"But Aye Be Whaur Extremes Meet"

'But I be where extremes meet'

Hugh MacDiarmid in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926)

"Hugh MacDiarmid came into being in 1922 [Christopher Murray Grieve having in 1922 adopted the pseudonym 'Hugh MacDiarmid']: the year, as is often noted, in which James Joyce's Ulysses was first published in book form, in which T.S Eliot's The Waste Land first appeared, and which saw the first publication of Virginia Woolfe's first novel in her mature modernist style, Jacob's Room".  (D. Goldie, 2011, The Edinburgh Companion to Hugh MacDiarmid)

"His adoption of the Scots language [Lowland Scots, as distinct from Highland Gaelic] in 1922 was a turning from the language of Empire, globally spoken English, to the language of some sections of a tiny country [a deliberate swerve into linguistic oddity]; it was at least as much a movement towards the unpopular [a move into inaccessibility] as it was a gesture of identification with his own people ... For in the 1920's, as today, most Scots did not read John Jamieson's four-volume Etymological Dictionary of the Scottish Language."  (R. Crawford, 1995, Proceedings of the British Academy)

"Reading the works of Dostoevsky, Pound, and Eliot, MacDiarmid became dissatisfied with the Kailyard School of Scottish literature being produced at the time ... MacDiarmid's attitudes towards the Kailyard's Scots lyrics: 'Doric, frozen in a rural past ... largely sustained by a retrogressive sentimental impulse [mental inertia, over-valued pawkiness], is not fit for the purpose of dealing with the concerns of modern, urban society." (N. Duron, 2014, The Sigma Tau Delta)

" ... Gregory Smith's Scottish Literature: Character and Influence (1919) ... identifies the tendency of Scottish literature toward the 'jostling of contraries' and the 'combination of opposites ... which is another way of saying that he has made allowance for new conditions'. When in his Scottish Chapbook MacDiarmid calls for a 'distinctively Scottish range of values' ... he means this 'jostling of contraries' ... MacDiarmid imagines Scottish poetry to be a 'revolt against a dreary rut of imitative versifying and a new freedom in vocabulary, in subject-matter, in angles of expression, in technical means, in experimentation of all kinds'. In the same essay he describes the 'national genius' of Scotland as that 'which is capable of countless manifestations at absolute variance with each other, yet confined within the limited infinity of that adjective Scottish. The kind of experimentation MacDiarmid wants is one that allows for, or even bases itself on, contradiction."   (Duron 2014, as above)

The following practical examples of MacDiarmid's 'method' are from his early publishing in Scots, the collections of Sangschaw (1925) and Penny Wheep (1926). 

(1)   The Watergaw in Sangschaw (1925)

"MacDiarmid's project of looking back to look forward is perhaps best encapsulated in his poem 'The Watergaw' from Sangschaw. In the poem, the speaker sits in the present state in contemplation of a mysterious ('antrin') past, thinking about the watergaw, or the indistinct rainbow, he saw a few nights before and of his father's face as he died sometime in the more distant past.

Ae weet forenichti' the yow-trummle

I saw yon antrin thing, 

A watergaw wi' its chitterin' licht

Ayont the on-ding; 

An' I thocht o' the last wild look ye gied

Afore ye deed!

There was nae reek i' the laverock's hoose

That nicht―an' nane i' mine; 

But I hae thocht o' that foolish licht

Ever sin' syne;

An' I think that mebbe at last I ken

What your look meant then.

In the first stanza, the two images of the watergaw and the dead man's face are held in tension with one another ... with no apparent connection. However this tension is relieved in the poem's last lines as the images of the past and present are synthesized through rhyme ... the rhymes between 'mebbe', 'ken', and 'then' do most of the poem's work. To 'ken', or to know, is a present tense verb, reflecting the speaker's current, contemplative state. His present state is then synthesized with the memory of his father's look before he died through the rhyming of 'ken' with the adverb 'then'. With this synthesis of the past with the present, a new insight and sense of possibility emerges, indicated by the rhyming of the words 'ken' and 'then' with 'mebbe'. Contained within this short verse is an almost formulaic expression of MacDiarmid's program: past (then) + present (ken) + future possibility (mebbe)".

(2)    The Eemis Stane  in Sangschaw (1925)

"Again we have a contemplative speaker, this time standing in the dead silence of a cold harvest night. The speaker's consciousness transcends his body as he reflects, from a cosmic vantage point, on the earth as an 'eemis stane', or an unsteady stone:

I' the how-dumb-deid o' the cauld hairst nicht

The warl' like an eemis stane 

Wags i' the lift;

An' my eerie memories fa'

Like a yowdendrift.

Like a yowdendrift so's I couldna read

The words cut oot i' the stane

Had the fug o' fame

An' history's hazelraw

No' yirdit thaim.

[There seems to be] a double negative in the poem's final stanza ('couldna read', 'had ... No' yirdit') ... creating a damaging incongruity: 'I could read the words [because] moss and lichen had obscured them'. [But there is] the possibility for an affirmative reading from the double negative ... Had the words on the stone not been obscured, the speaker would only be able to read from it, thus duplicating the 'mental inertia' of the imitative Kailyard poetry described earlier. Because the words ('thaim') have been obscured by time ('history's hazelraw'), the speaker can draw on the living passion ('the fug o' fame') he feels in the present and create his own poem from the raw materials of the past ('the eemis stane') that can be projected into the future. What we have is not a 'damaging in congruity', but rather a 'unified paradox' ..."

(3)    Gairmscoile in Penny Wheep (1926)

"In his poem 'Gairmscoile' from Penny Wheep, MacDiarmid uses rhyme to show that the Scots language has the capacity to evoke an ancient, original energy he believes to be still present within the human subconscious. The poem opens with the image of copulating 'Skrymmorie monsters' of the ancient past, 'Auder than mammoth or than mastodon' though still lurking 'Deep i' the hearts o' a' men'.... [These] monsters represent 'a primitive energy to be tapped and released in the race'. Though the primitive energy has hitherto been inaccessible, the speaker tells us 

there's forgotten shibboleths o' the Scots

Ha'e keys to senses lockit ...

―Coorse words that shamble thro' oor minds

and that 'It's soon, no' sense, that faddoms the herts o' men. That is, the mere vocalisation of Scots language is sufficient to unlock the primal energy of the modern man, connecting him to the ancient past.

The aural links made with the 'ee' sounds between the description of the monsters as 'scaut-heid', 'Skrymmoorie', and 'beasts', with the description of their presence 'Deep i' the herts o' a' men', collapse the temporal gap between the primeval monster and modern man. The two  are further tied together through the internal rhyme of 'ee' sounds as they are said to

Mee[t] the reid een wi' een like seevun hells.

... Nearer the twa beasts draw

until finally 'The bubbles o' twa sauls' break, and they merge and mate ... This mergence between contrary elements ... produce 'ee'-sounding 'wild cries' (the word 'cries' itself having the 'ee' sound) from which the speaker tells us 'a' Scotland's destiny thrills'. The poem ends with the victorious declaration

For we ha'e faith in Scotland's hidden poo'ers,

The present's theirs, but a' the past and future's oors

... MacDiarmid is able to create through rhyme the central paradox that defined his early career: that of looking back into the past to look forward to the future. In 'Gairmscoile', he writes, A foray frae the past―and future tae

           Sin Time's a blindness we'll thraw aff some day! 

PRINCIPAL REFERENCE (extensively quoted in (1), (2), (3), above) is:

Nicholas Duron, 2014, '"But Aye Be Whaur Extremes Meet": Hugh MacDiarmid's Poetics of Rhyme in His Early Lyrics', The Sigma Tau Delta, pp 16-27

(There is no shame in recognising, or reproducing, sensible exposition!)