massive organ soun', An' would 'train me eyes to see de beauty lyin' all aroun'.
I'd go to de City Temple,3 where de old fait' is a wreck,
An' de parson is a-preachin' views dat most folks will not tek;
15 I'd go where de me n of science meet togeder in deir hall, To give light unto de real truths, to obey king Reason's call.
1. Cf. the short story 'The Little-Match Seller,' (1830??1902), both about a poor match-selling by the Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen girl who freezes to death on New Year's Eve. (1805-1875), and the poem 'The Little Match 2. In London, cathedral of the Anglican bishop. Girl,' by the Scottish writer William McGonagall 3. Victorian church in central London.
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246 4 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
I would view Westminster Abbey,4 where de great of England sleep, An' de solemn marble statues o'er deir ashes vigil keep; I would see immortal Milton an' de wul'-famous Shakespeare, Past'ral Wordswort', gentle Gray,5 an' all de great souls buried dere.
I would see de ancient chair where England's kings deir crowns put on, Soon to lay dem by again when all de vanity is done; An' I'd go to view de lone spot where in peaceful solitude Rests de body of our Missis Queen,6 Victoria de Good.
An' dese places dat I sing of now shall afterwards impart All deir solemn sacred beauty to a weary searchin' heart; So I'll rest glad an' contented in me min'? for evermore, mind Whe n I sail across de ocean back to my own native shore.
1912
If We Must Die
If we must die, let it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot.
5 If we must die, O let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! O kinsmen! we must meet the commo n foe!
io Thoug h far outnumbered let us show us brave, An d for their thousand blows deal one deathblow! Wha t though before us lies the open grave? Like me n we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
1919, 1922
4. London church, where monarchs are crowned yard.' and the famous, including poets, are buried. 6. So- called in Jamaica, Victoria reigned during 5. Thomas Gray (1716-1771), English poet and the emancipation of slaves in 1837. author of 'Elegy Written in a Country Church- HUGH MACDIARMID 1892-1978
Hugh MacDiarmid, often said to be the greatest Scottish poet since Robert Burns, was born Christopher Murray Grieve in the Scottish border town of Langholm. After a short period of training as a teacher, he turned to journalism. His political convictions made for a turbulent life. He was a founding member of the National Party of Scotland, but it expelled him in 1933 because of his communism. He then joined the
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MACDIARMID: [THE SPLENDID VARIETY OF LANGUAGES] / 246 5
Communist Party of Great Britain, but it expelled him as well, because of his Scottish nationalism.
From the 1920s MacDiarmid was the central figure of the Scottish Renaissance movement. He published short lyrics in a revived Scots, or 'Lallans' (i.e., Lowland Scots), a language that fused the rich vocabulary of medieval Scottish poets, modern dialect Scots, and Standard English. In A Drunk Man Loolzs at the Thistle (1926), he built up an epic statement about Scotland out of a series of related lyrics and passages of descriptive and reflective poetry. In such early poems MacDiarmid proved the vigor and robust physicality of Scots as a medium for modern poetry, after the Burns tradition had declined into sentimentality and imitation. In essays such as 'English Ascendancy in British Literature' (excerpted below), he argued vehemently against confining 'British literature' to the Standard English literature of England, championing instead the varieties of Scottish, Irish, and Welsh literatures written in locally distinctive forms of English and other languages of the British Isles.
MacDiarmid wrote little poetry in Scots after the mid-1950s, when he turned to an ambitious 'poetry of fact and first-hand experience and scientific knowledge,' including the long poem In Memoriam James Joyce (1955), written in colloquial English but formally patterned by carefully controlled shifts in tempo. In it he affirms the essential kinship of everything in the world that is fully realized and properly possessed of its identity?a theme that clearly bears on his lifelong preoccupation with Scottish nationality, language, and culture.
[The Splendid Variety of Languages and Dialects]1
* * * Burns2 knew what he was doing when he reverted from 18th century English to a species of synthetic Scots and was abundantly justified in the result. He was not contributing to English literature but to a clearly defined and quite independent tradition of Scottish poetry hailing from the days of Dunbar and the other great 15 th century 'makars'3?the golden age of Scottish poetry whe n the English impulse seemed to have gone sterile and Scotland, not England, was apparently destined to produce the great poetry of the United Kingdom. To ask why this promise was not redeemed and why English, a far less concentrated and expressive language, became the medium of such an incomparably greater succession of poets, involves deep questions of the relationship of literature to economic, political and other considerations and both the causal and the casual in history: but at the momen t it is more germane to ask if the potentialities of the Scottish literary tradition can yet be realized? There are signs that they may be. The problem of the British Isles is the problem of English Ascendancy. Ireland after a protracted struggle has won a considerable measure of autonomy;4 Scotland and Wales may succeed in doing the same; but what is of importance to my point in the meantime is that, in breaking free (or fairly free) politically, Ireland not only experienced the Literary Revival associated with the names of Yeats, 'A. E.', Synge5 and the others, but has during the past half century recovered almost entirely her ancient Gaelic literature. * * *
1. Excerpted from 'English Ascendancy in British them. Literature,' first published in T. S. Eliot's journal 4. The Irish Free State was established in 1922, The Criterion. 'Ascendancy': dominance. though Northern Ireland remained part of the U.K. 2. Robert Burns (1759-1796), Scottish poet. 5. John Millington Synge (1871-1909), Irishplay3. Poets (Scots); term used for the courtly poets wright. William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), Irish known as the Scottish Chaucerians. William Dun-poet. 'A. E.' was the pseudonym of the Irish poet bar (1460??1530?) was
