the dominant poet among and mystic George Russell (1867?1935).
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246 6 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
* * 4 Literature, so far from manifesting any trend towards uniformity or standardization, is evolving in the most disparate ways; and there are few literatures in which dialect elements, and even such extreme employments of? and plays upon?them as render them permanently untranslatable and unintelligible to all but a handful of readers in their own countries, are not peculiarly and significantly active. On this account (as isolating it from general contemporary tendency which must have some deep-seated relation to the needs of modern, and prospective, consciousness) it is a pity that English literature is maintaining a narrow ascendancy tradition instead of broad-basing itself on all the diverse cultural elements and the splendid variety of languages and dialects, in the British Isles. (I do not refer here to the Empire, and the United States of America, though the evolution of genuine independent literatures in all of these is a matter of no little consequence and, already clearly appreciated in America, is being increasingly so realized in most of the Dominions, 6 which is perhaps the cultural significance of the anti-English and other tendencies in most of them which are making for those changes in the Imperial organization which will deprive England of the hegemony it has maintained too long.) To recognize and utilize these, instead of excluding them, could only make for its enrichment. It is absurd that intelligent readers of English, who would be ashamed not to know something (if only the leading names, and roughly, what they stand for) of most Continental literatures, are content to ignore Scottish, Irish, and Welsh Gaelic literatures, and Scots Vernacular literature. Surely the latter are nearer to them than the former, and the language difficulty no greater. These Gaelic, and Scots dialect poets were products of substantially the same environment and concerned for the most part with the same political, psychological, and practical issues, the same traditions and tendencies, the same landscapes, as poets in English to whom, properly regarded, they are not only valuably complementary, but (in view of their linguistic, technical, and other divergencies) corrective. Confinement to the English central stream is like refusing to hear all but one side of a complicated case?and in view of the extent to which the English language is definitely adscripted7 in certain important moral and psychological directions, and incapable of dealing with certain types of experience which form no inconsiderable part of certain other European literatures and may well be of far greater consequence to the future of humanity as a whole than the more 'normal matters' with which it is qualified to deal, becomes a sort of self-infliction of an extensive spiritual and psychological blindness. * * *
From A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle 1. Farewell to Dostoevski' Th e wa n leafs shak, atour? us like the snaw. around Here is the cavaburd2 in which Earth's tint.0 lost
6. Self-governing nations in the British Common-1. Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881), Russian wealth. novelist. 7. Attached (to the soil). 2. Dense snowstorm.
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MACDIARMID: IN MEMORIAM JAMES JOYCE / 246 7
There's naebody but Oblivion and us, Puir gangrel0 buddies, waunderin' hameless in't. wanderer
5 Th e stars are larochs? o' auld cottages, foundations An d a' Time's glen is fu' o' blinnin'0 stew.0 blinding / storm Nae freen'ly lozen? skimmers:0 and the wund? window/gleams /wind Rises and separates even me and you.
I ken nae Russian and you ken nae Scots.
10 We canna tell oor voices frae the wund. The snaw is seekin' everywhere: oor herts At last like roofless ingles0 it has fund . hearths
An d gethers there in drift on endless drift, Oor broken herts that it can never fill; 15 An d still?its leafs like snaw, its growth like wund ? Th e thistle3 rises and forever will!
1926
2. Yet Ha'e I Silence Left Yet ha'e I Silence left, the croon0 o' a'. crown
No' her, wha on the hills langsyne0 I saw long ago Liftin' a foreheid o' perpetual snaw.
No' her, wha in the how-dumb-deid o' nicht4 5 Kyths,5 like Eternity in Time's despite.
No' her, withooten0 shape, wha's nam e is Daith,? without /death No' Him , unkennable0 abies0 to faith unknowable /except
?Go d whom, gin? e'er He saw a Man,'ud be if E'en mair dumfooner'd6 at the sicht0 than he. sight
io ?Rut Him, whom nocht? in man or Deity, nothing Or Daith or Dreid or Laneliness can touch,
Wha's deed crwre often and has seen owre muchJ
O I ha'e Silence left.
1926
From In Memoriam James Joyce We Must Look at the Harebell1
We must look at the harebell as if We had never seen it before.
The emblem of Scotland. 7. Who has died too often and seen too much. The still center of night. 1. The Scottish bluebell, a blue flower with a bell- Makes herself known, appears. shaped blossom. More dumbfounded.
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246 8 / NATION AND LANGUAGE
Remembrance gives an accumulation of satisfaction Yet the desire for change is very strong in us 5 An d change is in itself a recreation. To those who take any pleasure In flowers, plants, birds, and the rest An ecological change is recreative. (Come. Clim b with me. Even the sheep are different 1 0 An d of new importance. Th e coarse-fleeced, hardy Herdwick, Th e Hampshire Down, artificially fed almost from birth, An d butcher-fat from the day it is weaned, Th e Lincoln-Longwool, the biggest breed in England, is Wit h the longest fleece, and the Southdown Almost the smallest?and between them thirty other breeds, Some whitefaced, some black, Some with horns and some without, Some long-wooled, some short-wooled, 2 0 In England where the men, and women too, Are almost as interesting as the sheep.) Everything is different, everything changes, Except for the white bedstraw which climbs all the way Up from the valleys to the tops of the high passes 2 5 Th e flowers are all different and more precious Demanding more search and particularity of vision. Look! Here and there a pinguicula2 eloquent of
