Throwback Thursdays” at ClimbingSky feature posts I wrote over a 15 year period for various blogs. This was first posted on November 12, 2011.

At the end of the Victorian era, nationalistic literary movements sprang up in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. The Irish movement and its writers are, of course, well known. But the same kind of movements also flourished in Wales and Scotland as Welsh and Scottish writers worked to reclaim their national myths, languages, and cultures that had become so Anglicized over the years.

Writer Hugh MacDiarmid (aka. Christopher M. Grieve) was central to the Scottish literary movement. Today’s selection comes from his most famous work, the book-length poem “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle.”

I first read A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle in the spring of 1987. At that time I was living in a small studio apartment near the cathedral in St. Paul. I have fond memories of sitting in the battered old Lazyboy chair that was the only furniture I owned with the large-formatted paperback balanced on my lap. Reading A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle remains one of my happiest reading memories.

Admittedly, the idea of reading a poem in Scottish may seem intimidating at first glance. But if the lines are read out loud, as any poem should be read, you will find that it is not as difficult as you would think. MacDairmid, like Chaucer,  gets easier the more time you spend with him.

Enjoy!

“A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle” (lines 2434-2457)
Man’s mind is in God’s image made,
And in its wildest dreams arrayed
In pairt o’ Truth is still displayed.

Then suddenly I see as weel
As me spun roon’ within the wheel,
the helpless forms o’ God and Deil.

And on a birlin’ edge I see
Wee Scotland squattin’ like a flea,
And dizzy wi’ the speed, and me!

I’ve often thrawn the warld frae me,
Into the Pool o’ Space, to see
The Circles o’ Infinity.

Or like a flat stane gar’d it skite,
A Morse code message writ in licht
That yet I couldna read aricht.

The skippin’ sparks, the ripples, rit
Like skritches o’ a grain o’ grit
‘Neth Juggernaut in which I sit.

Twenty-six thoosand years it tak’s
Afore a’e single roond it mak’s,
And syne it melts as it were wax.

The Phoenix guise ‘t’ll rise in syne
Is mair than Euclid or Einstein
Can dream o’ or’s in dreams o’ mine.

 

Listening with a pencil and my ear, these are the lines I marked:

I’ve often thrawn the warld frae me,
Into the Pool o’ Space, to see
The Circles o’ Infinity.

 

The skippin’ sparks, the ripples, rit
Like skritches o’ a grain o’ grit
‘Neth Juggernaut in which I sit.

Twenty-six thoosand years it tak’s
Afore a’e single roond it mak’s,
And syne it melts as it were wax.

 

It is difficult to excerpt out of this excerpt lines I like better than others. But in keeping with MontanaWriter’s November theme of poems about stars, I highlighted these few. These lines remind me of many poems that compare stars to sparks from a grinding stone or foundry, including these from Yeat’s Poem “The Secret Rose”:

When shall the stars be blown about the sky, 
Like the sparks blown out of a smithy…