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Deer on the High Hills:
the elusiveness of language
in the poetry of Iain Crichton Smith
Douglas Gifford
This paper is unashamedly metaphysical
in its approach to Crichton
Smith's poetry, and the concerns with
language which engage him so
strongly. There are concerns which matter
as much to him, concerns
perhaps more pleasingly and satisfyingly
handled in his work, in the
sense that relatively positive and definite
conclusions are reached. His
relationship with his mother is one such,
in its moving, obsessive, and
therapeutically developed treatment in the many
'Old Woman'
and the severe, yet often immensely dignified
maternal figures of the
fiction descending from Mrs Scott of Consider
the Lilies (1968). It's
arguable that this concern, in which the mother
took on a role
representative of much more than local
family, in poems like 'Old
Woman' ('your thorned back') or in the
eponymously named Mrs Scott
of Consider the Lilies, a role in which she
stood for the inhibitions and
dominance of traditional Calvinist Gaelic
and Scottish culture, dominates the first half or so of Smith's work, with
its attendant themes of the
duties, of 'home' and filial piety set
against the 'duties', discovered
through reading and Romantic conceptions
of self, to discover one's own
life potential and freedom of spirit.
There's no clear-cut point of
transition to different and new outlooks;
I argued in Chapman 34 (1983)
that the 'true dialectic' of Smith's work
was a continual swing between
affirmation of Grace over rigid human Law,
and a nihilistic view of life
and experience which dissevered no significance
behind the random
flashes, nightmares, and brief alliances of
a humanity Smith saw all too
often as irredeemably bourgeois and sordid.
There's no clear development, formally
or thematically, in his work, in the sense of say, Muir's
development towards
'One Foot in Eden'; but increasingly it seems to
me that, amongst
the patterns of opposites which structure his imagery
and ideas, and
emerging slowly as more important as a concern than
that of his guilt
regarding mother, village, Lewis, Gaeldom, and central
to all the polar
opposites, lies an awareness of the insufficiency of
language, the difficulty
of matching words with thinking and feeling, and
an awareness that
what is said will depend on whether the poet is using
the perspective
of emotion or the perspective of reason. The first section
of 'The White
Air of March' (introducing the poem's tragicomic, epic-ironic shifts)
cites the famous apothegm; ' "Tragedy," said
Walpole,
"for those
who feel./For those who think, it's comic".' Smith
feeling
produces Mrs
Scott; Smith thinking, the absurd Murdo, of Murdo and
Other Stories.
Thus I ask
you to imagine a patterned layout in which lines of
opposition intersect
at a central point, like the spokes of a wheel. I must
be far too terse
and subjective about the identification of some of the
lines of opposition,
since their central intersection is my main concern.
But primary 'north
and south' must surely see polar opposites in Smith's
grouping together
of disparate ideas and images like Lewis, the colour
black, notions
of over-rigid social and moral law, his own guilt regarding
his inability
to come up to the demands of his upbringing and
background, and
a sense of barrenness often expressed in the image of
the thistle; all
set diametrically against a grouping of ideas and images
including the idea
of exile from the island, the colour red, the notion of
human fallibility
as a positive moral condition ('you bleed from all that's
best/your active
anima' argues 'Deer on the High Hills', together with
blood as 'a natural
running lustre', or 'She Teaches Lear' and its
conclusion that
'from our own weakness only are we kind'), a kind of
Grace, a sense
of the rightness of rebellion against and moral law, and a
sense of transient
human flowering expressed in the image of the rose.
(This far too facile
identification of opposites has to be qualified by
realising that Smith
can find qualities of the one arising in the heart of
the other; a young
Highland girl studying poetry can be shown to have
Grace of a kind
perhaps superior to that of the Arts; and even 'Poem of
Lewis' allows a
kind of essential survivalist craft or residual Grace
amongst the people
who have no time for poetry.) Lying as East-to-West
opposites it might
then be argued, are Smith's dual conceptions of types
of humanity;
recurrently favoured by him are sensitive teachers,
children, the vulnerable
of past and present, often typified in figures like
Hamlet, Orpheus,
and Robinson Crusoe; while against them are set a
type I have
called 'absolute hunters'. 'She Teaches Lear' admirably
sums them up in
Goneril, Regan and Edmund - beautiful, spare, willing
to die for the
fulfilment of primary and selfish hedonism, Romantic as
they spur their
tall horses into the bright blue, past the 'little dreaming
flocks' of the lesser people, the vulnerable.
Smith finds them in his
Calvins, Johnsons, and his recurrent
motif of the Romans;
stamping their view of life on others. (Again,
the pattern mustn't be
over-simplified; especially in the earlier poetry,
as in 'Statement by a
responsible Spinster', the vulnerable who have
been tied by family ties
and social respectability are sometimes seen
as victims of their own
excessive fear, and rightly deserving a colourless
and barren life.)
Consequently, other recurrent images, figures
and situations arrange
themselves in opposition in ways which often
seem to echo the Law-and-Grace, Black-and-Red polarity, but which,
like the stay-at-homes in
tension with the 'absolute hunters' can
often carry an ambiguity of
value. For instance, the figure of the young
girl, golden in her promise
and vivacity, contrasts recurrently in poetry and
fiction with the figure of
the old woman, worn down to intolerant austerity;
but the egocentric
'Schoolgirl on Speechday' can also give way to
the figure of grace of the
beautiful poem 'Young Highland Girl Studying
Poetry', while the old
woman of so many of the poems of that name,
together with poems like
'Statement by a Responsible Spinster', can cross
over in value through a
personal dignity and traditional power to
become the mother figure of
the prose-poems (or prose translations of Gaelic
poems) of Bìobuill is
Sanasan-reice (Bibles and Advertisements),
a perspective which moves
the blame on to the poet in his awareness of
selfish academic indulgence
in Aberdeen set against the idea of his mother
as a girl gutting fish in the
raw discomfort of Yarmouth, a poor exile.
Similarly the perspective on
the polarised versions of the notions of village
and island can change
from the initial and prevalent condemnation
of parochial intolerance
and Calvinist rigidity; the moving story 'The
Brothers' of The Hermit
collection must be read to qualify the refrain
of stories like 'An American
Sky' of The Black and the Red, while a central
long poem, 'Return to
Lewis', is poised exactly between the poles of
the) early 'Poem of Lewis'
('Here they have no time for the fine graces'),
'The Island' or 'That
Island Formed You' and the (admittedly qualified,
but none the less
valid) nostalgia for and acceptance of home,
village and island in the
earlier of the two 'Prodigal Son' poems
('He got up and went home:
"This place is as good as others"
he shouted through the untellable
music'). It's fascinating to read the later prodigal
son treatment, with its
opposite message: 'Would he not leave
once more when useless
growth/barrenly blossomed?'. And related
to this is the opposed
presentation of Gaelic and Hellenic culture,
set against apparently
debased modern bourgeois attitudes of villages
or towns, from Lewis to
Glasgow, and the world of TV, neon lights,
and the Bomb. Again, an
important poem, 'For John Maclean, Headmaster
and Classical and
Gaelic Scholar', poises itself between the two
opposite positions; looking
back with regret to the legendary past, but
accepting that it must be
legend; endorsing a world of 'superficial
quanta' and neon, albeit
reluctantly.
The more extreme positions are well represented in the long
poem 'Shall Gaelic
Die?', or more obviously in the striking and reductive
juxtapositions
of 'The White Air of March' ('This is the land God gave
to Andy Stewart',
and the towering Cuillins set against Highland
dancers, Glasgow
violence and nuclear stockpiles by Loch Lomond). Of
all Smith's equivocal
attitudes, this towards the cultural past and
present is the
most tormenting for him. While the poet Duncan Bàn
MacIntyre is constantly
seen as the high point of Gaelic culture, a
perfect poise
between natural man and his animal surroundings,
between 'culture'
and 'reality', and while the Gaelic language is seen as
sophisticated
and immensely rich, nevertheless Smith knows how
cultural systems,
from the Roman to the Calvinist, can cripple the
instinctive skills,
so that even in 'Shall Gaelic Die?' the careful reader
will find amongst
the obvious regrets and recognitions that it's a way of
life and a way
of seeing that's dying, a concomitant recognition that, as
with Maclean and
his Hellenic certainties, a time may have come which
is right for their
change and even their death.
And the contemplation
of 'Shall Gaelic Die?' brings us back firmly to
the notion of
language in Smith's poetry. I've taken a little while to
sketch out a
model of Smith's North-South, East-West dualisms of
thought, because
increasingly I feel that the point of intersection of all
these polarities
is ultimately to do with the complexities - or the
elusiveness -
of language itself. In Chapman 34 I argued that Smith
belonged to
that tradition of writers in Scotland and New England
America who
suffered from, and articulated, a Puritan dilemma, a
condition of
being trapped between a loved-and-hated, but totally
conditioning religious
and social ethic, and alternatives of release which,
however enticing
and logically persuasive, were simply insufficient to
fulfil or replace
the needs created by the original conditioning. I further
argued that Smith's
'way out' of this dilemma lay in the adaptation (an
adaptation common
to modern Scottish writers from MacDougall Hay
to Jenkins, from
MacCaig to Alasdair Gray) of the concept of Grace.
While not abandoning
either of these arguments, I suggest now that the
problem of articulation,
the finding of appropriate language both to
express occasions
of Grace and - perhaps more frequently, to the point
where this is
the dominant aspect of the poetry - to express a 'reality'
which Smith
perpetually admits to be inexpressible, and which in
gloomier moments
takes on something of the aspect of 'the horror' which
Conrad's Mr Kurtz
ultimately perceived, is the central concern of the
poetry.
What does
Smith see in the idea of 'language'? Again, simply
extracting from
the poetry what seems impressively definitive won't do:
'For John Maclean'
told us 'that what protects us from the animals is
language healthy
as a healthy pulse', a strong quotation tempting in its
apothegmatic clarity.
But as I've suggested regarding other of Smith's
concepts, we must be wary. For one thing, the
context says 'happy who
can judge' like this - as John Maclean was happy
- but wrong, or at least
anachronistic, as the poem goes on to argue.
Elsewhere we find that
animals aren't to be dismissed as lesser than the
human in Smith's view
- indeed, rather the opposite, as deer and crow
and fox inhabit their
systems, and accept the grammar of their unknowable
lives, with a grace
(lesser than Grace perhaps, but akin) that the
ego of man cannot find.
Language for Smith isn't what it is to Maclean,
a matter of exactitude in
expression, an awareness of harmony in
numbers, 'unanswerable
grammar'. It's varieties of rhetoric, it's plays
like Lear struggling to
express something in their totality, it's Bacon's
art (the contemporary
painter Francis Bacon, whose tortured melting
faces fascinate Smith)
struggling to make a statement. And looking
for other definitions
throughout the range, one finds (in The Notebooks
of Robinson Crusoe,
a long poem sequence obsessed with language)
that landscape can be
invested with grammar, that language is something
that humans, in
their absurd condition, bleed; that (in a
long section on 'Names')
language cannot, for Robinson, nail 'sea' to sea,
or 'well' to water, let
alone allow an 'ought' to emerge from the summer;
and finally, with
Robinson coming out of the island, from the middle
of his dark wood of
solipsism and loneliness, 'language is other people'.
I conclude - tentatively! - that Smith has about
five positive views of
language and its possibilities, and that each of
the five has its darker
negative. Firstly, grammar is seen as the
backbone of systems for
structuring thought, a precondition for sanity.
In 'By the Sea' Smith,
watching the random play of images of a seaside
town, tells us that 'thick
rings of routine save us, rings like marriage rings'
- and the rings are
clearly the banalities of communication so
hated by Murdo, Smith's
comic challenger of social convention. For all
Crusoe found a discrepancy between names and things, he still needed
and desired that 'the
data erect a ladder'; some system to catch
experience was finally
necessary, since 'without the net, the sweetest
fish are tasteless'.
Given the first necessity of language, what
is its function? John
Maclean stood for one definition; but his belief
that learning language
properly led to 'the rule of Rome/the gravitas
of Brutus and his
calm/ ... his love of books,/his principle and practice',
an emphasis on a
kind of language-based set of moral exercises
which led to the school
Dux, and healthy minds in healthy bodies, is
a belief attractive but
anachronistic to Smith. Perhaps one closer to Smith's
real respect for the
function of language is found in 'Johnson in
the Highlands', with its
striking image of Dr Johnson's mind imposing
order on 'sad wastes'
through its 'tough reasoning'. No romantic, devoid
of pathetic fallacy,
Johnson saw lochs and deer with 'a classical sanity',
and Smith accords
his prose and apprehension of reality through language
a rare tribute by
terming it 'a healthy moderation'. Whatever
later qualifications he
makes, Smith
allows that language can, and should, try to translate
reality into
terms unswayed by human ego and imposition.
Smith's third
position, while still 'positive' in a sense, is less confident.
Significantly,
the best expression of this centres on another eighteenth-century and
pre-Romantic thinker, David Hume (in a poem simply
called 'Hume').
Hume is admired for the delicacy of the movement of
his
thought and
its articulation 'through all the daring firths of broken
Scotland'.
At least I think this is what Smith is saying, as this
is an
extremely difficult
poem, an example of several in which I suspect
Smith's ambitious
statement overcomes his means of expressing it. I
confess I'm
still puzzled by the last verse, which either accuses Hume
of substituting,
like Johnson, rationalism for acceptance of random reality,
or praises
him for avoiding mere 'diplomacies'. The last line,
'the
Corrievreckan
of bad art', is both tortuous in itself and ambiguous
in
that the reader
doesn't know if grammatically it attaches to 'diplomacies' or to
its immediate predecessor, 'the inner grace'. And where
Hume
stands in relation
to the last verse is utterly unclear, even by inference.
Nevertheless,
I take the poem to praise Hume for making the clear
places he did,
and for finding utterance in a dark, virtually medieval
Scotland; but
to conclude that full experience - the otter with
the
salmon, the
mist across the roadless land - lies beyond Hume's
philosophy and
language. In this third category language is a necessary
diplomacy,
valid but limited. There is throughout Smith's poetry
a
recognition
that we need this protocol; but almost always followed
by a
realisation
of its impossible limits. And 'For the Unknown Seamen'
of
Iona churchyard
expresses another reason for the necessary diplomacy
of language;
One would like to be able to write something for them
not for the sake of the writing but because
a man should be named in dying as well as living...
... and because
the brain being brain must try to establish laws.
I quote at
length because this encapsulates well Smith's positive
desire
for 'rings of
routine', 'a moderate jargon' (to use MacCaig's term for
the
'go-between'
nature of language from 'Culag Pier'), and for a diplomacy
of language
which accompanies rites' of passage. The poem
also
anticipates
the fourth category of language as 'other people' which
we
found in The
Notebooks of Robinson Crusoe, sentiments very close
to
those of the
novels A Field Full of Folk and In the Middle of the
Wood,
in which ordinary
human converse, sharing, and social arrangements
are seen as
redemptive, and close in idea to the conclusions of poems
like
'To a Young
Highland Girl Studying Poetry', in which language's
nature and
importance become almost the simplicity of communication
through gesture and action rather than the
sophistication of words, the
arts, or philosophy, through deeds rather
than speech. It's one of the
most endearing qualities of Smith's poetry
that it genuinely questions its
own importance at every turn, honestly
examining its validity in the
light of the mundane and workaday.
The fifth category is very close to crossing
over into being negative;
meaning through language is reduced
to a glimmer, as in the
fragmentary glimpses and contradictions
of 'The White Air of March':
Snatches
'and I mysel in crammasie'.
Rainbows
out of the darkness.
Green, green moments
Or out of the waterfall a sudden face... (section 16)
Clearly through these deliberate echoes
of moments from MacDiarmid we are close to our central area of Grace;
here, moments of grace in
which language, against all odds, snatches
a meaning and a beauty,
from surrounding darkness.
We are now at the heart of Smith's ideology.
Moving through ideas of
language as sensation, perception, and
relationship with the world, he
discards or relegates all five categories to
arrive at what he calls 'the true
dialectic'- neither positive nor negative, only
truer because it tries not to
be rhetoric, not to create pathetic fallacies,
but simply accepts. It is even
beyond poetry, in the end:
... the true dialectic is to turn
in the infinitely complex, like a chain
we steadily burn through...
not to be dismissed in any poem
by admiration for the ruthless man
not for the saint, but for the moving on
into the endlessly various, real, human,
world...
This, from 'Lenin', sums up the suspicion
Smith has for false dialectic,
false use of language, and represents his
consistent drive underlying all
changes of mood and evaluation, moral
and social. I say 'consistent'
because it does seem that this reductive,
stripping, self-questioning
activity is independent of topics and occasional
attitudes, and pervades
all his work.
It's also
independent of the negative evaluations of language which
are the dark
twins of those I've discussed as positive. The order I present
these in is
open to rearrangement, but I would judge the rejection
of
language to
begin with (and here again the kinship with MacCaig
is
unmistakeable!)
a distrust of and disgust with the falsity of metaphor. In
'Carol and
Hamlet' he tells us 'I too was terrified of words once. / I
was
so frightened
of where words would lead me ... / where language sent each
yellow writing
root...'. And the use of past tense reveals that this fear of
language is
something from which he intermittently recovers, only to
fall
prey to it
again and again. It's a far more serious condition than
MacCaig's 'I
lie, afraid of where a thought might take me', in 'Summer
Farm', where
even the 'lie' is a joke, since his metaphors are benign lies,
and he lets
the thought take him readily enough. Smith's distrust
of
metaphor is
a genuine doubt about its being nonsense, as in the dialogue
with himself,
'About that Mile', in which the wishing and dreaming
of
humanity is
finalised in a dreadful, convincing last line, in which
the
alter ego
says 'I turn to poetry for such foolery!' Again,
and
confessionally,
Smith recounts his feelings at a public meeting, surrounded by efficient
decision-makers, when suddenly
this fear struck me with a dizzy force
that this was real and the poems I make
mere cardboard coins to fill a childish purse.
The poem, 'Studies
in Power', doesn't accept this fear; but it's recurrent
through his
work.
The second
suspicion concerning the validity of language is of its
inability
to capture 'reality', the unknowable. This is probably
the
strongest and
most pervasive statement of all throughout his poetry,
from 'For
the Unknown Seamen' on; their deaths, their present
decomposed
state, why they die, their final significance are simply
beyond language.
Yet these events are not amenable
to any discipline that we can impose
and are not in the end even imaginable.
These things happen and there's no explaining
And to call them chosen might abuse a word.
Johnson's 'healthy
moderation' of reality through language couldn't
hear 'like
a native dog notes beyond his ran '; the animality
of
experience
is more real, and even Johnson is seen as twisted by
an
animal pain
he can't control or explain. Hume left out the world of
otter
and salmon,
and in 'Shall Gaelic Die?'
Winter has its own dictionary, the words
are a blizzard building a
tower of Babel. Its grammar is like
snow. Between the words the
wild-cat looks sharply across a No-Man's-Land,
artillery of the
Imagination.
And the whole burden of 'Deer on the High
Hills' is to the effect that
the deer 'inhabit wild systems', the poem
asking unanswerable question
after question of them.
What is the knowledge of the deer?
Is there a philosophy of the hills?
Do their heads peer into the live stars?
Do rumours of death disturb them? They do not live
by local churchyards, hotels or schools.
They inhabit wild systems.
As the later 'Prodigal Son' says, 'that
simple weather/seemed so beyond
the power of literature/I couldn't focus...'.
The third negation of language is another
paradox, in that it produces
some of Smith's most telling ironic treatments
of debased modern living.
In this mood, Smith breaks up language
and experience into grotesque
fragments, deploring the inability of language
to do the very thing he's
actually doing. For example, the prose-poem
'What is Wrong?'
But one day I saw a black pit in green earth, a gardener kissing
flowers, an old woman squeaking in her loneliness, and a house
sailing on the water.
I don't know whether there is a language for that, or, if there is,
whether I would be any better breaking my imagination into a
thousand pieces...
Similarly the prose-poem 'Sighting the,
Mountains of Harris' merges
(again, like the MacCaig of 'Centre of
Centres', in which taxis of
Edinburgh run around Suilven and crofters
and traffic wardens merge in
his imagination) mountains and neon lights,
guitars and broken ships,
nylon girls and 'the stones of Woolworths in
the bay'. 'The White Air of
March' is really a series of bitter and jarring
haikus, again paradoxical
in its contradiction between its claim that
it's a poem of exile 'in a verse
without honour or style', when clearly its
style does achieve sharp effect.
Again, 'Six Haiku' mocks linguistic systemisation,
but achieves random
and vivid effects, like
A piano in the desert,
Beethoven at a ceilidh -
Salvador Dali.
and
A girl with nylons
Walking past a prison -
the poetry of William Ross.
Such expression
of pointlessness of existence is further darkened in the
fourth assertion
of language's limitations, in Smith's ubiquitous perception of mortality
and the insubstantiality of a life. 'At the Sale' collects
the bric-a-brac
of lives from the Duke's to the widow's, from beds and
books and fireguards
to pianos and bibles and hourglasses, and lives are
seen as pointless
machinery; ('we will /endlessly pump and turn for forty
years/ and
then receive a pension..'), no more significant than any of
the
gadgets whose
purpose is long since indiscernible. 'O hold me, love, in
this appalling
place', implores Smith at the end; but whether it is his
earthly love
beside him being implored, or whether it is the abstract
notion of love,
and whether any response is given, is left unanswered.
And the 'appalling
place' gets even darker, becoming the circus, 'a place
of mirrors,
an absurd conclusion', in 'Hamlet'. If Hamlet of all people
can't find
language, who can?
There is
repeated in the poetry a disturbingly nasty image, that of
the
dead eel, suspended,
livid white, in dark waters. It disturbs, because it is
an image also
of humanity as Smith perceives it in his darkest moods.
The eel, the
dead sheep, the unknown seamen, and the drowned of the
Iolaire of
1918 - all bring Smith to his lowest point, where Hagasaki,
'children with
skin hanging to them like the flag in which Hagasaki was
sacrificed'
(in another poem of grotesque conjunction, 'At the Stones
of
Callanish')
and political injustice merge with a horror of day-today
existence itself
to produce probably his most negative poems, like 'If You
Are About
to Die Now', where the separate linguistic utterances
are
random, close
to madness, deliberate statements about meaninglessness.
And 'In the
Middle', title poem of a 1977 collection, is quite simply
about the
total breakdown of any systematisation, linguistic
or
perceptual.
In the middle
flashings
shakings and glitterings.
Arms that come from the right,
Arms that come from the left.
Whispers at corners. 'Is Hamlet better? Is Sarah?...'
Notes that are sent about thunder,
Cards about lightning...
papers that come from the left,
posts that breathlessly rush over moorland and road...
Glintings,
Shakings,
and flashings.
A postbag of clouds.
Note the emphasis on meaningless communications
and messages.
Language has broken down here to incoherence
and horror. How far we
have come from language being other people, or
language making us, as
in 'Shall Gaelic Die?'!
We are faced, after all these positive and
negative statements about
language, with the conclusion that Smith sees,
in some moods, life-enhancing possibilities in language, and in
others, limitations and
uselessness. Is then the most positive thing we can
say about him that at
least he insists on 'the true dialectic', a rigorous
questioning of all human
pretensions in the metaphysical and aesthetic?
Tentatively, I'd like to
conclude by suggesting that, just as there are
positive and negative
statements concerning language, so even the 'true
dialectic', that honest
facing of the complex unknowability of humanity,
has its doppelgänger,
its opposite twin. This twin goes beyond language,
elusive, unverifiable,
but recurrent.
What makes this most affirmative quality in
Smith's poetry even more
complex and difficult to treat of is the fact that
it can occur, and usually
occurs, within a context which doesn't so much act
as foil to it, in the
sense of a spiritual experience occurring in a
dark place, as render it
ambiguous and uncertain. 'Poem of Lewis' laments
the lack of graces in
'this black north', but implicitly suggests a subtle
undergrace in the very
deepest things, like weaving, drawing water,
tending land. There's no
denying that the conclusion is that this isn't enough,
since the lack of
'the great forgiving spirit of the word' is seen firstly
in almost biblical
terms, as the first requisite, and secondly
(and almost, seen from a
devout islander's point of view, blasphemously)
as murdered by the
island people. They crush beauty - and the poem
shares an early 'Old
Woman' image, that of the daffodil as grace,
destroyed here by
Calvinism as well as by weather, just as it was
'steadily stamped' by the
old woman. But 'lightning' lies at the heart of
the poem; and 'lightning'
becomes a Smith shorthand image for a miraculous
leap of mind, of
inexplicable manifestation of beauty, so that by the
time of 'Deer on the
High Hills' it is akin to the leap of a great deer,
itself a metaphor for the
bounding leap of the mind of God. We're outside
language now; signs
and sudden manifestations in art, in animal existence,
and especially in
the natural and the animal in humans, become
his essential hope. 'The
Good Place'
turns, in familiar fashion' the view of Lewis around in
the
way we previously
noted; now it's seen almost as Edwin Muir looked
back at Orkney,
'the adults friendly and the children happy', with
dazzling oceans,
'fighting bells', 'bees content'. Typically, however, the
conditional
creeps in; like that 'one would have thought' in 'Poem
to
Lewis', here
'you'd say it was a good place except that sometimes/
a
wish for terror
and for lightning strode/down the great mountains to the
village rhymes/
to find in lakes the wicked face of God.' I paraphrase this
as meaning
that the place is indeed 'good' in all recognised social
and
domestic ways;
but that the restless and truly creative mind sometimes
feels claustrophobia,
and yearns for a fuller spectrum of emotional
experience,
together with a (guilty) wish that the decorous placidity
of
village and
village culture (rhymes) could be upset, for the poet's
sake
and for the
discomfiture of the villagers, by the appearance of a
God
whose sheer
energy and natural force would be unrecognizable to
the
homely churchgoers,
who would call such a terrible force evil. The
meaning is
in the end closer to MacDiarmid in Sangschaw and
Pennywheep
than the Muir of 'One Foot in Eden'. It reveals that such
a
writer will
never be content in however idyllic a local setting; and
that
it's not
Calvinism which essentially causes his unrest, but a deeper
existential
hunger. Yes, Calvinism is blamed, as in Consider the Lilies,
as a Patrick
Sellers of the imagination, an interior clearance; but, like
the
novel, deeper
issues are about the writer's mind struggling to
come
to terms
with the nature of existence itself, an existence in
which
Calvinism is
a protagonist early and effectively dealt with. Follow these
poems with
the beautiful seven-part reflection 'Return to Lewis', and
the
bitterness against
the black men is so tempered that there is now real
regret in the
way the poet sees their island beliefs dying in the face
of
'progress';
'God is surrendering to other gods/ as the stony moor
to
multiplying
roads', 'the Bible faded to TV', black sunglasses
are
replacing black
hats. Beyond the polarised responses of hate and love,
the real meaning
is that of Sorley Maclean's 'Hallaig', a contemplation
of time and
change which, like Gibbon's final view in A Scots Quair,
transcends
local human issues to seek the face of a stranger God behind.
And at best
Smith finds a Muir-like and optimistic significance; the
fourth of
'Love Songs of a Puritan', observing beauty in girl
and
weather, concludes
All things that speak of surety and grace
proclaim us heretic from our proper place
though venomous devils preach against the light...
- probably
the most explicit statement of belief in a 'dear theology'
ever
made by Smith.
Later, and more profound, poetry, was to be altogether
more enigmatic
concerning the nature and validity of God. Perhaps the
most ambitious of all these later explorations
is 'Deer on the High Hills',
a 'meditation' in fourteen loosely connected
parts. It perhaps tries to do
too much; as well as being simultaneously an
attack on, and exploitation
of, excessive metaphoric richness and pathetic
fallacy, it's a series of
musings on the metaphysical nature of deer,
as seen by man, and in
actuality, with an ever-growing under-theme
concerning the unattainability of knowledge of God through reason.
These last two are indeed
eventually inseparable, since Smith comes
close in this poem to
suggesting that direct apprehension of
natural experience unmediated
by language or 'cloudy systems' of any human
kind, such as he imagines
the deer to experience, is perhaps the only
attainable experience of God.
They are 'half-in, half-out this world', with
their 'electric instinct';
section ten evokes, their totally alien and
sensual world with much of the
intuitive empathy of the poetry of Ted Hughes,
but with the additional
development in section eleven that the deer,
with their 'vibrant music,
high and rich and clear,/mean what the
plain mismeans, inform a
chaos'. Smith is not saying that man cannot
know this music; more
simply that man's ego, pathetic fallacies (in
his insistence that landscape
echoes his moods and desires), his 'dull ironic
crown' and his implacable
insistence on 'the idea', remove instinctive
skills and animal acceptance.
This is why Duncan Bàn MacIntyre is given
pride of place at the heart
of the poem in section six; he alone not only
knew them intimately, but
'was one of them', and shared their music.
This is as close as Smith
comes to the 'Golden Age' mythology beloved
of Renaissance writers
like MacDiarmid, Muir, Gibbon and Gunn;
but it's not really any
endorsement of Muir's 'a simple sky roofed
in that rustic day', of the
ancient wholeness seen by Muir in'Scotland
1941'. Maclntyre is unique
in having come to terms with praising the deer
and killing the deer;
It was a kind of Eden these days
With something Cretan in his eulogy.
Nevertheless he shot them also.
Like shooting an image or a vivid grace.
Brutality and beauty danced together...
The final plea of the poem is that we accept
that language cannot find
God (although Smith will later, in 'Shall Gaelic
Die?' suggest that 'God
is outside language, standing on a perch',
and that if He exists, He
should 'emanate from the language', like
perfume from flowers). The
final paradox of Smith's poetry, and
'Deer on the High Hills'
particularly, is that it says that words can't
cope with random reality,
yet comes astonishingly close to the elusive
goal of making them cope.
After all his deliberate parody and pastiche
of poets from Eliot to
MacDiarmid, Muir to Hughes, after all the
overheating of metaphor in
which Smith
slyly indulges, in his comparisons of deer to 'debutantes on
a smooth ballroom
floor', or 'fallen nobles', an effect is attained in the
final section
fourteen that, taken out of context and without the hothouse
atmosphere of
most of the earlier sections, would read as simply banal.
There is no metaphor. The stone is stony ...
The rain is rainy and the sun is sunny.
The flower is flowery and the sea is salty ...
It's dangerously
close to jingle. Yet let this be read after the mind-stretching discussions
of metaphor and pathetic fallacy which precede it,
and the sense
of stepping out of a hothouse of language is refreshing,
bracing, and
lucid. The last section is altogether about the limits of
language, our
misuse of its process and function, to bolster our transient
self-esteem.
And the poem - as all Smith's poetry - asks us to accept
primary experience
and to learn to live with 'this distance deadly'
between 'reports'
(through language) and 'reality'.
The deer step out in isolated air.
Forgive the distance, let the transient journey
on delicate ice not tragical appear
for stars are starry and the rain is rainy,
the stone is stony, and the sun is sunny,
the deer step out in isolated air.
NOTE
All quotations can be located under poem titles in Selected Poems 1955-1980, ed.
Robin Fulton (Macdonald, Loanhead, Midlothian, 1981).
See also Chapman, 34, February 1983 (Vol. VII, No. 4, p. 39-46) for my
article 'The True Dialectic: the Fiction and Poetry of Iain Crichton Smith'.
University of Glasgow.
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