what is actual, the latter to crystallize, as far as possible, what is actual in a wash of possibilities.
[ii] It can also be that works of fiction take the excesses or shortcomings of the imagination, its exaggerating what is possible over and against what is actual (Don Quixote), or its refusal to entertain the possible (Ishiguro’s Stevens), as a situation worthy of literary treatment. A good writer knows how to tease out the possibilities persistently latent in a situation, and a good novelist knows how to imagine how poorly (or well) others might do that teasing.