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Home / Schools

Schools

ASL Schools Conference 2022

22 August 2022 by Duncan Jones

October 1, 2022 @ 10:00 am – 4:00 pm

The ASL Schools Conference will offer CPD in areas of language and literature for teachers of English, for BGE, National 5, Higher, and Advanced Higher. The presentations will cover drama, poetry, short stories, novels, non-fiction, creative writing, and storytelling, in English and Scots.

Please note, this event is aimed at teachers and teachers-in-training, specifically those who are or are likely to be delivering the English curriculum in Scotland.

Programme

  • 10:15–10:25 Welcome
  • 10:25–10:40 Teaching resources for Walter Scott (Anna Fancett)
  • 10:40–11:20 Extending the range – three “new” Scottish short stories (Gerard Carruthers)
  • 11:20–11:40 Coffee
  • 11:40–12:20 Alasdair Gray’s novel Lanark (Alan Riach)
  • 12:20–13:00 Hannah Lavery’s play Lament for Sheku Bayoh (Gillian Sargent)
  • 13:00–14:00 Lunch
  • 14:00–14:20 Reading Scottish non-fiction (Cheryl Simpson / Andrew Young)
  • 14:20–15:00 Creative Writing in different genres (Gerda Stevenson) 
  • 15:00–15:10 Break
  • 15:10–15:50 Oral Storytelling – skills and art (Donald Smith)
  • 15:50 End of Conference

Anna Fancett is a teacher, storyteller, and scholar. She is currently working with the University of Aberdeen’s Walter Scott Research Centre to promote the work of Walter Scott to school pupils.

Gerard Carruthers is Francis Hutcheson Chair of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, and is currently editing the Everyman Book of Scottish Stories.

Alan Riach is a poet and Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He appears, briefly and fictionally, in Alasdair Gray’s Old Men in Love.

Gillian Sargent is a teacher of English at Grange Academy, Kilmarnock, and has tutored in Scottish Literature with the Scottish Universities’ International Summer School.

Cheryl Simpson and Andrew Young are teachers of English at St Aloysius’ College, Glasgow.

Gerda Stevenson is an award-winning writer, actor, director, and singer-songwriter. Her poetry, drama, and prose have been widely published, staged, and broadcast.

Donald Smith is a founding member of the Scottish Storytelling Forum, and is currently Chief Executive of Traditional Arts and Culture Scotland as well Director of the Scottish International Storytelling Festival.

ASL gratefully acknowledges the support of the Scottish Government towards this conference.

Free

Association for Scottish Literature

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James Watt South Building

Engineering Way, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, G12 8QQ + Google Map
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Tagged With: Schools

ALISON, Jim, ‘Burns in School’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 3, 1997 |


Transcript of a talk given at the International Bicentenary Burns Conference, University of Strathclyde, 11–13 January 1996

The third cam up, hap-step-an’-loup 
As licht as onie lambie 
An’ wi a curchie low did stoop, 
As soon as e’er she saw me, 
Fu kind that day 
[…] 
My name is Fun – your cronie dear, 
The nearest friend ye hae …

These words, the arrival of Fun at the beginning of The Holy Fair, are my text for today; their application should emerge later.

1. WHY SHOULD WE BOTHER WITH BURNS IN SCHOOLS?

In the context of educational development in Scotland over the last 15 years … Standard Grade, SCOTVEC Communication, revision of Higher, the 5-14 programme, Higher Still … nothing in the curriculum can safely be taken for granted. For every component a case needs to be made. And that applies not just to Burns but, as we have been seeing recently, to the teaching of literature in general, and within that to the place of Scottish literature.

Briefly then before we come to Burns, I shall touch on two prior questions: 

  1. why bother with literature?
  2. why bother with Scottish literature?

Literature 
The Scottish educational system at both primary and secondary levels has viewed literature and language as intimately reinforcing each other within the subject English. Most of us would, I think justify the study of literature on grounds such as these:

  • it demonstrates the fullest, most precise use of language,
  • it gives young people access to vicarious experiences and promotes their imaginative, aesthetic and moral growth,
  • it gives students knowledge of their cultural milieu and heritage,
  • it yields reflective enjoyment – and so on.

These claims can seem high flown and they are horribly vulnerable to classroom realities, but they remain articles of faith to which most teachers of English will subscribe. They are being severely tested at the moment in the Higher Still debate.

Scottish Literature 
So also are the claims of Scottish literature, which has recently been gaining more official recognition within the curriculum. I believe that Scottish texts, generously defined, have important advantages which should recommend them for classroom use at all stages. They can give our students imaginative insights into episodes and experiences which are part of our country’s distinctive past, and may influence our present and future.

They help us all to understand what living hereabouts has meant to the folk who have gone before us; they give shape to ideas, casts of mind and ways of saying which have haunted Scots over the centuries and which are often with us still.

In practical terms some are likely to tap into the domestic and non-standard language that young children bring to school. Many will also draw upon shared experiences of teachers, students and their families or illuminate local events and places. Fascinatingly they link with our music and art, our political, social and economic history. Overall they can help us to gain a sense of our cultural identity in relation to our neighbours and other nations.

But only if we know about them.

Burns 
Assuming then that we have made positive answers to these two general questions, we turn to Burns. Why bother? Among all the competing claims what has Burns to offer schools today?

In what follows I shall be speaking mainly about Burns in the context of English/English language courses in school. It’s important, however, to urge that there ought to be a coherent pattern of Scottish contributions to other areas of the curriculum such as Environmental Studies and Expressive Arts in the primary school, and that within these the work and life of Burns has contributions to make at all stages – particularly in music and history but also in art and drama and possibly R.E.

National Poet 
What does he have to offer to the study of literature and language? Well we are still, on his bi-centenary, being told on all sides that he is our NATIONAL POET. Ian McIntyre, for example, starts the most recent major biography: ‘Scotland’s national poet was born in the same year as William Pitt, Schiller and Mary Wollstonecraft’. Virtually every reputable contemporary work of reference also offers that thought: ‘The national poet of Scotland’. But what does the phrase mean? … Scotland’s greatest poet? its most popular? the only poet most people have heard of?, the only one who can stand international comparison. You will remember the surrealist musings of Iain Crichton Smith’s Murdo upon the Muse and the mouse, with that embarrassing echo of the English teacher in it somewhere:Murdo: ‘What does the mouse do when he sees this ploughshare approaching? Well he did what was natural for a mouse in such circumstances. He ran away. Not only that, but he ran away with bickering brattle. A fine phrase in itself. Here is the mouse in the corn, as we might say, helpless and here is the great poet who has by this time written many great poems. It is not a minor poet that we have here but a major poet at the height of his powers, or pooers as I might say. What did this great poet, author of such famous poems as Death and Doctor Hornbook do? He addressed the mouse. Most great poets would not see in this tiny animal matter for speculation. But Rabbie Burns did. That is why he is our national poet. At this moment he would teach us a lesson.’

I am not sure where that definition or that lesson gets us – other than offering a terrible warning to teachers who pontificate on Burns!

Burns is obviously not our ‘national poet’ in the sense of writing the epic dealing with the national myth or story, like Vergil or Camoens. In that sense ‘the matter of Scotland’ had been treated by Barbour and Harry, as Burns acknowledged, and perhaps even by Ossian Macpherson. But he did see himself as speaking for Scotland and as being charged with a responsibility to do something for Scotia, ‘or sing a sang at least’; and many people in his own time accorded him that role, ‘Caledonia’s bard, brother Burns’.

We note also his disinterested commitment to collecting and editing ‘the poetry and music of Old Caledonia’ for Johnson and Thomson. He has a patriotic interest in Scottish history, ‘the patriot and the patriot bard’; and he sees himself in a long line of Scottish poets which include his immediate predecessors Ramsay and Fergusson.

Pivot 
Any point in history can of course be portrayed as a time of transition, but Burns writes at a pivotal time for Scotland when, as Tom Devine has already demonstrated during this conference, society was feeling the social pressures of really traumatic agricultural, industrial and cultural change. Remember Auld Glen, James Tennant of Glenconner, neighbouring farmer and close friend of the Burns family whose son ‘Wabster Charlie’ founded the great St Rollox chemical complex! Burns illustrates remarkably widely these forces in poems such as The Twa Dogs; the diptych of Love and Liberty and The Cotter’s Saturday Night: The Author’s Earnest Cry and Prayer, Address of Beelzebub, The Gallant Weaver, Why shouldna Poor Folk Mowe? and many more. His work embodies matters of history, politics, commerce, religion, sexual mores, the social classes, festivals, music, language, agriculture, the landscape, travel and other aspects of Scotland in what Smout called ‘the crucial decades of the 1780s and 1790s’. He is in fact the first of our poets to be sensitive to a reasonably broad sweep of contemporary Scottish culture and to bring to bear on it some kind of historical perspective.

Quality 
On the grounds then of his aspirations, and the scope and diversity of his materials and styles, we are justified in seeing him as a national poet, but it is the quality of work that entitles him to the rank of the national poet, and a consequent international status. Assessments of his quality and his position in the canon have swung between 19th century bardolatry and the fierce critique launched by MacDiarmid in the second ‘Burns Cult’ essay for the EIS in 1926; then partly back via the judicious, but warm reappraisals of Daiches, Crawford, McGuirk and others, many of whom, happily, are taking part in this conference. My own belief is that the present proceedings, though stopping this side of idolatry, will confirm once and for all the use of the definite article … the national poet. If we believe, as I have urged, that the schools have a duty to vivify and transmit our national literary heritage, then we must in a systematic way introduce students to Burns as the one writer at the very heart of our national culture. The rest of our literature can be shown to fall into place around him. But it should also be part of a significant body of Scottish Studies within the primary and secondary curriculum.

Qualities as a Writer 
Among the qualities of Burns’s writing which justify our attention are:

  • his humour: from high-spirited fun to fierce satire,
  • range of feelings: compassion, patriotism, indignation, melancholy, sexual excitement,
  • lyric power: sentiment to sexual (humorous and serious) 
  • dramatic presentation of character,
  • narrative skills,
  • technical agility with words, ryhythm and poetic forms,
  • control of Scots/English language resources,
  • sensitivity to literary traditions, 
  • folk song qualities, matching words and melody,
  • letter writing skills and personae.

Belatedly we need to do justice to the extraordinary diversity of his riches … in the letters and songs as well as the poems; and to take account of the great range of his appeal at different ages and stages of students. What other poet in the canon of English Literature can appeal from early primary to sixth year secondary? Chaucer? Donne? Pope? Keats? Browning? Tennyson? Yeats? … even Shakespeare?

I shall return in a moment to the important question of his use with younger children.

2. RECORD OF THE SCHOOLS

How have Scottish schools been treating Burns in the past? Drawing on my own experience of over 50 years as pupil, teacher, teacher trainer and HMI, I have to conclude that the pattern has remained remarkably constant across the years and across the country. In primary and secondary school alike Burns has seldom if ever been grossly neglected: in certain ways he keeps popping up, but on the other hand he has seldom figured in any planned fashion. A typical situation is revealed away back in 1912 in Glasgow where the Albany Burns Club minutes its thanks to the headteacher and staff of Provanside Higher Grade school:‘For the great trouble and time they devote from the ordinary curriculum in working up children for the competition.’

In other words Burns has tended to be an extra, sometimes admittedly a treat, but never fully part of the curriculum.

Within my own experiences the usual manifestations have been:In primary school:

  • telling the folk hero tale of the lad born in Kyle, learning, singing one or two songs e.g. Duncan Gray, perhaps a visit to the cottage (and new Tam o’ Shanter experience).
  • Some elements of Burns Supper … Haggis, etc., might involve singing, reciting, dramatizing …
  • working for Burns Federation award certificate.

Additionally in secondary school:

  • S1-S3: some further poems, usually around January … Tam o’ Shanter, (tho also in primary) plus perhaps To a Mouse, To a Louse, Scots wha hae, etc. Also possibly the Burns Federation competitions.
  • S4-S6 some study of more demanding poems for exam purposes, such as The Twa Dogs and Holy Willie’s Prayer, and more recently pieces in the SEB designated lists for Higher or CSYS. Perhaps Burns Supper, School Burns Club, Writers’ Club etc.

The Scottish Examination Board 
It is worth registering by the way that SEB and its predecessors have always made it reasonably rewarding in examination terms to spend some time on Burns. Before the 1960s, when specific authors and texts were mentioned in examination papers, Burns turned up in some form or other as regularly as Shakespeare. The Leaving Certificate of 1930 for example asked for a comparison of the poetry of Burns and Pope, and that of 1931 asks ‘In what kinds of poetry do you think Burns is most successful? Illustrate your answers by quotations’. Hardly stimulating tasks, but typical of the time and no worse than any of the other questions in the papers.

The crucial new step in 1994 was the specification of 13 poems to be studied by anyone who chose the Burns option for the Higher Grade examination. I do not know how popular with students this option has been, but I believe that for the first time it encourages teachers to undertake a substantial study of Burns at Higher level. I realise that the specified text question has been unacceptable to some teachers but at least it has had the advantage of making it worth while to study some key Scottish poets at length ie. so far, MacCaig, Crichton Smith and Burns. One can only hope that whatever form of assessment replaces it in Higher Still is as beneficial in this respect. Personally I doubt it.

Variations 
The effectiveness with which Burns is presented across the school stages has always of course depended on the commitment of individual teachers. In the west there have been in the past some marvellously enthusiastic Burnsian primary headteachers who have made a rich and happy experience of their Burns topics; in other instances in some secondary departments it has meant little more than an annual dusting down of George Ogilvie’s Selected Poems or one of the Burns Federation Readers or the selection in John Blackburn’s Gallery. When studying Burns’s poems closely at the senior stages, teachers have of course used a variety of teaching techniques, from class exposition to open-ended group discussion. On the whole they have handled them much as they would the work of any non-Scottish poet, the main difference being the attention given where needed to Scots language forms.

What I have just described is the kind of mix I recall as a pupil; got involved in as a teacher in Glasgow and Aberdeen; and could still be pretty sure of encountering as I inspected primary and secondary school until two years ago. It is true of course that after the professional disputes of the mid ‘80s additional voluntary activities such as Burns Suppers and Burns Federation award preparations diminished markedly, and sometimes have not recovered. Additionally when teachers are under the administrative pressures of new syllabuses and assessment arrangements they can be excused for feeling that apparent add-on luxuries such as Burns activities may be jettisoned.

Evaluation 
On balance one could argue, and I think I would, that this admittedly patchy experience of the work of Burns over the primary and secondary stages was a more rewarding treatment than many other authors have received in Scottish schools. There has been, after all, some emphasis on enjoyment, and some chance that pupils would sing or perform and join in a group activity of some kind….. even if it was only making neeps and tatties in P5 or saying The Selkirk Grace. But it is worth stressing in this bi-centennial year that our school system can and should do better by the national poet.

3. THE BURNS FEDERATION

One cannot comment fairly on the way that Burns has been taught in Scottish schools without taking into account the promotional work of the Burns Federation over many years. I make no apology for giving due credit to it in this talk but, in preface, I should plead that I have never been a member of a Burns Club and am not engaged in a PR exercise for that excellent international organisation, the Federation. My observations are those of an outsider not privy to the inner councils. Tomorrow morning Mr. Murdo Morrison its president will have his say.

It has been common in the past for critics under the influence of MacDiarmid to denigrate the activities of the Federation, and of course it is an old Scots custom to be snide about enthusiasts. No doubt some of us also have unhappy memories of being dragooned into reciting by heart ‘To A Mountain Daisy’. Nonetheless I consider that its contribution to keeping Burns alive in our schools has been quite remarkable, if inadequately recognised.

Beginnings 
It is true that when founded in 1885 as a means of bringing together Burns associations of various kinds, it did not see itself as having any educational brief. Its first aim was social, to ‘consolidate the bond of friendship among members’. A reading of the early issues of its journal, the annual Chronicle (First published 1892), shows no articles on the potential of Burns in schools. Its contributors were mainly concerned with the biography of the poet and his family, the preservation of manuscripts and memorabilia, and the erection of monuments. An important purpose was to report the activities of the ever growing number of active clubs. It was only in 1911 that its formal objects were revised to include the aim:

‘To encourage and arrange school competitions in order to stimulate the teaching of Scottish history and literature.’ (Vol XXI, 1912)

This change in the constitution merely acknowledged however a movement to stimulate school competitions which was already well under way. The first formal reference to a school competition had come in the 1902 report of the Bridgeton Club, but the practice had started in 1878, originally only for the children of members and pupils of three east end schools, Hozier Street, Parkhead, and Martyr public schools. There is even evidence of the Greenock Club, arguably the oldest in the world, organising some kind of children’s prize as early as 1806.

In 1912 the Annual meeting of the Federation (in Carlisle!) heard a first report on the subject:

‘Mr. John Neilson, Thornliebank, submitted a report on the educational work conducted by Burns Clubs among school children. Ten years ago in the West of Scotland six clubs promoted competitions on the songs and poems of Burns: now no fewer than 42 clubs were engaged in this work, which had proved educationally and socially a great success. He advocated competitions being held every second year, and advised that the help of teachers should be requested in the work. Mr. Neilson promised to give preliminary hints to any clubs beginning School Competitions. In seconding the report, Mr. John Wilson, Glasgow, thought that the competitions should not be restricted to the songs and poems of Burns, but should embrace Scottish song and poetry generally. On behalf of the Scottish Song Society he offered to give hints to popularise the songs of Scotland.’

Some of the ingredients of these early competitions remain of great interest to us today, in particular their repeated emphasis on three key components:

  • music and song
  • recitation and performance
  • community involvement

The competitions usually resulted in a prize-giving linked to an annual children’s concert which was often a sell-out in the district. Such activities can at their best bring out the elements of celebration and carnival which are at the heart of Burns’s work.

Development 
Unfortunately the varied club events lost some of their individuality between the wars, when with the best of intentions the Federation took them over centrally in cooperation with the Education Authorities and, with greatly increased numbers, added something like a national examination syllabus in Scottish Literature, with texts prescribed for the session and written papers at different levels. These were taken each January, with certificates awarded to the best pupils in each class. Alas, for some older Scots today the only memory of Burns at school is a test plucked out of the air at short notice for no strong reason and thereafter quickly forgotten.

But these were the occasions when things went wrong! Overall the Federation has done its best to keep abreast of educational developments. It introduced personal projects and an Art award, encouraging the setting up of school Burns Clubs, and with the sponsorship of an oil company introduced a very popular one-day national festival for young competitors. I understand that some 140.000 young Scots from nearly 700 schools (mainly primary) are still entering for its competition annually. Happily this is not an assessment system which I was ever called upon to inspect, but I bumped into it periodically by accident and was impressed sometimes by the enthusiasm it could generate.

Larger Issues 
To its credit the Federation has often supported the larger educational cause of Scottish literature as a means of improving the expertise of teachers. From the first it insisted that Burns had to be seen in a wider context of Scottish studies. It had a large hand in creating the chair of Scottish History and Literature at Glasgow University. Its early Vernacular Circles, notably the London circle so much derided by MacDiarmid, did a great deal to raise consciousness of Scots language issues, and the Federation was a strong early backer of the Scottish National Dictionary.

Resources 
More closely relevant to schools, it has sponsored over the years a series of very useful anthologies in which Burns is imbedded in a range of other Scots poetry, prose and drama. In 1937 the first of these collections, I am proud to say, was edited by a former Senior Chief Inspector of Schools, J.C.Smith, and a former secretary of the EIS, Thomas Henderson. A more recent version, A Scots Kist, had the backing of Douglas Gifford. Among other materials produced by enthusiasts associated with the Federation have been the delightful bairnsangs of the three Ayrshire men who disguised themselves as Sandy Thomas Ross; the folk tale and nursery rhymes collected by Norah and William Montgomerie (he died a year ago but should not be forgotten on an occasion such as this.); the simple 24 page account of Burns’s life by James Veitch, a Burns Federation Song Book edited by John McVie and the anthology for younger children, A Scots Handsel, edited by J.K.Annand. I shall say something more about a current collection Burns for Bairns in a moment.

It is fair to say also that the Federation has acted as a catalyst for the introduction of a group of Burns poems into the present Higher Grade course (which I Persist in thinking is a GOOD THING).

Value of these Efforts 
I suggest then that we should be profoundly grateful for the Federations dogged efforts since the 1890s. It may have made mistakes in stressing the competitive motive so heavily and encouraging an elocution approach to the performance of party pieces, but we have to recognize that these features have been very popular with parents and children, and may account in part for the phenomenal survival of interest over the generations. In the face often of official indifference, the Federation has tried to understand and work with the school system. At its best it has maintained a generous vision of Burns as a great writer within a wider Scottish culture. It has seen the importance of the language issue. It has produced valuable materials for use in schools, and it has never forgotten what William Soutar affirmed … that if Scottish literature and language was to come back alive ‘It would come first on a cock horse.’ This is not surprising since many of its most committed members have been Scottish teachers … whom Christopher North, speaking of Burns’s many dominie cronies, characterised as that ‘meritorious and ill-rewarded class of men’.

4. BURNS FOR YOUNGER CHILDREN

I want to say something about Burns in our primary schools … on the assumption that our other contributors today will be dealing mainly with the secondary sector. What I take from the Federation’s best efforts over the years are, as I have mentioned earlier, the value of celebration and festival and simple fun in the education of young people. Burns’s poetry calls out today, particularly in the earlier stages, for music, song and dance; for performance, dramatisation and group involvement.

Burns, as far as I know never wrote consciously for young children, though he occasionally addresses them in his poems. Some of his songs and his smaller pieces, as well as extracts from the major poems, have however the genuine whigmaleerie touch … the humour, rhythm and linguistic playfulness with an occasional disturbing frisson that children love, particularly if there is also opportunity for music.

Burns himself said of one of them:‘Duncan Gray is that kind of light-horse gallop of an air, which precludes sentiment. – The ludicrous is its ruling feature.’

This is what Edwin Morgan has called the ‘madcap, inventive, quicksilver’ side of Burns. It is the manic dimension of his work; we have also to recognize that there is a powerful depressive side as well, and that the one is the obverse of the other. For the purposes of primary education however, we should make the most of this greatly underestimated resource of sheer fun in Burns.

Likely Items 
If we are setting out to choose Burns material for primary purposes, likely items include:Up in the Morning Early, Wee Willie Gray, Hey ca thro, We’re a Noddin, O Whistle and I’ll Come to ye my Lad, Duncan Gray, To A Haggis, To a Louse, Address to the Toothache, O Willie Brew’d a Peck o’ Maut, The Deil’s Awa wi the Exciseman, On Tam the Chapman, Killiecrankie, What will I do gin my Hoggie Die?, Poor Mailie’s Elegy, The Auld Man’s Mare’s Dead, On a Schoolmaster in Cleish Parish, The Kirkudbright Grace.

Nor should we forget the wonderfully lively Scots prose tale of The Marriage of Robin Redbreast and the Wren which according to Burns’s sister Isabella he made for the amusement of the younger members of the family. As a narrative of a desperate journey it’s an early preparation for Tam!

Materials 
How at the moment does a primary teacher get a convenient selection of Burns materials? Even in the bicentenary year the answer is, ‘not easily’. The Federation’s earlier publications, notably the excellent Scots Kist and Scots Handsel, are mostly out of print. It recently revised an anthology Burns for Bairns mainly for the purpose of its recitation competitions. This is quite a comprehensive selection, and crucially does not hesitate to make extracts from longer or more adult pieces.

Extracts 
I mention extracts for primary use because, as you are well aware, in Burns what starts as fun ‘may end in Houghmagandie’ (that is after all the plot line of The Holy Fair)! I first met ‘There was a lad …’ when I was twelve, and for years I did not realise it had a final verse about ‘the bonny lassies lying aspar.’ The school edition had simply dropped it off the end. I am not advocating bowdlerising Burns, simply saying that there are some poems that are eminently accessible in parts to younger pupils, and these opportunities should not be neglected. We should not through any fear of destroying the integrity of works of art hesitate to cull what we want for our pupils.

Burns for Bairns 
Unfortunately, as the title of the recent publication, Burns for Bairns, might suggest, its touch is uncertain: it contains feeble stuff such as The Banks of Nith and The Banks of Devon, and its advice on elocution and delivery is singularly unhelpful (eg. it says of The Gallant Weaver, ‘Treat this poem with a pleasant tone and tune, giving a good final cadence to the last line’). It is a pity that an opportunity has been lost here, particularly since the project was generously sponsored by one Burns Club with the intention of putting copies into all primary schools. There is still therefore place for a well packed primary kit (or Kist!) of Burns materials including selections of prose, background historical resources, tapes of music, a topographical video etc, in other words, a specialised version of SCC’s forthcoming 5-14 Kist. It may be that something of this kind has already been produced in Ayr division. If not, it is worth doing…perhaps by the new unitary authority or the Federation or the ASLS or the Saltire Society or SCCC. If we are in future to give Burns his key place at the centre of our teaching of literature and language from primary upwards, a well produced resource of this type is essential.

5. TEACHING METHODS

The teaching methods suited to presenting Burns in the 5-14 stages are in the main no different from those for any other imaginative writer: it should be possible to accommodate him within the programme for listening, talking, reading and writing, and find also room within Expressive Arts and Environmental Studies. One or two points, however, in no particular order:

i. Fun with Words 
It is worth exploiting every chance for language fun in Burns, particularly the crossing over between Scots and English forms. I remember, many years ago, two 12 year olds who had been learning and singing Duncan Gray coming to me with a painting they had done of the poem. This showed some kind of quadruped offering a bunch of flowers to what looked anatomically vaguely like a woman:

Me: explain please. 
Them: it’s a goat. 
Me: why the flowers? 
Them: it’s in love. 
Me: What’s the point? 
Them: it’s a wooing goat. Ha, ha, the wooing goat.

ii. Gender 
Even with primary children it is worth confronting the issue of Burns’s attitude to women. The song Sic a Wife as Willie had is a typical blend of linguistic nimbleness and grotesquerie. In a sense it is great fun, but is it right to laugh at a deformed woman? What do you think of the girl’s attitude in Whistle and I’ll Come to you my Lad? Write the dialogue between Kate and Tam on his homecoming. There are many opportunities for lively work in topics such as these.

iii. Winter 
In many Primary schools the curriculum rightly retains a quite primitive seasonal cycle. Summer excursions and holidays, autumn, harvest, Halloween, Christmas, Spring and Easter are all worked in somehow to class activities. We should not then devalue the annual January recourse to Burns. There is some fitness in his being established as the poet of the Scottish winter festival. Winter was his favourite season after all, and there are many vivid pictures of it in his poetry that can be extracted and enjoyed, and even sung. For example:

The wintry west extends his blast 
And hail and rain does blaw 
Or the stormy north sends driving forth 
The blinding sleet and snaw. 
Wild-tumbling brown the burn comes down 
And roars frae brae to brae, 
and bird and beast in covert rest 
and pass the heartless day.

This is the first verse of the unpromisingly titled song Winter: a Dirge. It’s good strong visual stuff which intriguingly anticipates Hopkins’s Inversnaid. I suppose it should have been called Winter: a Rant since it goes very well to Burns’s intended tune, MacPherson’s Rant. It can stand on its own, and does not need for our purpose its two following verses of Augustan Deism. Or take the extraordinary first five stanzas of A Winter’s Night describing the snow storm and the animals sheltering. Even the murderous fox wins the farmer’s pity. This latter piece has the added fascination of Scots and English rhymes. Which pronunciation to choose? A vote on it?

iv. Drama, Music and Dance 
There are also in Burns many chances for drama, music and dance, however modest your confidence and skills may be. Pieces such as The Deil’s Awa’ and Willie Brewed a Peck o Maut’ cry out for mime and movement. The Burns Federation, has a useful popular songbook with words and music and also a glossary by David Murison. Some schools now benefit from visiting tutors in traditional music, and children who can play fiddle or chanter. Happily moreover for schools that are not so endowed, there is now a lot of good Burns folk music on tape. I understand for example that Linn Records are releasing this week the first of a series which will cover the whole corpus of Burns’ songs. I had a chance to hear from it an irresistibly rhythmic version of Wee Willie Grayby Rod Paterson and Tony Cuffe. Some though certainly not all of the items in this first CD are likely to be very suitable for primary use. The revival of enthusiasm for country dancing among young folk is also worth exploiting, for Burns himself loved the dance. (‘The plooman laddie dancin’), though it was a cause of contention with his father.

Remember Fun in The Holy Fair:

The third cam up, hap-step-an’-loup 
as licht as onie lambie 
An wi a curchie low did stoup 
As soon as e’er she saw me.

His poems are full of such references and opportunities for ‘mirth and dancing’, and his songs make use of the old dance tunes. I should add that my own first war-time experiences of country dancing in primary school were a total, embarrassing disaster. I still blush to think of them.

v. Audio-visual Media 
There has always been a temptation to present Burns visually. When I started teaching I had one 35mm film strip of Tam o Shanter and one of Chaucer’s Pilgrims; neither was strikingly successful as a visual aid. However having recently fought my way through all the fudge, perfumes, tea trays and engraved crystal, I think I would recommend for any primary teacher a class visit to Alloway. The Tam o Shanter Experience, three-screen presentation in purpose-built auditorium, introduces a very convincing Meg and a less than diabolic Old Nick. Nanny is decent, just: not too abandoned. Her reverend grannie would not have been too shocked! This little show has a nice touch of comic, slightly homely terror which I believe Burns might have appreciated. I don’t think it diminishes the poem at all. In terms of the ‘horrible and aweful’ it is certainly no match for contemporary horror videos, but I am told that many of the primary classes who have already visited it have enjoyed it thoroughly. The recently refurbished Biggin is, for adults at least, a chilling, disturbing place, effectively and simply presented, but eerily empty. In the adjacent museum the new wall displays about Burns’s story and Ayrshire life are of very good quality. All in all, I think this is, with the adjacent brig and kirk, a worthwhile additional resource for primary classes provided they prepare for their visit in advance.

6. CONCLUSION

In this talk I have stated a case for Scottish literature in our schools. I have argued that the time is ripe to place Burns’s work right at the centre of our teaching of literature and language, and within a framework of Scottish studies planned across Primary and Secondary. I have described what I think are the strengths as well as the weaknesses of our traditional handling of Burns in the schools. In so doing I have acknowledged the valuable contribution of the Burns Federation over almost a century. Finally I have offered some thoughts on approaches to Burns at the primary stages. Throughout I have dwelled on the potential for high spirits and simple ‘fun’ in Burns’s work… ‘the nearest friend ye hae’.

Copyright © Jim Alison 1997

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Jim Alison, Laverock, Robert Burns, Schools

ALISON, Jim, ‘A Passage to Treasure Islands’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 29, 2003 |


‘But there were still some nights when he would gaze out into the etherium and see the wink of Silver’s cyborg eye and hear his hearty laugh. Jim would smile softly at the memory of the old pirate who helped him find treasure — the treasure inside himself.’ 
Disney’s Treasure Planet, The Junior Novelisation
Adapted by Kiki Thorpe, Designed by Disney’s Global Design Group, Puffin Books, 2003.

In May 1999 Elaine Petrie organised for the Annual General Meeting of ASLS a one-day conference at Falkirk College on the general theme of Children’s Literature. This was a challenging new venture for the Association, which had the effect of extending the range of its interests and commitments. ASLS has always taken pride in the breadth of its involvement in literature and language, and its series of Scotnotes and Schools Conferences have been evidence of its support for English teaching. But the Falkirk meeting was the first time that it had looked closely at the issues surrounding writing for much younger readers in Scotland. Some may recall that the day’s programme combined scholarly papers, contributions from writers Julie Bertagna, Theresa Breslin, Mairi Hedderwick and Sheila Douglas; evidence from a children’s publisher; traditional story telling; a statement on policy from Jenny Brown of the Scottish Arts Council and lively parallel workshops for local primary school children. Subsequently in that autumn’s Schools Conference Maureen Farrell followed up with a helpful review of Scottish fiction for early secondary students. 

Encouraged by the success of these events, the Association’s Schools/FE committee discussed further possible developments and identified three projects, all of which have subsequently borne fruit. The first of these, a writing competition for 12–14 year olds, resulted in cooperation with the Burns Federation in annual awards which have now been presented for the third time. Our second venture, the commissioning of new writing for young readers, produced My Mum’s A Punk edited by Theresa Breslin, James McGonigal and Hamish Whyte. This was published last year by Scottish Children’s Press, along with suggested teaching activities.

Beth Dickson in her editorial in issue 28 of this Newsletter has drawn vigorously on her personal experience to reaffirm the value of imaginative reading for young people living in Scotland today. It was for reasons such as hers that we decided in 1990 to tackle as a third task a practical guide to the resources of Scottish children’s fiction. Our good intention, much debated and modified, has now finally emerged as Treasure Islands. From the first it has been a group undertaking by 9 members of the Committee. At a very early stage we agreed to concentrate on novels, short stories and traditional tales, and to aim at a particular age range. Hence the subtitle, a guide to Scottish fiction for young readers aged 10–14. The thinking behind our efforts is summarised in the Introduction to that volume. I want however to say something further about the issues that confronted us as we worked. I have to add that my own impression of our deliberations may not reflect the exact views of everyone involved. 

It did not take the committee long to conclude that a large-scale encyclopaedia such as the Oxford or Cambridge works of reference was out of the question. That was beyond our resources and would anyway have been premature since the necessary scholarly research had not, as far as we knew, been undertaken. The more we thought about it, however, the more we became convinced that there was an urgent need for some rudimentary exploration of a potential corpus of writing for young people in Scotland. We recalled Edwin Morgan’s clarion which had served as epigraph to Scottish Literature in the Secondary School, published in 1976 by the Scottish Education Department:‘There comes a time when out of respect for itself a country must collect its resources and look at its assets and shortcomings with an eye that is both sharp and warm; see what is there, what is not there, what could be there.’ (TLS, 28 July 1972).

After considering several ambitious options we settled more realistically on the idea of a collection of brief reviews of Scottish fiction, drawing on our combined personal experiences as teachers, parents and readers. We had the precedent of Morgan’s own stylish little guide to adult literature, Twentieth Century Scottish Classics (1987). Our efforts at a booklet of this type might prove to be partial in both scope and preferences. Without being arrogant however, we felt that we could at least do some ground clearing for a more authoritative treatment in the future. 

Writing also in issue 28 of ScotLit, Professor Ian Duncan from his viewpoint in California recently expressed surprise that it should be necessary to speak up for Scottish literature in contemporary Scottish schools and universities (‘The Study of Scottish Literature’). In a similar vein it is at least worth speculating why children’s literature in Scotland has not merited any evaluation as a distinctive resource. After all, most countries in the English-speaking world have such surveys. Ireland, for example, produces the Big Guide to Irish Children’s Books, (with the blessing of Mary Robinson, then President of the Republic.) The standard Oxford, Cambridge and Rough Guides are of high quality but their coverage of Scottish material is at best sporadic. One wonders why researchers have not investigated this area of cultural studies. Perhaps they have been deterred by assumptions such as the following:

  • children’s fiction is a feeble literary form not worth bothering about;
  • it is too difficult to define the criteria of Scottishness in children’s fiction; 
  • it is chauvinist, or in some way politically insensitive, to think of anything as being culturally ‘Scottish’; 
  • the texts are mostly out of print and therefore not easily accessible;
  • nothing significant is likely to be to be found.

Early in our discussions we encountered these objections and, directly or implicitly, rejected all of them. 

As the compilers began to accumulate first lists of suggested titles, and as duplicates were eliminated, we had to adopt a working definition of our material. It suited us to take a generous view of what was ‘Scottish’ since we did not want fuss about ethnic qualifications. This is the approach advocated in Teaching Scottish Literature (1997) edited by Alan MacGillivray, in which many of us had been involved. We tended to think in terms of texts rather than authors. A Scottish text was simply one that used Scottish content in story, characters or setting or was written by someone who had lived in Scotland. This definition accommodated a rich and diverse mix. To take some borderline examples, we were free to lay claim to novels as varied as The Coral Island, Emma Tupper’s Diary, Great Northern?, Greyfriars Bobby, The Herring Girls and Madame Doubtfire. Would we have been able to annex the recent Disney’s Treasure Planet — a publication fortunately not known to us at the time? This curious, easily readable ‘tie-in’ boasts a Silver with a mechanical arm and a tricky Tinkerbell-ish sprite called Morph. It offers not a single word of credit to Stevenson or Barrie. 

It is worth recording that in trawling for titles we greatly appreciated the exploratory work done by Canongate Press in the 1980s when it was publishing its Kelpie children’s classics. That series had not proved viable in the longer run, but fortunately the Floris imprint has recently been reissuing some of its more popular volumes. We were delighted also to have the enterprising list of high quality fiction for less confident readers built up by the Edinburgh imprint Barrington Stoke, about which see Anna Shipman’s article in ScotLit, issue 27. Mary S Moffat’s enthusiastic online bibliography Historical Fiction for Children yielded a valuable personal selection of Scottish texts. When we saw how our personal choices were shaping, it seemed important to give chronological depths via some early writers such as R M Ballantyne and George MacDonald. The list finally closed at a technically convenient total of 160 texts but since then we have kept discovering additional possible authors. At the moment we have some 30 further names worth exploring. Happily moreover good books continue to be published, by both established and new authors. How we follow up the project, in print or online, is still to be decided. One welcome development would be to secure feedback from young readers on what they thought of our recommendations. So far, in the hallowed tradition of dominies, we have simply assumed we know what is best. For that reason we have invited readers of all ages to e-mail their own suggestions on children’s novels to ASLS.

But what is a children’s novel? This ominous question could well have lured us off into thickets of critical theory about readership. You will recall the Matilda dilemma. In Roald Dahl’s mischievous fable that tiny tot hungrily consumes from her local library a high protein diet of classics such as The Old Man and the Sea, The Sound and the Fury, The Grapes of Wrath, Brighton Rock and Animal Farm. If a children’s novel is simply regarded as any extended fiction which young people choose to read, we might perhaps have found ourselves having to include for the benefit of 14-year-olds Ian Rankin, Alan Warner, Matthew Fitt, Denise Mina, Janice Galloway, or Val McDermid. For sure, there are adventurous youngsters who savour red meat of this kind. While our final selection welcomes Buchan, Broster and Conan Doyle as children’s authors by long adoption, we have preferred on the whole to avoid adult fiction and concentrate on the often grossly underestimated writers who have, in one way or another, signalled that they are writing mainly with young people in mind. Whereas Ballantyne, Henty and Lang addressed their readers frontally, others have operated indirectly through choice of main characters, topics, and language register. Many have spoken through a young narrator. A complication is that in several fine classic texts the identity of the intended audience remains extremely puzzling. As we have suggested in our reviews, The Wind in the Willows and Peter and Wendy are notorious examples of this uncertainty.

In drafting our own text, Treasure Islands, we were strongly tempted to cultivate a cheerful, simple, child-friendly register. We realised however that we would have difficulty in pitching our recommendations effectively across a range of ages and reading levels, and composing anything more than unconvincingly breezy blurbs. We could not afford the glossy production values that such an approach would need. The priority had to be to offer at a modest price succinct guidance to interested adults who could influence the books that young people read. 

Our intended market naturally includes teachers but we are also targeting parents, relatives, teachers, students and librarians, with the hope that interested youngsters may additionally come within range. Having had varied involvement in secondary and primary teaching, members of the group endorse the Scottish Executive’s National Guidelines on English Language 5–14 in identifying Reading for Enjoyment as valuable in its own right. On the other hand we know from experience that the private, personal pleasures of reading can be killed dead by over-zealous instruction. We are aware also that the writers themselves often like classroom contacts, but can be deeply ambivalent about the ways that schools exploit their books as instruments of of the language curriculum. Indeed one of our chosen texts, Alison Prince’s The Sherwood Heroillustrates the predicament of pupils in a Glasgow comprehensive who get caught up with a children’s writer in a well-intentioned fiction project. We have therefore tried to strike a balance: Treasure Islands is designed to be helpful to teachers in training, and to their more experienced colleagues; but at the same time we do not see the volume as primarily a manual for English teaching professionals. Our hope is that it will interest any one who wants to find good books for young people. We have offered guidance on levels of difficulty, age range and interest, but deliberately have made no recommendations about whether titles may be more or less suited to boys or girls (there are 48 women writers and 46 men in our selection).

When we went to press in June 2003, 58 of our 160 titles were unfortunately out of print. Possibly some others have fallen off since then and a few may even have been reissued, such being the chronic condition of children’s publishing. You could argue that there was little point in our reviewing texts which were not going to be readily available to young readers. In this pioneering venture however we felt obliged to establish what could be brought back and kept in print given a little encouragement and rather more financial support. One of our aims has been to help publishers, booksellers and the media to take a greater interest in promoting Scottish texts. It is an irony of the undertaking that although our reviews run to only some 200–250 words they are probably the fullest critical attention that many of the chosen texts have ever received. 

Agreeing on an apt title for a new book can be a frustrating yet entertaining business. The guide’s provisional name had been a boldly assertive 100 Best Books until we found that our reviews exceeded this total, and that the Booktrust organisation based in London already published an annual survey with the same title. (As it happens, only two of the hundred titles reviewed in its 2002 issue could be considered Scottish even by by our generous definition.) We then played around with the phrase No Bad Books which attracted us by reason of its pun, containing both Scottish understatement and the implication that any text that attracts young readers must have some virtue. In our more pessimistic moments we might even have called our assembled wisdom The Hoose o Haivers, but our friends at Itchy Coo had got there first with their delightful Scots versions of Ovid. In the end however we borrowed Treasure Islands from a long-lost book programme on BBC Radio 4. We liked its iconic associations and saw its potential for a graphic cover. 

In embarking on the voyage to Treasure Islands our article of faith was that there did exist out there an appreciable territory of good fiction which could be annexed as distinctively Scottish and was worth colonising for young readers. A substantial claim for Scottish texts in schools had already been staked out in Teaching Scottish Literature (1997): 

‘They can give our students unique imaginative insights into episodes and experiences which are part of our country’s distinctive past, and may influence our present and future. They help us to understand what living hereabouts has meant to the folk who have gone before us; they give shape to casts of mind and ways of saying which have haunted Scots over the centuries and which are often with us still. In practical terms some are likely to tap into the domestic and non-standard language that young children bring to school. Many will also draw upon accessible shared experiences of teachers, students and their families or illuminate local events and places. Fascinatingly they link with our music and art, and our political, social and economic history. Overall they can help us gain a sense of our cultural identity in relation to our neighbours and other nations.’

Looking back, we are confident that our volume amply confirms that claim. Within the topic groupings in its admittedly subjective Keywords index there are titles which transmute into fiction aspects of life in Glasgow, Edinburgh, Skye and the Borders; social phenomena such as the treatment of outsiders and the poor; the experiences of girls and women; school life; growing up in Scottish communities; the impact of political strife and wars historic and recent; emigrations and displacement; historical episodes such as the persecution of witches; the Reformation and Jacobitism; fabled monsters and real animals, and many more. In the end however what really counts for readers, old as well as young ,is not so much the facts of the topics themselves as the author’s creative act of fictionalizing them, making them compelling and memorable stories. We believe that the new ASLS guide charts a rich archipelago of memorable Scottish fiction … even under the name of Junior Novelisations:

‘I remember him as if it were yesterday, as he came plodding to the inn door …’ 

Copyright © Jim Alison 2003

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Edwin Morgan, Jim Alison, Schools, Treasure Islands

BATEMAN, Meg, ‘Gaelic Poetry for English Classes’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 3, 1997
(The text of a paper given to the ASLS Schools Conference in 1994)


I have been kindly asked to speak at this conference to make the suggestion that you might include some modern Gaelic poetry in translation in the work you do with your English classes. In my talk I hope to let you decide if this would be a good idea by talking about the poets involved, the books where their work is to be found, and the perspectives from which their work might be usefully studied.

Before I start on such practicalities I should take a moment to address the question of why teach Gaelic poetry in translation at all. A purist could argue that translation makes a nonsense of poetry and in some sense that is undoubtedly correct. A defence might be made on the grounds that poetry is in any case a translation – a translation from feeling to words, from a private insight to a parallel, hopefully communicable, experience. If this partially defends the teaching of translated poetry, I will continue with defending the teaching of Gaelic poetry, though perhaps to this audience no defence is necessary.

I would make such a defence on three grounds, the most important of which must be that there is some very good Gaelic poetry. At school level there is no point looking at inferior poetry simply because it’s there as we do when we want to get a picture of the whole or are in search of the sociological factors made evident in a poem. To inspire young people in the enjoyment of poetry only the “best” should be searched out, and I believe some of “the best” can be found in Gaelic.

The second argument is compatible with the notions of a child-centred curriculum. Gaelic, as one of the cultures constituting this nation, is bound to impinge at some level on all of the population. Any exposure bringing understanding and respect between the cultures can only be a good thing. I would be pleased to see a speaker on this platform next year representing translated poetry from other cultures in Scotland – translated for example from Urdu, Punjabi.

A rather more political point is that after centuries of the active destruction of the Gaelic language and culture by the school system, there is now a chance to make good a wrong. I would not want to make this claim on political grounds alone, if there were any question of pupils having to suffer for the sins of their fathers. But there is good material … 

I’ll turn now to the practicalities of books. For the purposes of this lecture I would recommend firstly an anthology, Nua-bhardachd Ghaidhlig; Modern Scottish Gaelic Poetry, edited by Donald MacAulay. It was first published in 1976 and is due to come out again next month, November 1994. I feel it is a book where virtually every poem works. That may be too subjective a remark to be useful. The book as a whole has a certain homogeneity about it; it comes from a distinct time and a distinct place, with distinct perspectives on the world. All of the five contributors are Highlanders, born between 1911 and 1930, all are men and university-educated. They all share some of the following characteristics: an anti-clericalism which demands as fundamental the individual’s – and not the community’s – values; a sense of outrage at the history of the Highlands and Islands and the country’s indifference to the language and culture; a sense of tension between the security of belonging to a small rural community, at the price of being required to conform, and the freedom, in particular, the intellectual freedom, of city life, at the price of an anonymity which slips so easily into existential dread. This hurt is made clear in the lines of Derick Thomson:

The heart tied to a tethering post, round upon round of the rope, till it grows short, 
and the mind free. 
I bought its freedom dearly. 
                      (Water and Peat and Oats)

The most important characteristic uniting the poets is the passion and honesty of their probing which accepts no easy answers. When their poetry was first published this was particularly refreshing as for over a century new Gaelic poetry had consisted mostly of sentimental evocations of a past that never was. It was as if Gaelic poetry couldn’t, or wouldn’t, look Gaelic society in the eye. There was of course good reason for this: with the upheaval of Clearance and emigration too much had been shaken for the old models to stand; likewise the present was often too gloomy to be the subject of the songs that emigre Gaels gathering socially in the cities would want to hear. It is no wonder if their preference was not for reality, but for a few hours of escapism that could hold them together before their return to the wheels of British Industry. 

I will return to discussing each of the five poets individually in a moment, but first I would like to mention another anthology of younger Gaelic poets, An Aghaidh na Siorraidheachd/ In the Face of Eternity, edited by Christopher Whyte and published by Polygon, that came out in 1991. Poems are not written to an agenda, but we inevitably teach to one. Therefore it is important we realise the limitations (this is in no way a criticism, but a statement of fact) of the first anthology which are partially righted by the second. Four of the eight poets in the second anthology are women, three are conventionally religious, three are Gaelic learners, one is gay, and all of them reflect the world thirty or forty years later on. If my talk were addressed to teachers of Gaelic rather than English I would speak much longer about this second anthology, because I think it is important that young people from a Gaelic background do not think (as they might gather from the first book) that you have to be male and reject established religion to be a “thinker”. For Gaelic speakers, the second volume is interesting precisely because it does not have an exclusively island perspective. The language rather than the subject-matter defines it as Gaelic in what I believe is a healthy expansion of domain. But for English classes, it is because In the Face of Eternity is not so obviously a window on a different culture that I want now to return to the “Famous Five” of the first anthology, MacAulay’s Modern Scottish Gaelic Poetry.

The oldest poet amongst these, and indeed the inspiration of much of what followed, is Sorley Maclean (b.1911). Most of his poems were written in his late twenties and were a sort of enquiry into the conflicting demands of love, political idealism and self-preservation. The scenario which generated many of the poems was as follows: MacLean was a young man in love. This experience inspired in him new levels of commitment to humanity, which at that time meant fighting fascism in Spain. The contemplation of such heroic action also entailed the contemplation of death, and hence an end to love, but his fear of death also deprived him of the self-worth necessary to pursue love. I think many young people can relate to this sort of perfectionism. His poetry can also be used to discuss questions of social justice, in particular the Clearances (see the poem Hallaig) and to show symbolism at work with his use of the dramatic landscape of Skye. 

I expect the most ‘teachable’ of the poets in the anthology is Derick Thomson. He has a number of highly-crafted poems where some features of the old way of life in the islands (a hand-made coffin, a well,etc) becomes a metaphor for change. These illustrate very clearly how the interweaving of the concrete and extended resonances make for a poem in which the overall effect is far greater than the sum of the parts. They are also the poems in the anthology which most poignantly grieve for the past.

The poetry of Iain Crichton Smith well illustrates the use of highly-coloured, if not surreal, language and imagery. These generally serve in making a plea for a fuller way of living, without the cramping of society’s ideologies (a frustration known to every adolescent). The poetry of Donald MacAulay makes much the same plea, and asks that people be given the respect to live by their individual yardsticks. He shows a suspicion of group behaviour and easy answers, and is critical of the sort of censorship practised by the very communities which Derick Thomson regards with such nostalgia.

George Campbell Hay stands out from the other poets in the anthology as being a poet of celebration, using beautiful language to evoke beautiful scenery. His anti-war poems too come from the same premise that life is beautiful and war a most unnatural evil.

I hope I have shown that this anthology could be a rich source of poems in the upper school and that I have given an idea of some possible approaches, both thematic and formal. The book itself has a detailed introduction and citations of other publications should a deeper study of an individual poet be required.

I would like to end with mention of a poem by the youngest poet in the second anthology, In the Face of Eternity. She is Anne Frater (b.Lewis,1967) and the poem is called ‘At the Fank’. In detail, she describes herself watching with a group of neighbours busy with sheep-dipping. At first she is reluctant to join in, feeling slightly cold and the job being messy. Gradually she is ‘moved to usefulness’ until at the final point of involvement and warmth she finds herself speaking ‘with her own language on her tongue’. I leave you here with this typically island scene depicted by a young woman who recognises language as the ultimate source of her identity.

Aig an Fhaing

Nam sheasamh thall aig geat a’ phreiridh,
feur glan fom bhotannan,
lamhan fuar nam phocaidean,
faileadh an dup
gu fann
gu neo-chinnteach
a’ nochdadh mu mo chuinnlean
’s mi a’ coimhead cach cruinn
lachanaich le cheile
timcheall air an fhaing:
a’ bruthadh nan caorach,
guthan ard ag eigheachd
’s a’ gearain, ’s a’ gaireachdainn
’s gach druim thugams’
gam ghlasadh a-mach.
Mi seasamh, ’s a’ coimhead
’s a’ feitheamh airson facal
mo ghluasad gu feum.
Mi siubhal gu slaodach
a’ cruinneachadh nan uan
’s gan ruagadh romham
a-steach gu cach;
uain a’ ruith
gu meulaich math’r.
Boinneagan uisge
mar mhillean mialan
a’ leum as an dup,
agus crathadh cinn nan adharcan
fliuch, fuar, feagalach
a’ deanamh as.
Ceum no dha eile
’s chi mi aodannan nan gair’.
Mo lamhan fhin a’ breith air cloimh,
faileadh an dup air mo chorragan,
peant a’ camharradh mo chasan, 
poll dubh bog air mo bhotannan 
’s mo chanan fhin nam bheul.

At the Fank

Standing over by the prairie gate
with clean grass under my wellies, 
cold hands in my pockets, 
the smell of the sheep dip 
faintly
hesitantly
coming to my nostrils
as I watch the others gathered
around the fank
and laughing with each other:
pushing the sheep,
loud voices shouting
and moaning, and laughing
and all with their backs to me 
shutting me out.
I stand and watch
and wait for a word
to move me to usefulness.
Moving slowly
gathering the lambs
and driving them before me
in towards the others;
lambs running
to a mother’s bleat.
Drops of water
jump from the sheep dip
like millions of fleas
and the horns’ head-shaking,
wet, cold, fearful
running off.
Another step or two
and I can see the laughing faces.
My own hands holding wool,
the smell of sheep dip on my fingers.
Paint marking my legs, 
soft black mud on my wellies
and my own language on my tongue.

Anne Frater.


Recommended Texts

  • Nua-Bhardachd Ghaidhlig / Modern Scottish Gaelic Poems ed. Donald Macaulay pub. Canongate.
  • An Aghaidh na Siorraidheachd / In The Face of Eternity ed. Christopher Whyte pub. Polygon.

Copyright © Meg Bateman 1994.

Aig an Fhaing / At the Fank copyright © Anne Frater.
First published in Gairm magazine, and reprinted here with kind permission of the author.

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Derick Thomson, Gaelic, Iain Crichton Smith, Meg Bateman, Schools, Sorley Maclean

CORBETT, John, ‘Scots: Practical Approaches’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 25, Autumn 2001 |


Advanced Higher Specifications

The new Higher Still and Advanced Higher examinations in English promise (or threaten, depending on your point of view) a ‘greater range and intensity’ of work on both language in general and Scots in particular. For example, the Advanced Higher support notes suggest that:

Students will engage in a variety of language activities e.g.:

  • analysing and describing textual materials and discourses, both historical and contemporary
  • consulting reference materials, including dictionaries, glossaries and thesauruses of Scots
  • applying linguistic concepts, terminology and techniques to the description of Scottish language
  • acquiring knowledge of the sound system (phonetics), the forms (syntax and morphology) and the vocubulary (lexis and semantics) of Scots
  • collecting and analysing linguistic materials gathered in fieldwork

Literature as such is not mentioned, except possibly in the indirect reference to ‘textual materials and discourses’, but the specifications elsewhere mention journalism or ‘a soap opera set in Scotland’ as being more likely to provide raw data for linguistic analysis. Understandably, perhaps, in the creation of a new unit in Scottish Language, the designers have wanted to put some clear blue water between language study and literary study, literary study being understood here in its traditional sense of exploring aspects of the self and society through imaginative writings. Language and literature have not always been happy bedfellows: enthusiasts for literature often feel that the sometimes clinical precision demanded by language study kills any life in a poem, or novel or play. This attitude is perhaps best summed up in Tom Leonard’s poem, which begins:

would thi prisoner
in thi bar
please stand

fur thi aforesaid crime
uv writn anuthir poem
awarded the certificate of safety
by thi scottish education department

fit tay be used in schools
huvn no bad language
sex subversion or antireligion

I hereby sentence you
tay six munths hard labour
doon nthi poetry section
uv yir local library
coontn thi fuckin metaphors

So there is a sense then, that a turn towards language in literary studies, if you like, signals the death of the creative impulse; just as there is in language study the vague sense that the intrusion of literary texts will signal the end of scientific rigor. I’ve always felt that the polarisation of views is a pity, though it is sometimes understandable. Unless you are careful – and unless precise description can be wedded to interpretation – the linguistic study of a literary text can become a mechanical exercise. But equally, given that for the past 400 years most written Scots has been literary, it seems a shame to neglect this rich resource for the study of how language works. This talk, then, is an attempt to show how an exploration of the language of literature in Scots can both illuminate the given literary texts, and reveal insights into how communication – language – works more generally. We’ll be looking at activities at different levels of language: sounds and spellings, words, grammar and discourse. The activities are such as could be used in the 14+ age range, though some are more demanding than others.

Sounds and Spellings

Some people might argue that the first example is not a literary text at all. It’s an excerpt from an old Scotland the What? sketch in which a toy-shop owner from Ballater phones up the late Princess of Wales to ask her what kind of Christmas present she’d like for her then new-born son, William. I’ve used this sketch for a number of years with second-year students at Glasgow University and also with teachers of English in Poland, where it went down very well:

A. From Scotland the What?, by Buff Hardie, Stephen Robertson and George Donald (Gordon Wright, 1987)

In this comic monologue from 1982, the owner of a toy shop in Ballater, near Aberdeen telephones the Princess of Wales to ask what her son would like for Christmas.

Noo, fit wid he like for his Christmas, the loon? Fit aboot a pair o’ fitba beets? Beets. Beets. B-O-O-T-S, beets. Weel, I ken that, but he’ll surely grow intae them. Weel I’ll tell ye fit I’ve got. It’s something very suitable. It’s oor ain special line in soft toys, and it is a cuddly futret. A futret. Div ye nae ken fit a futret is? Futret. F-E-R-R-E-T, futret. Now, cuddly futrets is exclusive tae the Toy Shop, Ballater. We get them specially made up by a wee wifie, in Hong Kong. Oh, an’ fit a job I hid explainin’ tae her fit a futret is. Ye wid like a futret? Oh we’ll fairly manage ye a futret. Noo fit size o’ a futret wid ye like? We’ve got a dinkie futret, a mini futret, a life-size futret, a jumbo futret or a mega-futret. Ye’d like a jumbo futret? No, it disnae hae a trunk. No, it’s got a string that ye pull, an’ it sings Run, Rabbit, Run. Weel, fit else div ye expect a futret tae sing? Now is there onythin’ else the loon wid like? Fit aboot a rubber duke…for his bath? A duke. No, no, nae that kinda Duke. D-U-C-K, duke. A quack quack duke. Like Donald Duke. Donald Duke. He’s a freen’ o’ Mickey Moose…Moose…M-O-U-S-E, Moose! God, div ye nae understan’ English, lassie?

This extract is interesting for a number of reasons. First of all, obviously, it illustrates some of the stereotypical features of NE Scots: the /f/ phoneme in ‘fit’, the /i/ in ‘beets’ and the /dj/ in ‘duke’, as in ‘Donald Duke’. Other features (such as the /u/ in ‘moose’ are shared with most other varieties of Scots. One obvious way of approaching this text would be to ask what characteristics are true of the pupils’ own variety of Scots, and what characteristics are not. 

More interesting, though, are the relationships between (i) the sound and the spellings in the text, and (ii) the speaker and the listener. When asked to spell the unrecognised words, the toy-shop owner does so: ‘D-U-C-K, duke’ and ‘M-O-U-S-E, moose’, and at last in exasperation, he exclaims, ‘God, div ye nae understan’ English, lassie?’ The sketch wittily raises key issues about the status and perception of Scots: the toy-shop owner has access to two different linguistic systems, spoken Scots and written standard English, but rather naively he equates them. For him, ‘B-O-O-T-S’ spells ‘beets’. In one sense there is no reason why ‘beets’ shouldn’t be spelled like this: spelling is an arbitrary system for representing sound – and English is notoriously arbitrary in the way it represents sounds. The toy-shop owner’s naivety lies in the fact that he thinks everyone speaks and writes ‘English’ like him. He’s unaware that while he and the Princess share a common written standard, their speech characteristics are markedly different. This is a key element in the comedy of the sketch – the fact that the toy-shop owner does not recognise that he and the Princess come from markedly different social and geographical backgrounds, and so he does not modify or accommodate his speech to bridge that social and geographical divide. He talks to the Princess as if she were a local wifie and cannot comprehend where her difficulties are coming from.

Many Scots texts have the advantage of being more or less explicitly about language. This is one. Practically it can be used to explore the following issues:

  1. What are the sounds that characterise this variety of Scots?
  2. What is the relationship between sounds and spellings? How are the sounds represented in writing?
  3. What is the social relationship between the speakers? How (if at all) does the language of each speaker attempt to bridge any social/geographical divide between them?

A creative way of using this kind of text is to attempt to write a pastiche or parody of it. Who for today’s pupils would represent someone from their own place and class, and which famous person would definitely not belong to their community? You could ask the pupils to invent their own sketch, using their own language variety, based on a phone call between, say, a Hollywood actress and a local chemist, who thinks she might be interested in a new kind of anti-dandruff shampoo. The activity can then explore which phonological features and vocubulary items characterise the pupils’ local speech variety, and would be opaque to someone from outside that community. It also raises issues of how these essentially spoken characteristics are written down. 

Words

From sounds and spellings I want to move now to words. The vocabulary of Scots is probably the biggest obstacle to its reception by readers in general, and teachers and pupils in particular. The sad fact is that much Scots vocabulary is no longer known, by most teachers and pupils, and that the close study of most texts in dense Scots will rather tediously demand frequent recourse to a glossary or dictionary. This obstacle is compounded by the fact that even familiar words often appear in unfamiliar spellings: the reaction of many people to Scots texts, as William McIlvanney recently observed, is the same as if they were written in Linear B script.

These barriers are there, they’re real, and they have to be tackled if you are going to make an earnest attempt to deal with Scots in all its complexities. Ways have to be found of introducing the vocabulary in interesting ways, and even of making the consultation of dictionaries and thesauruses (demanded by the Advanced Higher guidelines) an interesting and even stimulating activity. Strategies can be adopted from language teaching – EFL has over the past decade rediscovered the importance of teaching vocabulary in a rich and stimulating fashion. There is no shame in treating Scots as a foreign language if that is what much of it effectively is. Since vocabulary is such a big issue I’d like to focus on two simple strategies for making its study a bit more interactive.

The first strategy, adopted from EFL, is to use a ‘word rose’. You take a sample of words and phrases from the text, put them on the board in roughly the shape of a rose, and ask the pupils to check their meaning, and to predict what they think the poem is about. Try it and see what you come up with:

                    plook 
     birslin                    bumbee 
  playschule sun               pus  
 fremmit                           dog’s braith 
   clort                     public laavies 
       tholed                incubus 
   coordy custard         skyrie 
                    semmit

‘Birslin’ might not be generally known: it means something like ‘scorching’, or ‘crackling with heat’. ‘Skyrie’ means ‘bright’ or ‘garish’, ‘fremmit’ means ‘strange’ or ‘foreign’.

The vocabulary activity here is directed at pupils coming up with their own predictions of what the poem is about. Therefore, by the time they read or hear the poem, they have familiarised themselves with some of the vocabulary and invested some time and energy in making sense of it. In other words, they’ll have a reason for listening to or reading the poem and making sense of it too – if only in order to compare it with their predictions.

Yalla 
Sheena Blackhall

Yalla’s a playschule sun on a bairn’s pictur 
A budgie’s poop o a colour 
Skyrie’s a fried egg. 
A meenister wadna gie it a secunt luik. 
It’s the margarine clort we butter on public laavies 
Ye see it, shakkin a leg on a dandy dyeuk.

Splytered ben Daft Hoose waas 
It’s common as muck. 
Tae be tholed in teenie doses 
Like a flu injection, mebbe. 
It’s the coordy-custard Bully-Boy Big-Buck 
Stripe, on a wasp’s semmit 
Birslin as mustard, fand in a fremmit 
Vase o Van Gogh flooers. 
It’s a hoor’s peroxide hair 
An ahin-the-Gas Works colour 
O Chastity laid doon wi its bumbee bare.

Excitin’s a burst plook, 
It’s an explosion of pus 
An incubus o a tint 
That fell aff the back o a barra 
A dog’s braith colour, yon’s yalla.

A ‘word rose’ can get you into a poem and help make it more immediately comprehensible. Once there, you can do other lexical activities: one is to make a ‘mini-thesaurus’ of the lexical items in the text and see where that leads you. Here, you might group ‘Daft Hoose, flu injection, burst plook, pus’ in a semantic field of sickness and insanity, and ‘budgie’s poop, public laavies’ with bodily waste, and ‘fried egg, margarine, butter, mustard’ rather disconcertingly joining them as foodstuffs. The poem, ostensibly about the colour yellow, seems to associate it with feeding and excrescence, illness and moral corruption (‘meenister, hoor, Chastity laid doon’). Playing around with the vocabulary, trying to predict contexts and make semantic links between items, all go beyond the mechanical activity of ‘looking things up in a dictionary.’ It also helps bring the language alive.

In my book Language and Scottish Literature I suggest doing this with a poem quite deliberately chosen as an example of very dense Scots, Kate Armstrong’s ‘This is the laund’. 

This is the laund that bigs the winds; winds big the cloods; 
the cloods, the weit, the weit, the grun; an antrin steer 
o syle an rain. Thon frimple-frample watter rowin 
frae Kenmore tae Dundee is cried the River Tay. 
It’s no the Tay ava. The get o aa the oceans 
fae Mexico tae Greenlaun, gift o a cloodit warld 
an we wid awn it, screive it. Siccar the wather-man 
ettlin tae shaw the springheid, warstles wi his isobars 
an seeks tae trammel fer ae day the fricht o kennin 
the yird’s sclenter. Tae whitna maitter scarts atween these banks 
on loan a whilie, we sall gie particlar name. But gif 
the medium be the message, raither mind hoo thocht 
or scoukin haar kenna the immigration laws. 
Frae muckle warld tae muckle warld, bairnie tae mither, 
spicket tae seiver, onding tae quernstane, 
sae Scotland’s fowk, skailt frae ae clood or ither 
intil a sheuch descrives them as her ain; 
sae ilka braith an ilka tear ye share, an antrin steer 
o rain an syle, a thocht baith gied an taen.

It is an admittedly difficult poem to get into. The suggestion I make in the book is to compare the vocabulary in the poem with that of a nightly weatehr forecast on BBC Scotland or Scottish Television. If you do that, then you find that the vocabulary of the forecasts fall into a fairly narrow set of semantic fields: meteorological events, (wind, rain, fog) and processes (rising or falling temperatures, freshening winds, etc). One thing which strikes us about the poem is that there is a greater variety of semantic fields than are found in the weather forecasts. Some are detailed below: 

Rain, wind, cloud 
laund (1) 
winds (1,1) 
cloods (1,2, 16), cloodit (6) 
rain (3, 19) 
haar (13) 
onding (15)

Geography & Topography 
grun (2) 
Greenlaun (6) 
syle (3, 19) 
warld (6, 14, 14) 
watter (3) 
yird [?] (10) 
River Tay (4) 
sclenter [?] (10) 
the Tay (5) 
maitter (10) 
oceans (5) 
banks (10)

Confused/violent activity 
steer (2, 17) 
rowin [?] (2) 
frimple-frample (3) 
warstles (8) 
trammel (9) 
sclenter [?] (10) 
scarts (10) 
skailt (16)

Offspring 
get (5) 
bairnie (14) 
mither (14)

Possession 
gift (6) 
awn (7) 
on loan (11) 
her ain (17) 
share (18) 
gied (19) 
taen (19)

Communication 
screive (7) 
shaw (8) 
gie … name (11) 
medium (12) 
message (12) 
descrives (17)

People (see also Offspring) 
wather-man (7) 
Scotland’s fowk (16)

Seasons 
springheid (8)

Meteorology 
isobars (8)

Mental state 
fricht (9) 
kennin (9) 
mind (12) 
thocht (12, 19) 
kenna (13)

Physical activity 
braith (18) 
tear (18)

Legislation 
immigration laws (13)

Channels for water (man-made) 
spicket (15) 
seiver (15)

The classification of the lexical items into sets here is more thorough than that attempted for the weather forecast – partly because the communicative purpose of a poem is harder to pin down. Parts of a weather forecast can be neglected if they are irrelevant to the needs of the viewer (who might be interested in a particular area, and who might or might not be interested in gardening, or skiing, for example). But if poetry is written and communicated for its own sake, then none of the lexical sets, large and small, noted above, can be considered inessential.

The poem shares with the weather forecasts some areas of vocabulary: Rain, wind, cloud and Geography, for example. However, other areas of meaning are prominent in the poem, notably words for Confused activity, and – perhaps less obvious when we actually read the poem – words in the lexical sets of Possession and Communication. Collecting the lexical items into sets such as these can help display prominent themes in a text, and the sets can support arguments about the interpretation of the poem: we can say, for example, that the poem is about the great natural cycle: the global transformations of earth to air to water to earth (a cycle echoed by that of mother to child). People (here ‘Scotland’s fowk’, typified by the ‘wather-man’) try to possess this terrifying process by naming it: ‘awn’ is yoked to ‘screive’ as if one is a paraphrase of the other. However, the poem’s speaker asks us to remember that natural cycles, like thought itself, cannot be pinned down by the labels and limits of humankind, and that, despite our claims of ownership, we are equally part of the great natural cycle.

This kind of activity demands the use of good Scots dictionaries, and if possible the Scots Thesaurus, which is a fascinating reference book. But again, we are not encouraged simply to look things up – the dictionary and thesaurus activities are subordinated to the making sense of a lexically dense text, but one, I would suggest, that rewards the effort.

Grammar

From words I want to turn now to grammar. Teaching first-year students grammar at Glasgow University I’m frequently struck by how… innocent of formal grammatical knowledge many are when they arrive. I hope that with the new Higher examinations that innocence will gradually disappear. It’s difficult teaching grammar in an interesting way, and I can’t claim to have found a way of doing that yet, especially when you’ve got 10 short weeks and a class of 400. With smaller groups and more time, I’d be less inclined to go for the brutalism of ‘this is the lecture on the preposition phrase’ and more inclined to go with the concept of grammar as choice. We have choices in the way we combine words – grammar looks at these choices and considers the different meanings that result from those choices. To talk precisely about these choices, true, you need to know how words combine to form phrases, and how phrases function as constituents of clauses (ie as Subject, Verb, Object, Complement, Adverbial). 

The importance of grammatical choices becomes clear when you have been doing what I’ve been doing most recently, and that is looking at the history of translation into Scots. I’m probably prejudiced if not obsessive about this now, but it seems clear to me that translation stands as one of the main pillars of the Scots literary tradition: from the earliest times it has fed, inspired and internationalised our literary activity. It’s extended the language we use and extended the types of literary genre we can use it in. In terms of grammar, however, interesting things happen when two or more people translate the same text, as happens for example with the Old English elegy, The Seafarer, translated into Scots by Tom Scott and Alexander Scott, and into English by Edwin Morgan (and a whole host of others, including a significantly strange version by Ezra Pound). Different translators make different choices about how they will render the source text, and these choices are particularly interesting when the source text is a West Saxon dialect, one of the ancestors of Present-Day English, and cognate to the ancestor of Present-Day Scots. The Seafarer is a tenth-century elegy, a lament by the eponymous sailor about his harsh life, that ends in Christian hope and the prospect of a final voyage, possibly to and beyond death. This is how the two Scots versions begin:

Alexander Scott, ‘Seaman’s Sang’ 

Anent mysel I’ll tell ye truly: 
hou, stravaigin the sea in trauchlesome days, 
aye tholan the dunts o time, 
I’ve borne strang stounds in my breist, 
kennan my ship the hame o monie cares.

Tom Scott, ‘The Seavaiger’ 

A suthfast sang I can sing o my life, 
Vaunt o vaigins, hou I vexious tyauvin 
In days o sair darg hae dreeit aften. 
Bitter the breist pangs I hae abydit, 
Kent abuin keels care trauchlit wonnins…

Now the basic sentence structure of English and Scots today is SVO (Subject followed by Verb followed by Object). Adverbials (ie adverbs and prepositional phrases) give extra information and they are quite mobile – they can come at the beginning or end of sentences, though seldom between Verb and Object (they can interrupt Verb and Object in other languages, which is why ‘I am meeting in the morning Richard’ is something, let’s say, a Spanish speaker might utter, but you wouldn’t normally hear it from an English-speaker). There are historical reasons for the SVO pattern in Present-Day English and Scots. When The Seafarer was written, word-order was actually more flexible because the endings of the words told the listener or reader what function the phrase was playing, whereas today these endings have been lost so we rely much more on the position in the sentence to signal the clause function. One of these two translations systematically inverts expected clause patterns: which is it?

Alexander Scott, ‘Seaman’s Sang’

A [Anent mysel] S [I] V [’ll tell] O [ye] A [truly]: 
A [hou, stravaigin the sea in trauchlesome days], 
A [aye tholan the dunts o time], 
S[I] V [’ve borne] O [strang stounds] A [in my breist], 
A [kennan my ship the hame o monie cares].

Tom Scott, ‘The Seavaiger’

O [A suthfast sang] S [I] V [can sing] A [ o my life], 
V [Vaunt] A [o vaigins], A [hou S [I] O [vexious tyauvin] 
A [In days o sair darg] V [hae dreeit] A [aften]. 
C [Bitter] O [the breist pangs] S [I] V [hae abydit], 
V [Kent] A [abuin keels] O [care trauchlit wonnins]

The Tom Scott version is grammatically much more tortuous than the Alex Scott version. If you take the Adverbials away, you basically have two SVO patterns in Alex Scott’s version, while you have OSV, SOV, and COSV patterns in Tom Scott’s version. The last line has one of those ‘Spanish’ intrusions of an Adverbial into a VO sequence. Obviously, faced with the same source material, the two translators made very different grammatical choices. Why?

Briefly, I’ve argued elsewhere that Alex Scott’s translation is intended to be much more fluent – he keeps to expected grammatical patterns because he wants to have a ‘normal’ speaking voice that seems ‘natural’ or ‘conversational’ to the reader or listener. This is a translation that hides the fact that it is a translation. Alex Scott plays down the poetic qualities of the original, subduing the alliteration and choosing vocabulary that is fairly accessible.

Tom Scott disrupts grammatical expectations, employs at times thumping alliteration, and chooses more obscure vocabulary. This is a translation that draws attention to itself, is self-consciously literary, and tries in a way to reconstruct the strangeness of the source text, by way of its archaic grammar as much as its arcane vocabulary.

Interesting comparison can be made with two English translations. Edwin Morgan adopts a more or less, conversational tone, much like Alexander Scott’s:

This verse is my voice, it is no fable, 
I tell of my travelling, how in hardship 
I have often suffered laborious days, 
endured in my breast the bitterest cares, 
explored on shipboard sorrow’s abodes, 
the welter and the terror of the waves.

Ezra Pound’s notorious and celebrated translation, however, pushes further the alienating strategies of Tom Scott:

May I for my own self song’s truth reckon, 
Journey’s jargon, how I in harsh days 
Hardship endured oft. 
Bitter breast cares have I abided, 
Known on my keel many a care’s hold, 
And dire sea surge.

Again the grammatical deviations from the SVO norm make this text more self-consciously poetic, much more visible than the fluent translations of Morgan and Scott. Different grammatical choices have different effects. If these effects are to be articulated, the grammatical characteristics of the poems have to be described, precisely and accurately, and pupils have to have the tools to do this. But it’s not necessarily a mechanical operation – at best, if grammatical description can be linked to interpretation, it can be creative and expressive.

You can’t always find a set of translations like this to demonstrate to your pupils, though translations into Scots are so numerous that it shouldn’t be difficult to find English/Scots versions at least of useful texts: over the past few years there have been stage versions in Scots of Phaedra, Medea, The Three Sisters, A Government Inspector, The Hypochondriac amongst many others. There are published versions of Cyrano de Bergerac in Scots, English, and Indian English (‘Binglish’) for example, and these bear fruitful investigation about lexical and grammatical choices.

But at the very least, it is possible to make your own versions of texts: take a sonnet and rewrite it as free verse, or vice versa. Translate from Scots to English and English to Scots. Play about with the grammar and consider the consequences of doing so. The trick is to convey the potential of different grammatical choices for altering meanings…and then to go deeper into the technical mechanisms by which this is done.

Discourse

I want to conclude by saying a few brief words about discourse. ‘Discourse’ technically refers to patterns of organisation above the level of the sentence, and unlike grammar it can be approached in a number of different ways. Approaches vary, for example, depending on whether you are considering spoken discourse or written text. Spontaneous conversation has its structures and constraints: the taking of turns, the shifting of topics, the give and take of evaluations and interruptions, the supporting ‘mms’ and ‘ayes’ and nods that signal you are awake and listening. Written text is more goal-oriented, has conventions that develop in accordance with the social expectations of the genre: a job application, for example, will have a certain format and register and content.

Literary texts, since they are intrinsically playful (whether or not the play is for a serious purpose) tend to disrupt our expectations about the organisation of discourse. We tend to expect texts to make sense. Sometimes, however, they don’t. Consider the opening paragraph of James Kelman’s ‘Comic Cuts’:

These things always begin in a less than unexceptional manner. It’s a case of grabbing the nettle. What else is there? What else could there be? And I stress the ‘could’. One has to accept these things; if ye were to examine every last detail, every last detail. Being speaking, I was awake, but weary, weary. I stared at the guy, having to concentrate my mind, focus, focus, abracadabra. Then came a screech. It was just the wooden chair I was sitting on. I had shifted my seated position. Another sound, barely discernible, the ticktick of a clock. Then too Vik’s breathing, regular, not snoring. My best mate, partner and mucker, he was stretched out behind the kitchen table. He had terrible bony joints and couldnay have been too comfortable. 
From Kelman, James (1998) ‘Comic Cuts’ in The Good Times, (Secker and Warburg), p. 128

I’ll confine myself to a few observations about this text. First, the opening sentences work by throwing the reader in at the deep end and deliberately disorienting him or her. ‘These things’ – what things are being referred to? What’s ‘a case of grabbing the nettle’? And when the narrator asks the rhetorical questions ‘What else is there? What else could there be?’ (rhetorical questions that assume that the listener knows the answer) the reader (who is occupying the position of the listener) is completely lost. But we stick with the text, assuming that it is not nonsense, that it will make sense. In other words we work with the text to make sense of it – the coherence of a text results from an interaction between writer and reader through a text. Meaning does not reside in the text; it is actively constructed by a reader using the text, using his or her knowledge of similar texts, and using knowledge of the world. James Kelman’s short stories often work like this – teasing the reader by offering sentences that do not hang together coherently, forcing the reader to make inferences, fill the gaps, construct meanings. We do this as a matter of course with other texts, but the clues are usually more obvious.

There are ways to articulate how the discourse of this text is working: we could point to the patterns of reference (eg ‘what do “these things” refer to), the use of the definite article (‘the guy’ assumes we know who is being talked about, but we don’t yet), and we could consider the assumptions that we normally bring to bear upon a text when we are reading it (we assume that the writer is generally cooperating with us in the creation of meaning, that what he or she says is relevant, that it gives us enough information to make sense, that it is not deliberately untruthful, that it is not deliberately obscure). Fiction tends to subvert these expectations – literature tells lies, misleads, is obscure, withholds information – yet we persevere with it, hopeful of a reward by the end. By frequently denying our expectations of how discourse works, it does us the service of showing us how discourse normally works.

Conclusion

This has been a wide-ranging and in some respects idiosyncratic consideration of how Scots literary texts might be used practically in the classroom to shed light on the texts themselves and on the linguistic systems though which they communicate. We’ve touched on a number of the themes in the Advanced Higher guidelines: the sounds and words and grammar of textual materials, and the use of dictionaries and thesauruses in a stimulating, creative way. In the Advanced Higher in Scottish Language, the emphasis is not on literature, and in the Scottish Literature components the emphasis is not on language, but I would like to suggest that there can be useful interaction between the two.

Copyright © John Corbett 2001

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Alexander Scott, Edwin Morgan, Ezra Pound, John Corbett, Kate Armstrong, Schools, Scots, Sheena Blackhall, Tom Leonard, Tom Scott

DUNCAN, Ian, ‘On the Study of Scottish Literature’

12 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 28, Spring 2003 |


As someone who teaches and researches topics in Scottish literature in an English department at a North American university, I’ve been asked to provide an ‘outside view’ of the subject in the context of current debates over its status and value in the school curriculum. It seems bizarre to me that the study of Scottish literature should require a defence in Scotland in this day and age, although I know from experience that the case needs to be made elsewhere.

I came quite late to the study of Scottish literature, through reading Scott, who would play a far more prominent part in my professional life than I ever expected. Scott confronted me as an anomaly in the development of the ‘English novel’ – a force of influence (to be sure) but of an oddly inconsequential kind; a cloudy distraction from the true path of a morally serious domestic realism, a ghost in the house of fiction. At an early stage of working on my doctoral dissertation I had the good fortune to meet Tom Crawford, who was visiting the James Boswell archive at Yale, and I asked him if he thought it made sense to think about Scott in the light of a Scottish – as distinct from an English or British – literary tradition. With what I now recognize to have been heroic forbearance, he replied that such a point of view might indeed prove quite fruitful. Mine was a symptomatic ignorance. As a category, Scottish literature did not exist at the leading centres of ‘English’ where I was a student in the mid-1970s and 1980s. My first-year supervisor at Cambridge, Helena Shire, had insisted I read Dunbar, Henryson and Gavin Douglas alongside Chaucer and other English poets in the medieval syllabus of the undergraduate English tripos. But that was an exception. There was no sign of Burns on the Cambridge curriculum, none of Scott, apart from a one-off visiting lecture by David Daiches, who (however) did manage to convince some of his audience that there might be more to the Waverley novels than tartan and tushery. At Yale, too, British literature remained resolutely English (some eminent Irish authors excepted), even though the Yale university library holdings in Scottish literature must be the richest in North America, with major caches of Hogg, Stevenson and Barrie alongside Boswell. (It’s pleasant to imagine these archives providing the basis for a future programme in Scottish studies at Yale …)

This state of affairs still prevails, by and large, at university English departments in England and the United States, although changes are beginning to occur locally. (Canada is a somewhat different case). I do not think that the neglect of Scottish literature can very plausibly be blamed on a residual anti-Scots prejudice, or anglophiliac conspiracy, although influential acts of exclusion have certainly shaped the growth of the modern tradition of English literature: Samuel Johnson’s denunciation of Ossian in the 1770s, Matthew Arnold’s mid-Victorian complaint that Burns could not be a great poet because he lacked ‘high seriousness’, F. R. Leavis’s dismissal of Scott from the great tradition of the English novel on the grounds that he was ‘an inspired folklorist’. The problem, which is structural rather than intentional, follows from the ways we go about constructing a national narrative of cultural history. Like any narrative, it has its arcs of development, its turning points, its rhythms of greater and lesser intensity. And while the modern national histories of England and Scotland may be bound by a shared political destiny, their literary-historical contours do not match. The arcs and turning-points, the peaks and valleys, do not coincide, or if they do, they mean different things. This lack of synchrony is more visible in the centuries preceding the Union of Crowns, when the national histories are still formally separate. The high points of early modern English literature – the Age of Chaucer, of Spenser and Shakespeare – these have no corresponding achievements in contemporary Scotland. (Although Shakespeare did briefly turn into a Scottish playwright after 1604 …) The attempt to fit the two histories together casts the dominant model, the English, as the norm, and reduces the other to its shadow. The makars, inserted into an English chronology, become ‘Scottish Chaucerians’ – mere followers.

The situation gets more complicated, of course, after 1707. Scotland’s political absorption is followed on the one hand by a brilliant epoch of intellectual modernization, the so-called Scottish Enlightenment, and on the other by processes of economic and cultural integration that support the single narrative of a unified British history – one in which, all but inevitably, English developments set the pace. Recent scholarship has shown how eighteenth-century Scottish historians subordinated their own national history to the English model, while a contemporaneous ‘Scottish invention of English literature’ brought a tactical acceptance of English linguistic and aesthetic standards, at least in Edinburgh. A golden age of modern Scottish letters – the century from David Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature (1739) to Thomas Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837) – remains sunk out of sight in most standard British literary histories, submerged by that most problematic of all period categories, ‘Romanticism’. Since this is the period I work on, I’ll use it as my main example.

That century saw Lowland Scotland become one of the generative centres of European and North Atlantic literary culture. In the balance of a new, British imperial world order, Scottish innovations in moral philosophy, the social sciences, history, rhetoric, poetry, periodical journalism and the novel matched or outweighed their English counterparts. Hume, Adam Smith, and other Enlightenment philosophers developed a comprehensive account of human nature, social organization and historical process; poets and scholars invoked the national past and regional popular traditions in a series of attempts to reimagine Scottish identity in a post-national age. James Macpherson’s collections of ‘Poems of Ossian’ founded European Romanticism on a scandalous invention of lost cultural origins; Robert Burns fashioned the first modern vernacular style in British poetry; Scott’s historical novels combined those distinctively Scottish inventions, a universal modernity and a national past, to define the governing form of Western narrative for the next hundred years. At the same time, a succession of Edinburgh periodicals – The Edinburgh Review (1802),Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (1817), Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal(1832) – established the main medium of nineteenth-century public discussion. And to name these highlights is to overlook a long list of strikingly original achievements: Smollett’s novels, Fergusson’s urban eclogues, Joanna Baillie’s theatre of the passions, the experimental fiction of James Hogg and John Galt.

Once more, though, these developments don’t fit the English narrative, in which ‘Romanticism’ bursts from the shell of a dried-up neoclassicism, cracked by the shockwave of revolution in France. The later eighteenth century is (or was, until recently) a strange twilight zone of English literary history, an ‘Age of Sensibility’ or ‘Pre-Romanticism’, its poets groping hesitantly towards the radical horizon of Lyrical Ballads and Songs of Innocence and Experience. In Scotland, though, ‘Classical’ and ‘Romantic’ cultural forms occupy the same moment, rather than defining successive stages or periods; Macpherson’s Fingal is not just contemporary with the scientific projects of Enlightenment but is one of its characteristic products – as well as being the founding document of a global Romanticism. The French Revolution brings a change in Scottish cultural history, but one with different dynamics from the English case, characterized by intellectual continuity rather than rupture. As the counter-revolutionary regime of Pitt and Dundas tightens its grip over Scottish patronage, the projects of Enlightenment shift their institutional base, from the university curriculum to an industrializing literary marketplace, so that after 1800 Edinburgh becomes the British centre for innovative publishing in periodicals and fiction. A ‘Romantic’ aesthetic ideology does not formally take hold in Scotland until 1817, when Blackwood’s Magazine sets itself up as the Tory scourge of a Whig post-Enlightenment (exemplified by the Edinburgh Review) in the national struggle over electoral reform.

All of this scarcely registers in the standard literary history, which casts British Romanticism as English, a mighty handful of lyric poets grappling with a Kantian (later Heideggerian) problematic of the transcendental imagination. Never mind that this version of Romanticism is a late invention, consolidated in the North American academy after World War II. Scotland, neither English nor foreign, comes to stand for an inauthenticRomanticism: its poets and novelists manufacture nostalgic simulations, a theme-park Highland heritage, while ‘Scotch reviewers’ bully Keats and Wordsworth. Rather than being a site of Romantic production, it is Scotland’s fate to have become a Romantic object or commodity: glamorous scenery for Queen Victoria and industrial tourism; a series of kitsch, fake, sentimental ‘inventions of tradition’, from Ossian and Waverley to Fiona MacLeod, Brigadoon and Braveheart.

Nor, unfortunately, is this simply an English (or Anglo-American) story. In the early decades of the last century, Scottish critics devised their own compelling variant, denouncing the post-Union literary tradition as inorganic, self-divided, alienated from its vital sources – the proof of that alienation being Scotland’s lack of a genuine Romantic movement. Gregory Smith’s exotic phrase for an internally-conflicted national character, the ‘Caledonian Antisyzygy’ (in Scottish Literature: Character and Influence, 1919), supplied Hugh MacDiarmid and Edwin Muir with critical ammunition in their revolt (de rigueur among Modernists) against Victorian forefathers: a revolt charged with nationalist energy by, among other things, the burden of Scotland’s participation in nineteenth-century world empire. MacDiarmid and co. were taking aim at the Victorian sentimental cult of Burns and Scott, it can be argued, more than at those writers themselves. Nevertheless, critics and historians in their wake took the ‘Antisyzygy’ diagnosis literally, and made it into a routine: branding some Scottish authors as more Scottish than others, carving up individual oeuvres into authentic and inauthentic tendencies, usually along linguistic lines – so that few readers, for example, now bother with the English poetry of Fergusson or Burns.

This summary is a caricature, I know, and it overlooks all sorts of crucial factors, not least the political contexts that this nationalism spoke to. Recent commentary has clarified its account of national tradition, if not always consistently. Tom Nairn, rescuing the Scottish Enlightenment from Antisyzygy proscription in The Break-Up of Britain (1981), develops the nationalist account of Scotland’s lack of a Romantic movement – finding what Muir (in Scott and Scotland, 1936) had found in Scott’s Edinburgh, ‘a very curious emptiness’. Yet this analysis ultimately derives from Scottish Romanticism: the first clear statement of the ‘Antisyzygy’, as diagnosis of a national cultural pathology, can be found, one hundred years before Gregory Smith, in John Gibson Lockhart’s (Tory, Unionist) semi-fictional anatomy of Scottish culture, Peter’s Letters to his Kinsfolk (1819). Cairns Craig has shown (in Out of History, 1996) how the model of a divided, deficient Scottish tradition relies on the assumption of an English ‘organic’ standard: Muir adapts T. S. Eliot’s critique of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’ in modern English poetry, while David Craig (in Scottish Literature and the Scottish People, 1961) invokes the Leavisite model of a ‘Great Tradition’.

Scott’s reputation was perhaps the most spectacular casualty of Antisyzygy nationalism, which cast the author of Waverley as chief Unionist collaborator, a Wicked Wizard of the North who enchanted an entire tradition into a moth-eaten museum-piece. Far from helping people to read Scott’s poems and novels, such an analysis became a means of not reading them. Recent historical developments have helped make Scott look interesting again, with initiatives such as the new Edinburgh Edition of the Waverley Novels encouraging a fresh approach, although bad habits of reading, or rather failures of reading, linger here and there. Scott, for sure, was a key figure in the ‘invention of Scotland’ that has been analysed by Murray Pittock and less subtle scholars; but the novels themselves are far from exhausted by the uses to which they have been put – an instrumentality that may have little or nothing to do with what an attentive reading can find out. We need to remind ourselves of what, once upon a time, was obvious: the imaginative vitality and intellectual wealth of these astonishing works (not just The Heart of Mid-Lothian and Redgauntlet but, say, Woodstock), appreciation of which should enhance, rather than obscure, the rival brilliancies of Scott’s contemporaries – Galt’s The Entail, Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of Justified Sinner, as well as their other works, and works by other hands. (The best Romantic-era Scottish novel not by Hogg, Scott or Galt? Christian Johnstone’s Elizabeth de Bruce, 1827.)

So there are at least two good reasons for recognizing the distinctiveness of a Scottish literary tradition. One, simply put, is that tradition’s internal strength – the originality and excellence of its constituent works, from the makars through the Romantic Enlightenment (whatever we want to call it) to the current, turn-of-the-millennium crop of rising poets and novelists, and everything and everyone else before and besides: Robert Louis Stevenson, for instance, whose gifts an English literary history has been no more successful in defining than it has Burns’s; or Margaret Oliphant, whose return to currency as an English novelist (the author of Miss Marjoribanks) exceeds, for the moment, the rise of interest in her as a Scottish woman writer – one who, like Joanna Baillie, made her career in the south. We need to be able to read these authors: which means, in the first place, having their books available, and also, in many instances, learning how to read them, since reading habits and terms of reference change. The Edinburgh Scott, with its Penguin Classics offshoot, can serve as a model for the joint issue of high-quality scholarly and popular editions. There are, fortunately, a host of analogous projects, keeping our literary universe open: the Stirling-South Carolina edition of Hogg (also in paperback!), bringing to light works which in some cases have never been available in their original versions, and reprint series such as Canongate Classics and the ASLS’s own Annual Volumes. Literary criticism too can perform a public service in extending our reading skills – whether developing terms for a better understanding of famous authors, such as Burns and Scott, whose achievements have been distorted by an alien aesthetic standard, or recovering less familiar or downright obscure writers and movements, overlooked because of their class or gender or other contingent reasons.

Reading, we accustom ourselves to the rhythms of change and continuity that make up a Scottish literary history, its successions and combinations of models, forms and topics. We find surprising illuminations along the way. Humean empiricism, Cairns Craig has argued, generates a socially constructive model of the imagination that is quite different from the transcendental model associated with English Romanticism, and no less consequential, since it provides a philosophical matrix for the nineteenth-century novel – not just Scott’s historical fiction but, through that, the ‘English’ realist form. We learn, too, that a national tradition is multiple rather than singular, an often turbulent play of crosscurrents rather than a broad mainstream – for example through Murray Pittock’s studies of a Jacobite tradition far more complex and polyvalent than we had thought, or the reclamations of women’s writing undertaken in the recent History of Scottish Women’s Writing edited by Douglas Gifford and Dorothy McMillan, the electronic archive of Scottish Women Poets edited by Stephen Behrendt and Nancy Kushigian, and like projects. Perhaps the last thing Scottish literature needs is the unifying forcefield of a ‘Great Tradition’.

Which brings us to the second good reason for affirming a Scottish literature: its importance and influence outside the borders of Scotland. Scottish writers from the century of Enlightenment and Romanticism – Hume and Smith, ‘Ossian’, Burns and Scott – enjoyed a huge international popularity and prestige, across continental Europe and North America and other European colonies, defining the intellectual and literary genres of modernization throughout (at least) the nineteenth century, from political economy to national epic and historical novel. In the light of this world-scale reception, it is the English tradition (Johnson, Wordsworth, Austen, Keats …) that begins to look provincial. (Byron belongs to both!) Merely to reverse the charge of national inferiority, though, is just as unhelpful – replacing one imperialist boast with another. The splendours of the English tradition need no defence. It is important, rather, to recognize the complex networks of affiliation that bind Scottish literature (sometimes painfully) to other literatures and cultures. Scottish writing helps constitute the literatures of continental Europe, North America and the British and European colonies, in complicity with other, often less benign institutional conduits of ‘influence’, just as it is in turn constituted through and by other literatures. Scholars who have recently been drawing the map of Scottish literature’s global interrelations, such as Robert Crawford and Susan Manning, are building upon a solid scholarly foundation (in the work of R. S. Jack, Andrew Hook and others).

These networks of reciprocal making bind together, not least, Scottish with English writing (the work of North American scholars such as Leith Davis and Janet Sorensen is helpful here). Thus, we need to understand Scott in the light of Scottish traditions of moral philosophy, historicism and antiquarianism, poetry and ballad revival – and also of English and Irish, as well as continental, traditions of the drama and novel and romance, and a great deal else. Victorian Scottish authors in particular, like Carlyle and Oliphant, did not simply write and publish in London, but shaped ‘English’ styles and genres, as Robert Crawford and others have insisted. It makes as little sense to tear them out of their English context, in a mistaken bid for purity, as it does to read them as English authors without regard for their Scottish roots and associations. English needs to be an essential component of the study of Scottish literature – just as Scottish literature needs to play no less vital a part in English studies, in England and elsewhere. So: let’s not submerge Scottish literature, once again, under the surface of ‘English’; but let’s not cut it off from English either. Scotland’s literary and linguistic bond with English, far from being a shackle, can enhance our understanding of how national cultures develop – not in splendid isolation but in complex engagement with the world. 

Copyright © Ian Duncan 2003

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Ian Duncan, Schools

FLEMING, Morna, ‘Teaching Henryson’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

ScotLit 33, Autumn 2005 |


When writing the February Newsletter for The Robert Henryson Society, I noted that 2005 was the 500th anniversary of Dunbar’s poem ‘Lament for the Makars’, which makes mention of Robert Henryson:

In Dunfermelyne he [Death] has done rovne 
With maister Robert Henrisoun

and felt again the frustration that too many pupils in Dunfermline, in Fife, never mind in Scotland, go through their entire school careers without ever hearing about one of the greatest poets that Scotland has produced.

The Robert Henryson Society was formed in Dunfermline in 1993 ‘to encourage a wider appreciation of his work among the public at large’ through newsletters, evening lectures and an annual conference. Since the outset, schools and teachers have been seen as one of the most important fora for widening knowledge of the poet’s work, and the Society has actively encouraged a number of initiatives over the years.

One of the first practitioners to teach Henryson successfully in school was Gerald Baird of Grove Academy in Dundee, who taught the Fables and The Testament of Cresseid to pupils at different stages of secondary. He was commissioned by ASLS to write the definitive Scotnote on the poet, a book which is of great help to teachers who have not had the benefit of courses in medieval Scots literature like those offered by Glasgow University. (Many of the teachers mentioned in this article are alumni of those courses.)

I myself have taught the Fables over a number of years to junior secondary pupils, and a selection of Fables and The Testament to Certificate of Sixth Year Studies pupils at Beath High School in Cowdenbeath. I gave an account of these experiences at the 7th International Conference on Medieval and Renaissance Scottish Language and Literature held at Strathclyde University and published in The European Sun (2001). Unaccountably, Henryson was dropped from the list of prescribed texts for Advanced Higher.

The Robert Henryson Society has made a number of attempts to get Henryson into the Dunfermline area schools, firstly through a pack sponsored by Dunfermline Building Society which included ‘The Prologue’ to the Moral Fables and ‘The Cock and the Jasp’ in three different versions: the original Middle Scots, a modern Scots version by Bob Smith, and an English version by Barbara Rasmusen. This was accompanied by classroom worksheets based on the work that Gerry Baird had publicised some years before, and a tape of the two poems produced by Scotsoun.

It is difficult to overemphasise the importance of Scotsoun, and indeed George Philp, in the development of The Robert Henryson Society. It was George who was the prime mover in the founding of the Society in 1993, and without the Scotsoun tapes of the Fables, the poetry would remain inaccessible to many teachers as well as pupils.

The most recent success for the Society in schools was the competition for primary pupils to design a stained glass window based on the fable of ‘The Two Mice’. This was won by pupils from Lynburn Primary School, under the Depute Headteacher, Margaret Whetton, who produced very imaginative designs which were translated into stained glass by Liz Rowley. The glass should be installed in the school very soon and will be unveiled with as much publicity as can be mustered.

However, these are all small-scale projects, depending on the passion of a small number of individual teachers. Fear of the unknown, ignorance, or initiative overload seem to inhibit many teachers from embarking into the new world of medieval literature. It may be that the Britain in Print project will see Henryson finally entering the 21st century as a writer for schools.

The initial project was set up by the members of CURL (Consortium of University Research Libraries) to catalogue pre-1701 British manuscripts and with the help of Heritage Lottery Funding, promote the collections and the materials to a general audience, via a web-site. Lesley Porter, then head of English at Queen Anne High School in Dunfermline, was approached to join the project, and suggested that Henryson be the focus, as he had the Dunfermline, Fife, Scottish and national contexts. And, more importantly, The Testament of Cresseid provided the link to Chaucer and the canon of English literature.

It was decided in early meetings that material would be drawn from early printed editions of major Scottish literature of the 15th Century and, as such would:

  • meet key curriculum needs within Scottish school-age learning
  • be of practical benefit to support teachers by filling a gap in the e-learning content already available
  • link to the Chaucerian tradition and therefore have wider relevance to a UK schools’ audience

With the criteria in mind, literary material would be complemented with content designed to place the literature in its historical context, and would also include material which provided a comparison with literary movements in England and indeed Europe. The contextual material would be embedded in the ‘timeline’, a feature of the website. The poet and scholar, Robert Henryson, was identified as ‘meeting the criteria’ in his Testament of Cresseid. For Lesley, however, a major consideration in determining our choice was the fact that Scottish schoolchildren, many of whom leave school with little or no experience of our Scottish literary heritage other than perhaps, Robert Burns, should have at Higher and Advanced Higher level some experience of the Scottish canon.

The Britain in Print project team, led by Richard Ovenden – Director of Special Collections at Edinburgh University Library and the Project Director for Britain in Print and Norman Rodger, Project Developer, would seek advice from the Heritage Lottery Fund, from the National Grid for Learning Scotland, who provided curriculum-content related advice; from Humanities Advanced Technology Information Institute (at the University of Glasgow); and from Lesley, in providing the educational link and developer of the materials and resources at Queen Anne High School. And more importantly, for the Queen Anne pupils who would pilot the material, whilst at the same time, learn something of their literary heritage and culture.

As far as the school’s involvement, the project provided an exciting prospect for Lesley as a teacher in terms of development work and providing a stimulating text to teach. The ‘old standard’ Higher texts: Othello, War Poetry, Edwin Morgan’s poetry, Romeo and Juliet, The Devil’s Disciple, The Crucible, Consider the Lilies, whilst not detracting from their ‘greatness’, are ubiquitous in the extreme in exam papers, as any SQA marker can testify. More importantly, however, it gave senior pupils the opportunity to study a more challenging text, medieval Scottish poetry, than perhaps they might have done for their Higher English course. By opening up the breadth of the Scottish literary canon to them, the project also provided pupils with, and access to, a context in which to place the work as part of local, Scottish, British, and European, heritage. 

The website Unit of work had to provide S5/6 Higher and Advanced Higher with an in-depth study and analysis of the language and ideas used by Henryson whilst at the same time, be ‘website friendly’ and provide the links to the other aspects on the website, e.g. the historical context etc. In addition to the question and answer format, the worksheets also had to provide opportunities for class and/or paired discussion. Pupils also had to have the opportunity of preparing critical essays – titles given – and multiple choice questions. It also had to be flexible enough to allow individual teachers a level of teacher-input, depending on the range of pupil abilities which exist even within Higher classrooms. And given that many of our ‘English’ teachers in Scottish secondary schools have little or no knowledge of medieval Scottish literature, the material had also to be ‘teacher-friendly’. 

The Unit, although it can be used as a stand-alone resource, is designed to work in conjunction with the website and this is where it works best. It can be found on www.britaininprint.net [note: website no longer active], which will be found to be a very easily-used website. The analysis of the text by the pupils through the worksheets is enhanced by the knowledge gained through e-learning. The activities provide pupils with a means to access information from the web and therefore, enhance their classroom learning. 

The aims of the Unit were:

  • To provide pupils with a framework to the study of 15th century Scottish literature
  • To provide pupils with a degree of online visual content
  • To enhance pupils’ independent study of 15th century Scottish literature
  • To prepare pupils for external examinations as part of SQA Higher and Advanced Higher English

On a wider level, the Unit enhances learning and prepares pupils for Higher Education and research as they move on to University.

Initially, Lesley developed a unit of work to be used in conjunction with the project’s e-learning tool. This provided the manageable sections for study of the poem and is used on the website to provide the analytical framework. As The Testament is a fairly long text and given the degree of difficulty of language for pupils, she divided the analysis of poem into nine different sections: Introduction (Stanzas 1-10), Narrative Episode: Section 2 – Cresseid’s rejections, return home and prayer (Stanzas 11-20); Section 3 – Cresseid’s dream (Stanzas 21-38); Section 4 – Cresseid’s dream: the debate and judgement of the Gods; Section 5 (Stanzas 50-58), Narrative Episode :Cresseid’s leprosy; Section 6 (Stanzas 59-66) the Complaint of Cresseid; Section 7 (Stanzas 66-76) Cresseid, the lepers and Troilus; Section 8 (Stanzas 77-86) the Testament and Death of Cresseid; and Section 9 (Stanza 86) the Moralitas. 

The Unit is interspersed with biographical details, literary background, critical essay questions, activities and of course, the text and the modern audience, all of which were designed to promote discussion and pupil engagement in the text. And, built in to the learning structure are the literary conventions: nine-line stanza structure, formal rhetoric, ubi suntconvention, complaint, moralitas, courtly associations of the imagery, allegorical dream and spiritual recovery. The Charteris edition was used, for no reason other than this was the edition I used when studying the text at university. 

The website itself was designed with the structure of the unit in mind, divided into the nine sections and containing, teaching notes, summaries of the various sections, notes on the poem, study tools, background to printing, geographical mapping (both Scotland, Britain and European), academic background, time-lines, page-view, glossaries and audio recordings of the text The site itself is user-friendly and would be of benefit to everyone including those ‘A’ Level students studying Chaucer, the general public, history teachers who would find it beneficial in the use of printing and time-lines, undergraduates, European history/literature students and of course, members of the Henryson Society! 

For Lesley as a teacher, the e-learning tool was a welcome addition to classroom resources, but for the pupils, the website provided an important enhancement in terms of their learning. Accessing the website for textual information or historical background, e-homework, participating in the multiple-choice quiz, support for critical essays, together with teacher-led classroom analysis, pupil and group presentations enhanced the teaching and learning for Higher English.

The production of a reading of the text which I took part in with Colin Donati gave a valuable audio resource which can be accessed on the website as the poem is studied stanza by stanza. Norman Rodger also set up an on-line question and answer session with academics which was fairly successful, although perhaps the questions were coming too quickly for the academics! The edited version on the website gives a sense of the kinds of questions which pupils were asking, clearly showing their involvement not only in the text itself but in its literary and cultural contexts. 

Lesley is convinced that what the pupils gained out of their study of The Testament of Cresseid was infinitely more exciting and unusual both in the delivery, resourcing and material in the ‘website’ learning component of the course and perhaps more in keeping with 21st Century learning – the use of information technology to enhance the teaching of English. However, far more that that and from our perspectives as Scottish teachers in Scottish secondary schools, teaching Scottish pupils, the value and worth of teaching a text which gives our youngsters a knowledge and understanding of a major Scottish poet who is rightfully at the heart of the Scottish literary canon cannot be underestimated. The uniqueness of the project served to enhance the learning of our youngsters. 

Copyright © Morna Fleming 2005

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Morna Fleming, Robert Henryson, Schools

HODGART, John, ‘Language Issues in Studying Burns for Revised Higher: Bard tae Waur?’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

Laverock 3, 1997 |


“Burns is really much too difficult for our children. They prefer Shakespeare.”
(a former P.T. English in Ayrshire, noo retired, an T.G.F.T.!)

In spite o the annual ootburst o Bardolatry ilka Januar, Burns’ work isnae as weel kent as it deserves to be and no as well taucht in oor schuils as it shid be. Altho he is noo an option in the Revised Higher English Exam, the study o the set 13 Burns’ texts is mair the exception rether than the rule for maist young Scots, even in the Burns hameland o Ayrshire an Dumfries. It wid seem that monie teachers feel a lot less enthusiastic aboot him bein on the syllabus than the poet felt when welcomin his “Bastard Wean”. In fact for some Scottish teachers mibbe Burns himsel has become somethin o a love forgotten child, if no a bastard wean!

For oor students, studyin Burns’ work shid be lik enterin a treisure hoose o linguistic an imaginative delicht, but it seems that the feck o them arnae offert this experience at Higher level as maist Scottish teachers seem tae prefer the Bard of Avon or the dreich modern meditations o Philip Larkin. Somehow it seems tae be worth the effort tae teach Shakespeare tae oor Higher students, but no Burns. Nae doot the curriculum has tae be covert an time is ticht, wi poetry aften relegatit tae the stock exam-answer piece, such as “Dulce et Decorum Est” etc. Furthermair, their problems wi the set Burns set text selection, for some o them are gey leng, there seems an awful lot o them, and mibbie there’s an awful lot tae explain aboot 18th century Scotland? It can seen gey dauntin.

But shairly Shakspeare is even mair difficult, sae why this resistance or reluctance tae tak Burns work seriously? Is it jist the fact that monie teachers lack confidence in haunlin his language, or a maitter o educational snobbery an ignorance amang maist teachers that hiv been educatit in English or American literature, but no in the native languages an literature o Scotland? If that is whit their ain education has equippt them tae cope wi, can we really grummle when they often cannae see the pynt o takin Burns seriously at this level? Yet is his language really sae hard tae unnerstaun or owre auld farrant for oor ain young folk tae appreciate? 

Possibly ane o the maist ironic aspects o the ABC o Scottish education (the annual Burns Competition) is the fact that for maist young Scots this has aye been the ane time o year when it was aw richt tae yaise the Scots tung in the classroom, because ti wis poetry an seen as the language o the past, but onie young Scot wha brocht real modern Scots intae the classroom, especially the urban varieties, wid suin ken how the “wee sleekit, cowerin, tim’rous beastie” felt when it saw the ploughman,s “Murderin pattle!”

I think the ironies o this wid in fact hae been gey familiar to Burns, as it’s part o the same process o cultural condeetionin that he suffert fae himself: bein made tae feel that the native speech o Lowland Scotland is somehow “incorrect” or “inferior” tae Southern Standard English, rether than a series o closely relatit dialects or even as a kizzen language tae English, rether like Portugese an Spanish or Norwegian an Danish. Thus nearly aw the distinctive features o Scottish speech hae buin seen at best as quaint an couthie or at worst as the language o the sheuch, no fit for intelligent, educatit folk: a malign social an cultural cancer that is deeply rootit in oor education system, perpetuatin negative attitudes an ignorance aboot oor native language, an turnin Scotland into a linguistic minefield o snobbery an prejudice.

Nae wunner generations o Scottish weans hae buin made tae feel that they maun only speak “good” English an avoid nearly aw forms o Scots lik the plague, as if the “dinnae say ay” mentality wis implantit in their brains lik a genetic tumour. Nae wunner oor teachers see Burns as ower difficult an monie young Scots leuk on his language nearly as a foreign tung, an nae wunner the hail range o Scottish poetry is gey sair neglectit in oor schuils, never mind Burns.

Yet shairly it’s noo time tae see the inherent bi-lingualism o Scotland as a great cultural advantage, no as a handicap, valuin oor ability tae yaise some form o Scots as weel as Scottish Standard English. Furthermair I wid argue that until we stert teachin oor weans tae be confident, expressive an literate in baith (in fact whit 5–14 or Effective Learnin an Teachin baith imply) we will continue betrayin oor ain culture bi ignorin the very thing that made Burns a great poet: his expressive uiss o Scots that English cannae match, plus his linguistic brilliance in contrastin or combinin it wi English, or tae be mair precise, English as spoken bi a Scot, a skill he yaised tae great effect in his best work.

This neglect or ignorance o Burns an his language is really maist bamboozlin for a country that honours him as its “national bard”. It is gey sad tae, for in spite o aw the bardolisin boak we sometimes hae tae thole, Burns is in fact a great poet: a brilliant satirist, a skeely letter writer in verse an prose, but abuin aw possibly ane o the greatest sang scrievers o aw time. Shairly we hae a duty as Scottish teachers tae try an bring the warmth, humour and virr o his words alive tae oor ain young folk, an tae let them discover that his work is still fu o life an relevant tae their world.

Nae doot we first need tae convince the teachers o aw this, but even if they are, how can we convince them that Burns is a realistic option as a set text etc at Higher? The first bit o advice is tae get haud o a daicent study guide, an while there are twa three on the market, ane advantage o the ASLS Scotnote is that it tries tae get roon the time problem bi coverin aw the skills an options for Revised Higher via the Burns poems, tho it can equally be yaised jist tae study ane or twa poems for the critical essay, as there are short notes an questions on each poem.

Afore actually readin the poems it’s important tae first mak the pupils better acquent wi Burns an his times an the ASLS guide tries tae dae this via a close readin exercise an a report on twa Burns articles bi David Daiches. Saicondly it’s essential that they hear a guid readin or tape o the poems (e.g. Scotsoun tapes or folk singers like Jean Redpath or Dougie MacLean etc) afore studyin them in onie depth, sae that their lugs gradually tune intae the soun o Burns language, afore gaun on tae read an study it for theirsels wi the help o a glossary, sae that bi the time they actually try tacklin the questions, they hae gradually owercome onie language problems, ane step at a time. Fae ma ain experience I prefer daein the poems first, owre a concentratit period o the first term, but leain the sangs tae twa or three sessions spread across the year, especially Januar, tae gie it a bit mair variety.

Tae help oor pupils relate Burns work tae Scottish culture o their ain day, an tae their ain linguistic development, we should try tae explain that, like maist writers, no everything he wrote wis great and this wisnae because he lacked skill or education. Like monie Scots he wis a product o a split culture, often torn atween his Scots identity an his “educated” English identity that taucht him the “proper” wey a gentleman an scholar shid speak an write (echoes o Chris in Sunset Song). In his desire tae be acceptit as a “man of letters” bi the gentry an posh Edinburgh critics o his age (the “literati”) he often wrote in the rether flooery sentimental style that wis fashionable in English literature at the time, posing as the “man of feeling” for the benefit o “polite” society.

Indeed the Edinburgh literati advised him tae imitate the maist polished English poets o their age an tae avoid sae monie “Scotticisms” in his work as they saw their native tung as gey reuch an coorse, no fit for educated discourse. Ironically when Burns follaed their advice, the results are noo maistly unreadable, as is the work o ither Scottish poets o the time, no simply because it is aften written in gey posh English, but because it’s lang-windit, fu-breekit, gey fantoosh an fushionless. (No unlike some o the creative writin we aften see at H/S.Y.S. level?) As shuin as he sterts whit I wid caw his “all hailing” style, we ken no tae expect Burns at his maist leal-hertit. Furthermair, if he had aye follaed their advice, there’s nae wey we wid be celebratin him as oor national poet or as a symbol o oor identity. 

Hooever the English influence wisnae aw negative, faur fae it, for at the same time he assimilatit monie positive features fae English literature (Pope an co.) that he was able to yaise creatively for his ain purposes, in fact mainly yaisin a mixture o plain English an Scots in his best work, wi ane complementin the ither rether than conflictin wi it, or sometimes yaisin a mair formal English for contrastin purposes, especially in his satires. Abuin aw, because o the conflictin cultural pressures he wrassled wi, he learnt tae play monie roles, wear monie masks as a writer, an developt muckle skill in exploitin an manipulatin different linguistic registers for different effects in his work.

Yet as Scots we shid aye be gratefu that Burns steyed true tae his ruits an trustit his ain instincts tae write aboot the world he kent best, in the language o his ain folk, drawin on the poetic pooer an smeddum o their tung, an especially their sangs. Fair kittled up bi the Scottish folk tradition he inheritit fae earlier Scottish makars an sangwriters, especially Ramsay, Fergusson an the great Anonymous, he wrote aboot the social an political realities o 18th century Scotland in a memorable wey an produced ane o the greatest bodies o folk sang in world literature, enablin him tae speak in a universal vyce tae the hail human race, as baith a great Scottish scriever an a great world writer at the same time. Thus we can mibbie begin tae relate Burns’ cultural divisions tae contemporary issues aboot language, culture an identity, that are still relevant tae Scotland the day.

In maist o these great poems, Burns unites the art an folk traditions of Scotland, but yaises a flexible mixture o Scots an English: earthy expressive Scots, as in Kate’s flytin, English as yaised by a Scot, includin a lot o Scots idioms, as weel as a mair elevatit English (e.g.the poet’s asides in Tam) tae create contrastin or distancin effects. These linguistic contrasts are in fact a key feature o his satirical technique, aften switchin fae a mair elevatit style back doon tae earthy or hamely Scots (e.g. To a Louse, Address to the Deil, Holy Willie) tae bring pride an pretension doon tae earth, or tae expose the truth. Indeed he often seems tae switch fae Scots tae English, or the ither wey roon, sae that the ane complements or adds tae the ither: e.g.we can see this in the skeely wey he switches fae hamely Scots tae abstract English in To a Mouse, but combines folk idioms an mair elevatit English in summin up his vision o life at the end.

Thus he exploits a hail double vocabulary an soun system, sometimes yaisin an English word for a rhyme, but mair aften Scots or a Scottish version o an English word (e.g. wuids an floods in Tam o Shanter) an tho at times it seems tae be optional, ye often hae tae ignore the spellin e.g.”deep drowned in Doon”, but drooned keeps the internal rhyme that is lost wi “drowned” or “that night a child might understand”, whaur ye really need tae say it in Scots, for there is a world o difference in tone or mood atween ane an the ither.

Generally speakin his sangs seem tae yaise less Scots than his poetry, but in actual fact they often yaise mair Scots than it seems on the page, judgin bi the English spellin conventions that they are set doon in. While Scottish writers o the 17th–18th centuries were bein forced tae copy English spellin, if they wantit their work printit, we can often tell fae their rhymes etc that they said the word gey different fae how the spellt it. At the same time George Thomson, the editor o Select Scottish Airs wha thocht o himsel as a man o superior taste, wis aye tryin tae “improve” Burns’ songs, baith musically an verbally, as he considert some o Burns’ expressions ower reuch for polite lugs. Yet Burns’ replies tae him gie us a great insicht intae his art an feelins aboot language :

“I have not command of the language that I have in my native tongue – in fact I think that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scotish.”

Altho Burns wis flexible aboot mixin Scots an English, often switching fae Scots tae English or vice versa, for the sake o the rhyme etc or sometimes jist yaisin “a sprinklin” o Scots tae mak it soon authentic, we oftenhae tae ignore spellin aw thegither. Indeed it fairly gars me grue tae hear words bein pronounct in English, whaur the rhyme scheme or ither soun patterns, e.g. vowel stress/repetition, show that they shid be said in Scots.

For example in Comin thro the Rye, if “body” is said in English it fairly chynges the meanin (a dead body?), as opposed tae the Scots “buddy”; or in Scots Wha Hae, whaur the rhyme scheme tells us that the last line has tae be “let us do or dee” (an no “die” as it is spellt); or in John Anderson “sleep thegither at the foot” is whit it says, but “foot” breks the vowel repetition o “ane anither … thegither”, sae “fit” fits better! Sometimes we can see fae the surroundin words that the English soun jist disnae fit, as in A Parcel o Rogues whaur “my auld grey head” really has tae be “heid”, baith for the sake o the assonance, an the Scottish idiom “auld Heid”.

Even whaur the pronunciation seems optional e.g. in Of a the Airts, “wild woods grow, and rivers row” is often rhymed as in the English row the boat, but the Scots word for the verb to roll is “rowe” (as in English row between people), sae it really has tae be “growe an rowe”, fittin in wi “monie” in the next line, while if we say “woods” as in English, the internal rhyme o “wild wuids” is lost, as weel as the vowel repetition wi “rivers”. At the same time “night” an “flight” in the followin line jist disnae match the alliteration o “day an nicht my fancy’s flicht”, an this is generally true o maist “ght” words, lik “right” etc, that shid be pronounct “richt” etc, as in German.

Altho he sometimes jist yaises “a sprinklin o Scots”, these few words often haud the key tae the mood an spirit o the sang, as we can see if we try tae pit some o the words intae English, for even jist ane or twa words can mak aw the difference: “One Fond Kiss” jist disnae soun richt, as it draps the lang vowel stress o “ae”, while “You are not Mary Morison” chynges the tone an depth o feelin aw thegither. Nae wunner Hugh MacDiarmid said “Ye are na Mary Morison” were his favourite lines, for altho they are gey simple, in the context o the sang they speak volumes.

These differences are simply the differences atween ane language an anither, an the difficulties o translatin fae ane tae the ither, even when they are as closely relatit as Scots an English, for the life blood o the sang is often drained awa if they are pit intae English. The great English poet John Keats said that he sometimes needit six lines tae say whit Burns could say in ane, an a lot o this is due tae his brilliant uiss o the Scots tung: a concision an clarity via simple, but often subtle language, vivid concrete imagery an expressive folk idioms (key features in Scottish poetry). This verbal magic, combined wi musical genius, is whit gies his sangs their power, an their universal appeal. (see note on Auld Lang Syne in Scotnote: Robert Burns, p.25–26)

The great Medieval Scottish poet, Gavin Douglas, wrote that he wis happy tae yaise some Latin, French or English, “when scant wis his Scottis” an in some weys Burns carries on this tradition, yaisin a wide range o Scots, no only fae Ayrshire, but “fae aa the airts,” plus some aulder Scots he learnt fae earlier writers, in effect a sort o “synthetic” Scots, in the sense o drawing thegither diverse elements.

In fact in his great poems an sangs, Burns yaises the hail range o language at his disposal: expressive Scots that can say things English cannae [ruitit in his ain Ayrshire tung, but extendit via the influence o his faither’s Nor East Doric, an fae his trevels an his readin, sometimes throwin in aulder Scots words learnt fae books or sangs]; his clear yaisage o English as spoken bi a Scot, an his ability tae combine it wi Scots, sae that his English contains Scots or sometimes vice versa, an the resultin mixture sometimes transforms baith wi a brilliant bi-lingual skill; or he can even fling in the odd Classical term or French word tae gie his language a scint o “bon ton” whaur he thocht fit.

Thus he yaised jist aboot as wide a spectrum o language as onie educatit Scot has ever yaised (apairt fae the Medieval Makars): naethin short o a linguistic triumph, considerin aw the cultural forces ranged agin him. Is this great linguistic achievement somethin we can afford tae neglect in oor schuils an is it really sae difficult tae unnerstaun?

Since Scots an English are really linguistic kizzens, wi aboot 90% compatability (or in ither words wi aboot 90% o the words we yaise common tae baith) a reuch estimate wid be that on average, (tho the amount varies a lot fae poem tae poem) aboot 90% o Burns poetry is written in “English” or Scottish forms o English words like “cannae”etc. Probably only aboot 10% are Scots idioms, an mibbie only aboot 5% o that needs a glossary, for the mair archaic or obscure words – in fact a lot less than Shakespeare. I suspect tae that the average student willnae hae tae leuk up a dictionar, whither Scots or English, onie mair for Burns than they will for onie ither great writer, an maist editions o Burns come wi a guid glossary. Naw the problem isnae really the language, but whit is (or isnae) inside some teachers’ heids!

Thus we hae a poet wha can still speak tae young Scots in a language that isnae really sae auld-farrant or difficult as it micht at first seem, an altho he deed nearly 200 year syne, he can still appeal tae youngsters the day. Yince they’ve got ower the 18th century backgruin, or difficult words, they’ll fin a writer wha cared deeply aboot monie o the things that young folk the day are fashed aboot: justice, freedom, human richts, luve in its widest (an sometimes wildest) sense, a concern for aw craiturs sharin oor wee planet, a maist warm-hertit luve o life an the joys o bein alive, haun in haun wi a deep compassion, tolerance, an hatred o everythin that is life denyin or demeanin, such as puirtith, grippieness, nerra-nebbitness, heepocrisy an fanaticism, qualities the world isnae likely tae rin oot o at the back en o this or onie ither century.

Altho there are still muckle problems tae be owercome in terms o teachers’ attitudes, there are at least hopeful signs on the horizon o a real chynge beginnin tae tak place, an it is noo Scottish Office policy tae support the study o Scottish language an culture at the 5-14 level, e.g. The Kist etc. Yet unless Scottish teachers learn tae value the language o aw Scottish weans as muckle as Burns did himsel, Scottish education will continue peyin lip service tae oor great national poet, an his “immortal memory” will become (if it hasnae awready) jist an archaic folk festival, insteid o a national treisure tae pass on tae the next generation. If we cuid manage tae bring that aboot, mibbie Robin wid be as prood o us, as we claim tae be o him. I can think o nae better wey tae mak his memory immortal amang his ain folk.

See also the ASLS Scotnote on Robert Burns.

Copyright © John Hodgart 1997

Filed Under: Articles, Uncategorised Tagged With: John Hodgart, Robert Burns, Schools

MACGILLIVRAY, Alan, ‘The Jewel on the Doorstep: The Place of Scottish Literature in Schools’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

An edited version of a paper given at the Education Conference of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 5th October, 2009. |


Just over twelve years ago, along with a number of other teachers, I was working on a book for Edinburgh University Press, rather ponderously entitled Teaching Scottish Literature: Curriculum and Classroom Applications. That book is still with us today, I’m glad to say, with all its pithy wisdom and witty no-nonsense pragmatism. In that book, behind the particular applications of Scottish language, literature and culture to different stages of the school and the many exemplars that were created to demonstrate their possibilities, there lay a basic premise that all of us in the Association for Scottish Literary Studies subscribe to, that many teachers and educational thinkers agree with, and that has never been challenged by any sustainable argument, any rational case, any set of ideas that stand up to even a cursory inspection. I stress the word, never, without any fear of contradiction. Over more than forty years of engaging with the task, the struggle, the frustrating and unending push against the inert resistance of Scottish educational and political officialdom. I have never heard a single attempt at a thoughtful response, a single rationally expressed sentence, a single fragment or shard of sensible disagreement that could be held up as opposition to the basic premise I was alluding to. And what is that basic premise? It is quite simply that Scottish children being educated in the schools of Scotland have the inalienable right to learn about the culture of Scotland (including inevitably its languages and literature), and the Scottish educational system should confirm this right absolutely and unarguably within its curricular and assessment requirements. Every country in the world does this for its own culture, including our great neighbour to the south, and the other nations of the British Isles. Scotland is out of step with the world. Has nobody in Scottish government ever noticed this?

In writing the introduction to the book in 1997, I made use of a major Scottish literary source, a poem that is concerned with Scottish education of a kind, that addresses major issues of Scottish government, but one that, because of the centuries’ long acquired habit among educated Scots of ignoring their own culture and traditions, has been largely forgotten. This poem is by the Scottish poet who was the most widely popular among the Scottish people before the advent of Robert Burns. The poet is Sir David Lyndsay and the poem is his allegorical work, “The Dreme”, addressed to the young king James V, to whom he was a companion and tutor. Like so many great poems of the medieval and Renaissance periods, and so many more recent poems from Burns down to MacDiarmid, Lyndsay’s poem is constructed as a vision, and it may be all the more effective for being so. We could do with some visions about our lives and our society. “Where there is no vision, the people perish,” Miss Jean Brodie said. Politicians and administrators seem to fear the vision thing, perhaps because it has a way of making their tabulated aims and targets and mission statements look petty, timid and uninspired. Lyndsay’s Dreme is cosmic in conception, and yet it has a solid kernel of wordly reality. At its heart there lies a signpost or two for Scottish education which could be profitably followed by the educational establishment.

Lyndsay, as is the way with medieval poets, has spent a sleepless night with heavy thoughts preying upon his mind, and so gets up early as the January day begins to lighten. He wraps up warm with cloak and hood, a double layer of socks on his feet, and warm mittens on his hands, and sallies forth to have a walk upon one of the beaches of his native Fife. The weather is appropriate to the season and the place, and the birds are lamenting the absence of the warmth and brightness of spring and summer, a dreich east coast day in fact, and Lyndsay is glad, after his walk along the beach at low tide, to find shelter in a handy cave in the cliff-face. As poets do in the unlikeliest of circumstances, he intends to do some writing, but can’t think of anything to write (a normal condition for the writer) and sits idly doing nothing until he nods off and falls into a deep sleep. It is at this point that the poem moves from a kind of realism influenced by a pre-Wordsworthian empathy with nature into the full-blown allegorical mode. The poet dreams and the dream is an ordered working-out of a sophisticated view of the universe and society. Through the dream-experience of the poet, we are shown matters that we ought to know about. For Lyndsay, of course, it is a part of his duty as usher to inform and educate his young charge, the boy-king, James V. The future ruler must have a grasp of the current view of the universe in material and spiritual terms, of this earthly world so far as the knowledge of the time permitted, and of the place of his realm of Scotland within these larger contexts. For us, more than five hundred years down the line, the rationale for reading “The Dreme” must be different but it is still both relevant and timely.

As in all explorations of new territory, a guide will be of service. For Dante, through the Inferno and Purgatory, it is the poet Virgil. For Lyndsay in his dream universe it is a beautiful woman, Dame Remembrance. Lyndsay here is evoking more than the personal memory of the dreamer; what is being shown in the dream is more than the things that have already been learned and experienced by one person through life and education, and that are capable of recall. He seems to be creating Dame Remembrance as the means of access to the accumulated knowledge, experience and tradition of the community, the people, the nation. For our purposes, it might be most helpful to regard Dame Remembrance as a symbolic representation of an education system, not just the real system that may exist in the real world, but a visionary system, an ideal that can be created from our imaginations and aspirations.

The lessons that Lyndsay has Dame Remembrance articulate for the young James V are specific to his time and his intended station. There is a kind of revisiting of the territory of Dante in a tour of Hell where corrupt churchmen and wicked tyrannical kings are seen suffering torments for their misdeeds and fallings-off from the high expectations of their office. High-born lords and ladies are enduring agonies of punishment for their ostentatious displays of pride, extravagance, avarice and lust (It must be said that Lyndsay particularly lingers on the sufferings of the ladies). All ranks of society get their particular come-uppance. Dame Remembrance then flips the dreamer off on a rapid tour of Purgatory, Limbo, the spheres of the fixed planets (this is a pre-Copernican universe), and Heaven with Christ in majesty among the angels, saints and the redeemed souls of the virtuous. It is the basic instruction in cosmology and religion that precedes the geography lesson. The dreamer is then shown the Earth, its dimensions, its seas and continents (excluding America), with a brisk run-down of the main countries, especially in Europe. The lesson culminates with a view of the Earthly Paradise, Eden, which has its physical presence in the geographical context. However, the real nitty-gritty comes when the dreamer asks for a view of Scotland. “Weill, sonne,” says Dame Remembrance, like a kind auntie, “that sall I tak on hand.” And she shows him the Islands of Britain and Ireland, with England in the south, “ane full riche countre”, and Scotland to the north with all its islands. The relative poverty of Scotland is not stated, but clearly implied. Yet it is anything but an absolute poverty. The dreamer observes that the land of Scotland is very well endowed: an abundance of natural commodities to sustain and enhance the lives of the people; a beautiful and fertile landscape that can be productive, profitable and pleasurable in equal measure; a people who are attractive, ingenious, strong and resilient. Why, he asks Dame Remembrance, do riches not abound in this land? What is “the principall cause quhareof we ar so pure”? And, of course, Dame Remembrance goes off into full political lecture mode, suited to the young king who is being instructed. Failures in government policy and in the justice system, royal negligence in the past, indifference to the welfare of the common people, etc.: it is laid on thick. And, to add weight to the lecture, in comes the perfect visual aid, the ragged sorrowful wasted figure of the typical Scotsman, Jhone the Commoun Weill, Jock Aabodie, going into exile, driven from his home by lawlessness, corruption and oppression, crying out against the law, the Church, the nobility, the Highland outlaws, the haill clanjamfrie. If he is to stay in his own land and live a peaceful, prosperous and happy life, the new king has got to get a grip and sort the whole mess out. There you are, young Jamie, that’s your task for tomorrow. And Lyndsay’s Dream moves to its end, with a rude awakening as Dame Remembrance leads him back to the seaside cave where he lies sleeping, and, in a surreal conclusion to his dream, a warship appears off the Fife coast, fires off its guns and jerks him back to reality. True writer that he is, Lyndsay hurries back home to have breakfast and write down all the details of the dream before they fade from his memory.

So what has all this to do with us as we contemplate the cosmos of Scottish education? I was coming to that. As Robert Henryson knew, every fable has to have its “moralitas”, its explanation and point. As I said at the beginning, I have drawn on this literary illustration before, in the introduction to the book, Teaching Scottish Literature, in which I used these words:

 “…one of the things that (we) will realise, or be reminded of by … Dame Remembrance, is that Scotland is a rich nation in its literary culture. Just as Lyndsay sees the wealth of Scotland in terms of its natural resources of food in the plant and animal life on land and the fish in its seas, its extensive mineral deposits and the positive qualities of its people, so (we) should be able to see the cultural wealth of (our nation) in terms of the linguistic resources of three languages – Gaelic, Scots and English – expressed orally and in literature, the sophisticated variety of a literature that has always had a European dimension and been part of the great cultural movement of our civilisation, and the strength of an individuality created by the specific qualities of Scotland and its peoples.

“Why therefore, we might ask with Sir David Lyndsay, should these riches not redound within this realm, or be displayed to the advantage both of themselves and the (nation) they adorn?”

In order to answer that question, it is going to be necessary to make a long overdue foray into territory that educationists have tended to fight shy of entering, perhaps partly out of a natural distaste, but to some extent certainly out of timidity in attempting to operate in an unfamiliar environment. Yet this timidity is unfounded, and any distaste must be overcome. The environment in question is the arena of politics and public administration, and it is too important and too relevant to the topic we are considering to be left unaddressed. Scottish education, like all Scottish life, whether or not some people try to deny it, exists in a very political context. That has always been the case. There has never been a time since John Knox made his pronouncements on the need for the Scottish people to be literate that Scottish education and the decisions that shape it have been uninfluenced by the political climate of the day.

The traditional system of Scottish secondary education, based on senior secondary and junior secondary schools, all resolutely streamed throughout, was structured according to a politically motivated ideology of fitting people into social categories for life, depending on their performance in a pre-teen qualifying examination. The class-based unfairness of that system was blatant. The comprehensive system that succeeded it, which most of those active in education will have experienced, tried to marry a basic shared education for children of all levels of ability with a idealistic flexibility in practice that would cater for differing intellectual, physical and psychological needs. All practising teachers are aware of the problems and pressures of that system, and of how a political aim of social fairness has in fact produced both an even more marked post-code class division by where your school happens to be and a resulting parentally-inspired gold-rush for the best placements. The system of education that now seems to be emerging, and which teachers are being expected to implement, is equally political in its business-management-inspired reliance on targets and performance indicators and production models to meet employment market demands. Politics are always paramount. Which brings us inevitably to the politicians, and equally inevitably to their side-kicks, the civil servants.

The three successive Scottish education systems I have described have each been driven by a characteristic political ideology (I refuse to use the word “philosophy”). In turn, these have been Conservative, Old Labour and New Labour. And up to last year, Scottish education has been directed by politicians in these moulds. Decades of London-controlled administrations have appointed Secretaries for Education, often in rapid bewildering succession, to supervise shifts and turns in Scottish educational policy; the one constant element throughout has been, under a set of changing initials, the Scottish Education Department. This is a civil service department whose personnel have remained much more steady and consistent over the years than their political masters, so that inevitably their influence on the changing educational policies has been very significant, while remaining often almost invisible.

It is time to return to our true subject and ask the question, “What has been the effect of all this on Scottish culture, particularly Scottish literature, in the schools?”

I wish I could report that things were fine. A Scottish administration, run by Scottish politicians, supported by Scottish civil servants (bearing Scottish names, and mostly with Scottish educational backgrounds and sporting Scottish accents), bearing in mind their national cultural responsibilities to Scottish children in Scottish schools staffed by Scottish teachers, might reasonably be expected to organise the best conditions and make the necessary reasonable requirement within a wider cultural framework for the teaching of Scottish literature, among other cultural issues, as something that future citizens of Scotland are entitled to. Alas, no such luck. This Scottish Government, like all its predecessors, seem totally unprepared to make the natural, the right, the most rational and probably the most popular decision that it could make on behalf of Scottish children’s understanding of their own country. Scottish children remain without any guarantees that they will have access as of right to their particular cultural heritage. Unlike the fortunate children in nearly all other countries in the world, vis-a-vis their own national culture, as I have said before. Who are these people who deny them their rights? And who gave them the authority to do this?

To begin with the politicians. Perhaps we should not judge them too harshly. Like most of the people in Scotland today, they have emerged from that education system that has consistently placed little value on Scottish literature and language. They have been taught by teachers who similarly have had a Scottish schooling that lacked these components. No wonder that they do not have a strong awareness of anything there that specially needs defending or promoting. Like most of the Scottish population, they think it is mainly to do with Robert Burns and not much else. The notion that they and the children for whose education they hold responsibility are the direct inheritors of a fifteen-hundred-year old tradition of speech and writing is a strange and alien idea. There is a mind-set that resists arguments, however rational and convincing, and evidence, however solid and massive. Take that in conjunction with one of the hard facts of politics, that politicians take a long time to master and fully comprehend their ministerial briefs and remain largely in timid thrall to the civil servants who have been in post through successive administrations. A combination of ignorance and timidity in educational matters is a powerful disincentive against making the simple political decision that is all this matter requires. The politicians need to realise that education is not rocket science. It is not something to be left only to supposed experts who will produce the goods. I think we have ample evidence that the committees and working groups of educationists and seconded teachers have only ever the vaguest of notions about what the goods should be. The politicians are supposed to have the vision and to inspire it in others. They are also supposed to be cynically aware of what will benefit their own image in the eyes of the public. Can both these purposes can be easily allied in one political move? It has been successfully done before, in the recent past. Back in the earlier years of this millennium, along with other interested parties, the ASLS began promoting the idea that Scotland should have its own Poet Laureate. After an initial conversation and follow-up correspondence which, as ASLS President, I had with the then Minister for Culture, Frank McAveety, more serious and wide-ranging discussions began and the idea was gradually borne in upon the Labour Executive that this was actually an issue that was both the right thing to do and something that would be of political benefit. Hence we now have Edwin Morgan as the Scots Makar, not the best of titles, but signifying a real recognition of an important Scottish literary dimension. Forget the jokes about the pies, Frank McAveety deserves all credit for actively espousing the cause of Scottish literature. Where he has gone, why should the current Government fear to follow? 

But what about the civil servants and professional educationists who have had the major influence over what happens in schools with Scottish literature, etc.? It has to be said that, in the National Poet of Scotland negotiations, the role of the civil service was pretty dubious. The initial reaction to the proposal was one of guarded hostility, raising objections almost as a matter of duty. It was a reaction that had to change once the politicians got on to the bandwagon, but the feeling must remain that if it had remained up to the Civil Service, none of it would have happened. People have often said that the role of the Civil Service in Scotland has traditionally been that of a colonial administration ensuring that the interests of the London Government remained paramount. Hence manifestations of a national sentiment were to be discreetly discouraged, damped down, ignored and, in the last resort, effectively opposed. Traces of that may still linger on. I can give an example from the last decade of the last century. In 1998 the Central Committee for the Curriculum (now superseded by Learning and Teaching Scotland) received a report from a working party called the Review of Scottish Culture Group. This report had the strongly focused remit of developing the ways in which Scottish cultural components might be incorporated into the curriculum of primary and secondary schools. Like very many of the reports on education that were produced in earlier decades, the report was eloquently and gracefully written. It pre-dated the current fashion for clunking nebulous abstractions interspersed with complex tables and high-stacked boxes of points to be ticked. It set out clearly the arguments, the evidence, the resources, the possibilities for a coherent Scottish curriculum within the wider educational context, and rejected the idea of an unplanned, optional, laissez-faire approach through random and patchy provision in favour of the clear specification of a Scottish element in national programmes and syllabuses and, where appropriate, in attainment targets. Perhaps most significantly, the report stated that the experience of Scottish culture should be part of a continuous entitlement for all learners across the curriculum, well-resourced, organised and coherent. One would have expected that such proposals would have merited wide dissemination and serious consideration by educationists and the public at large. Yet what was the response to this report of the Central Committee for the Curriculum, the body that had commissioned it. What was the attitude of the Scottish Office behind the CCC? They rejected it, refused to publish it, tried to suppress it. Within a year, to cover the gap, another document was rushed out, written anonymously and probably within the Education Department, inadequately edited and clunkingly-written, entitled “The School Curriculum and the Culture of Scotland”. It omitted everything that made the original report convincing and cogent and practical, and was widely seen as an incompetent fudge. Understandably, it was received by the teaching profession with derision. It has hardly been heard of since, although Learning and Teaching Scotland still stocks it. As for the original Report, it needs updating to take account of later developments, but it should be essential reading for all, including ministers and civil servants, who wish to understand the issues involved in providing Scottish culture effectively in the schools at all levels. But perhaps the urge to censor the clear rational Scottish Enlightenment voice still pertains in the corridors of power.

One further, more recent, example of how officialdom works against Scottish literature will suffice. Following immediately upon the introduction of Standard Grade courses, the Scottish Examination Board made three attempts to revise the assessment of Higher Grade English, and some hard-won concessions were briefly obtained. In 1989 the syllabus labelled Revised Higher included specified Scottish texts for the first time, albeit in an optional literature section. This arrangement operated successfully until 1998 when the ambitious revisions of the Higher Still programme replaced it by internal assessment of an obligatory response to a Scottish text of the student’s own choice. However, in reaction to the justifiable complaints by teachers that the cumulative demands now being made were excessive, an ad hoc group was set up to review the whole of Higher English and recommend some alterations and pruning. This group worked quickly under Government pressure and came up with a number of proposals that were quickly implemented. One of the things that disappeared was this specification of possible Scottish literary texts. Even some members of the ad hoc group are not clear how this was agreed and on what basis. Its retention within the existing Higher recommendations would not have affected the overall assessment load, which remained the same for coursework. But it happened and the Scottish text element has not been reinstated. Currently the battle for it still goes on.

In the most recent discussions with officials on this matter, a slightly new set of buzz words and possible stalling devices has put in an appearance. The words that now are likely to appear as ammunition against the embedding of Scottish literature in the curriculum are “tokenism” and “narrowing”. With “tokenism” the argument is that any inclusion of a compulsory Scottish element in the Higher can only be a token gesture, a single text, a mere nod in the direction of what is right and proper. Therefore, and this is the subtle bit of the argument, since tokenism is by definition undesirable, it is best not to do anything at all. One would have thought that the rational response would be to make a fuller commitment to the issue, thus knocking tokenism out of the picture completely. But clearly I went to the wrong Logic class. The other word, “narrowing”, as in “narrowing of the literature syllabus”, refers to the perceived undesirable effect of bringing in a presumably lightweight and inferior Scottish text into a school literature programme, thus diluting the broad, comprehensive, well-planned, liberal and humane literature syllabus that is apparently thought to generally exist in Scottish schools. I think we could all agree that the use of these words “tokenism” and “narrowing” is more revealing of the level of ignorance of the quality and range of Scottish literature that prevails in influential quarters than of anything else. The final point I would make in this connection relates to a current, rather feeble, stalling device that has begun to appear in official pronouncements, to the effect that it is not possible to make any immediate changes in respect of Scottish literature in the Highers, because the current requirements at different levels, which are presumably inscribed in stone, could be upset. Therefore, the whole matter must wait until a later stage in the Curriculum for Excellence development before any decision can be reached. By which time, some may hopefully expect, a new delaying tactic will have been found. Those who have grown grey-haired in pursuing the cause of Scottish culture in schools may be forgiven for being cynical about the political and governmental environment they have had to enter and engage with. 

I think the lesson from these episodes is clear, although it has taken a long time for most of us to realise it. We have to grasp the undeniable fact that, within Scotland, under all the surface good-natured approval, smiling nods of support, warm references to how great Scottish culture is – Oh, I’ve always loved the ballads – My, isn’t Burns wonderful! – I like to hear the auld Scots tongue – we’re the best small country in the world – there is in some quarters a skulking streak of hostility to things Scottish, particularly if they are undeniably good and artistically successful. What is merely pawky, or mediocre, or parochial is fine. That is not a threat; it can always be patronisingly accepted. What has to be resisted is anything that demonstrates that Scotland has produced strong individual and independent voices, creative minds that can reach out to the young and show them that their community, their nation, has its own individual and independent value. That is what panics the Establishment horses, shows up the numpties, undermines the Anglicising tendency of the socially-insecure. And where can this hostility be found? It lurks anonymously in the corridors and offices of government, rumbles in school staffrooms, whispers in the media planning suites, occasionally snarling audibly in editorials and debates. It never ever justifies itself with reasons or facts, because on its side of the fence these crutches do not exist. It is the product solely of cultural ignorance and apparently invincible prejudice.

On its own, perhaps, this hostility might be tolerated and even bypassed. Being realistic, there have always been Scots who don’t like Scotland, and there always will be. Somebody, I forget who, said, “I love Scotland, but I wouldn’t trust it an inch.” There’ll always be people in it ready to let it, and you, down. So always keep an eye on it, and never turn your back. We could live with that. However, this hostility has a powerful ally. It can always rely on inertia to do much of its work for it. If lovers of Scottish literature are happy to let the teaching of it remain an option, to rely on the good instincts of English teachers and departments to give it a fair place in their programmes, then I’m afraid they are deluding themselves. They may think, by believing the fair words of Learning and Teaching Scotland, they are giving the best opportunity for it to happen. In reality they are giving a licence for it to be ignored. The real underlying message to teachers is, “You don’t need to do this if you don’t want to. You don’t need to make the effort.” And very many English teachers and departments will gladly, even enthusiastically, take advantage of this licence. They will do nothing. And so the enemies of Scottish literature will have won again.

The irony of it all is that there are so few of them that really count. If we were to collect together all those who have shown the will and had the influence, the necessary clout, to impede and to go on impeding the implementation of this most desirable of Scottish educational reforms, there would hardly be enough of them to fill a shoogly charabanc. This contest for the cultural health of Scotland is basically a no-show. Persuade them, if at all possible, to come out blinking into the sunlight and we shall find that they have nothing to say, no arguments to put forward in support of their prejudices, no credibility of any kind.

And what do the proponents of Scottish literature and culture have on their side? Let me summarise.

  1. A powerful set of arguments based on reason and good sense – it is the most natural course imaginable to provide Scottish culture to the young people of Scotland in Scottish schools.
  2. The example of every other established country in the world in requiring its own culture to be promoted in its educational system.
  3. The true nature and quality of Scottish literature and culture, as distinct from the ignorant set of preconceptions current among the ill-informed, that is, rich in its linguistic variety, its social and aesthetic diversity, its breadth and longevity, its relevance to modern life and its inter-connectedness with the larger European and global culture.
  4. A large and growing store of resources for teaching Scottish literature in the classroom, the kind of provision made by the ASLS over many years: texts and teaching materials; critical texts to help teachers in evaluating and contextualising what they wish to teach; back-up provision for teacher education through college and university courses, and increasingly on the Internet.

What more might be of benefit to this endeavour? I would like to think that there is room in our educational service for a Standing Cultural Advisory Group, made up of people who are actually knowledgeable in the specific areas of Scottish culture (literature, language, history, drama, music, etc.), rather than the current trendy suspect reliance on the limited knowledge and judgements of non-specialists (businessmen, journalists, social workers, public relations consultants, and the like). Such an advisory group could have a very specific remit and a defined time-frame to work within, to avoid its being tarred with the dread name of Quango. Equally, I am attracted to the notion that all civil servants and local government officials should be required to acquire credits in Scottish Studies courses as part of their Diploma or Degree in Public Administration, so that they might have some actual knowledge about the country they are engaged in administering.

This article began with an example from Scottish literature, “The Dreme” of Sir David Lyndsay, to focus the topic. Let it end similarly. In the first of his “Morall Fabillis”, one of the truly great but insufficiently recognised Scottish poets, Robert Henryson, tells the story of the cock who, in the course of his scratching for food around the back-yard, comes across a fine jewel. This jewel has been carelessly swept out of the house and lost. The cock eyes it beadily and moralises about its significance and relevance to his life. He finally rejects it as not being of any use to him, on the grounds that it may be beautiful and highly prized by others with a superficial set of values, but it does not compare with the basic food and necessities of his own life. He leaves it lying and continues in search of worms and grubs and ears of corn. It seems a good utilitarian down-to-earth philosophy, a practical ‘moralitas’ for a farmyard bird. However, Henryson sternly rejects this superficial worldly interpretation. There is a higher and truer interpretation of this fable. The cock is profoundly and foolishly mistaken in his view of the jewel, an unthinking ignoramus. The jewel signifies wisdom and learning, a knowledge that enhances human life, and shines with lustrous colours as enduring riches not to be spurned by the wise and thoughtful. There is a parallel here for us. Knowledge of the rich Scottish tradition in literature, a jewel of our culture, has been carelessly swept out of the auld hoose to lie unknown and neglected. Those who find it and try to estimate its worth too often apply the wrong standards of value; they set it against apparently more utilitarian and mundane considerations – the job market, useful qualifications, apprenticeships, basic communication, social skills – all very valuable in warstling alang through life. And they wrongly reject the jewel. What they cannot or will not see is the real higher value of the treasure, the knowledge that it holds of Scottish tradition and identity and original creativity, the capacity that it has to enhance the lives of those who acquire it, to help form the informed critical readers and thinkers of a humane and outward-looking Scotland.

We have to keep believing in this jewel that is ours. We have to keep agitating for Scottish literature to be given its rightful and required place within the larger context of good literature wherever it may come from. And that means continuing to demand that it feature as of right within the Certificate examinations with Scottish texts identified as such. It means continuing to argue for a Scottish element within the curriculum at all stages, required as a basic starting point in all programme planning, not something alluded to as a notional desirable possibility in vague phraseology within a few boxes amid the verbiage of a tediously written official document. It means arguing for the provision of adequate teacher education in Scottish language and literature at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels. It means continuing to lobby Scottish government at all levels for a clear and unambiguous statement and decision on the matter. It means continuing to seek support among teachers as a whole for something that they will find personally rewarding, professionally satisfying and daily enjoyable as an escape from the restricted and self-perpetuating selection of texts that make up the literature curriculum in the schools today.

If we keep at it, as some have been doing for more years than they care to remember, perhaps one day we shall have a Scottish Education Secretary who will find the will and the chutzpah to say, Enough is enough. This demeaning and evasive buck-passing has gone on too long. This is how it will be. Scottish literature and culture will be a requirement in all Scottish schools. Our children deserve it as their right. It only takes one person in the proper place to say this, and the whole shoddy official charade will end. The pissing-about will have to stop.

So why are we waiting?


Alan MacGillivray has been a Principal Teacher of English, a Senior Lecturer at Jordanhill College of Education and Honorary Lecturer in Scottish Literature at Strathclyde University. He is a Past President of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, and has written and edited extensively on Scottish literary topics. He also writes and publishes poetry in Scots and English.

(The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author, arising out of his experience and observation of Scottish education from the inside over the last fifty years.) 

Copyright © Alan MacGillivray 2010

Filed Under: Articles Tagged With: Alan MacGillivray, Schools, Sir David Lyndsay

McGONIGAL, James, ‘Edwin Morgan Poems, National 5’

11 September 2021 by Duncan Jones

A paper given at the Schools Conference of the Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 3rd October, 2015


I want to offer a slightly different approach to the six poems of Edwin Morgan that are now set texts at National 5. Line-by-line analysis has been done elsewhere, both online and in classrooms, so it seems important to think about providing some fresh perspectives on poems that (we might feel) have already been analysed within an inch of their lives. I am thinking here mainly of three of the four poems of Glasgow life that feature in the list of six set poems: ‘In the Snack-Bar’, ‘Good Friday’ and ‘Trio’, which have been taught for many years. These can be looked at afresh, and set within an approach that includes the other poems, ‘Winter’, ‘Hyena’ and ‘Slate’. The National 5 examination in fact demands that students pay attention to the interconnections between poems, and so there clearly needs to be a wider perspective than line-by-line analysis.

Everyone looks for a starting point for analysing poetry, however, and I will refer to three useful resources for teachers and pupils. The first of these is Scottish Short Texts (Hodder Gibson, 2014) by Carolyn Cunningham and Willie McGuire, which can be highly recommended for its interactive classroom activities and practical examination focus, in addition to detailed textual analysis. Secondly, placing the set poems within a wider view of Morgan’s life and work, and also written at an accessible level, is the ASLS Scotnote, The Poetry of Edwin Morgan. This pays attention to the set poems, but also to the development of his writing and reputation, and it draws on my work as the poet’s biographer. It also provides useful guidance towards further audio and online resources. Finally there are the BBC Bitesize web pages on the set poems, which students might be directed to by parents or teachers. This I found somewhat basic and uninspiring, but it is thorough enough, and does offer a multiple-choice test after each poem has been analysed. This can be a quick and useful assessment technique, and could be adapted to be more challenging. 

I will be pointing out some errors of interpretation in all three of these resources, but the main intention here is not to pick holes or over-interrogate the obvious. Rather, it is to set the poems in a fuller context, so that they can be read, taught and written about more confidently. It is important to consider the dynamic in any poem between its line-by-line movement and its endpoint of completion or summation – in other words, to remember the journey of the reading mind, which is not a linear series of discrete steps but more like a dance movement, where the tempo and overarching musical theme work together with an enjoyment, or at least a deployment, of the technical skills. This holistic approach can get lost whenever we focus too anxiously on what each line or image ‘means’, and the whole point of the poetry vanishes into a sort of fussiness. 

The context of Morgan’s Glasgow poems

Four of the six set poems have Glasgow as a setting. Three of them date from the early 1960s: ‘In the Snack-bar’ (written in August 1964), ‘Trio’ (15 December 1963), and ‘Good Friday’ (May 1962). These poems seem very familiar now to many teachers, who might even have studied these texts themselves at school. But at the time of writing they were quite new, radical or even rebellious. In the early 1960s, Morgan was known mainly as a translator and critic, and as an experimental poet within the avant-garde and international movement of concrete poetry and sound poetry, pushing the typographic and the phonic elements of poetry to their extremes. But the other important Scottish concrete poet, Ian Hamilton Finlay, who was a good friend of Morgan, disliked these Glasgow poems, and said so. To him they lacked the verbal intricacy and sparkle of Morgan’s concrete poetry. And at the other extreme, Hugh MacDiarmid, who was the great precursor and a sort of poetic father-figure for Morgan, not only saw concrete poetry as trivial word-play, but he hated industrial Glasgow. For him it was an ‘arrida nutrix’, not a wet-nurse but a dry-nurse, a place that offered no poetic nourishment whatsoever. He also despised the Glaswegian dialect as a slovenly and bastard mixture, far from the ‘authentic’ Scots language which he had tried to re-invent and synthesise, and which was for him definitely a rural and mainly Borders and East-coast tongue. 

But Glasgow was Morgan’s birthplace and home. He identified with its technological inventiveness, its modernity and energy, and he felt solidarity with its people and concern for the modern city’s very visible social problems. He came from quite a well-off background. The family firm was Arnott, Young and Company, founded by his grandfather on his mother’s side, a significant ship-breaking and metal recycling business on Clydeside, with several yards. They were well-off, but his family did not own a car, and they travelled everywhere by tram or train, surrounded by Glaswegian voices. Morgan was an intelligent only child, often in adult company, and very alert to voices, and what accents and tones might mean. Travelling was always a sort of entertainment for him, and just being in Glasgow, he once said, was like being in a play. It was surprising, dramatic, comic or tragic – you never knew who would walk on-stage next. 

The idea of writing poetry about Glasgow came as a revelation to him. In the 1950s, his poetry had been interesting but anxious, tense, over-worked perhaps. This reflected tensions and uncertainty in his own life and work, including his own gay identity and the secret and illegal life that this entailed. Then, in the spring of 1962 he was on an educational cruise to St Kilda (he may have been giving lectures on literature, to work his passage) when suddenly he had a psychological break-through. It may have been because he was at sea, which he always loved; or because this was a former troop-ship, the Dunera, which would have brought to mind his former freedom as a young soldier sailing round the Cape of Good Hope to take part in the North Africa campaign, in the Royal Army Medical Corps. Suddenly the poem ‘Linoleum Chocolate’ came into his mind – a tiny incident in which he had seen ‘Two girls running, / running, laughing / laughing, lugging, / two rolls of linoleum / along London Road’ in Glasgow’s East End, near the Barras open-air market (Collected Poems[CP]: pp. 163–64). Suddenly a bar of chocolate flies out of the second girl’s pocket, a man picks it up for her, and the girls have a bite of it ‘to recruit the strength / of their giggling progress’. 

It was a trivial incident, but here is how Morgan describes it to a friend and fellow-editor, seven years later in March 1969: 

Never had I been able to write about two girls running down the street till that moment. It was as if – and I recognised the change immediately – I suddenly realised that I was able to be free, that the albatross had slipped off my neck into the Atlantic, that the everyday things that I had always had sympathy with but had never been able to write about were now in a new relation to me and could come into poetry as naturally as symbols of alienation had come in the past. My god, to be post-alienated! 
Edwin Morgan, The Midnight Letterbox: Selected Correspondence 1950–2010 ed. James McGonigal and John Coyle (Carcanet Press, 2015: p. 232)

These letters provide another useful background resource for Morgan’s poetry, in his own words. We might notice here how this Glasgow poem relates to ‘Trio’, in its atmosphere of laughter and generosity; or to ‘In the Snack-bar’ in its helpfulness from a stranger (the man who picks up the chocolate for them); or to the use of real settings, London Road, or Bath Street, in ‘Good Friday’, Buchanan Street in ‘Trio’ or Great Western Road in the other Glasgow poem, ‘Winter’. I should also say that Morgan’s letters, and the actual dates when he wrote particular poems, come from another place that is well worth visiting online: the Edwin Morgan Papersin the Department of Special Collections, University of Glasgow Library.

Can meaningful poetry come from small incidents?

We need to see where such local poems fit into the wider scheme of things. Scottish Short Texts and BBC Bitesize are fine on the surface detail and techniques line-by-line, but are perhaps not so good on the thematic structure of where that detail fits. So here I’ll offer three ways into dealing with all of the set poems and with the final comparison question in the National 5 examination. Scottish Short Texts has really good teaching ideas, such as the use of Venn diagrams to plot the similarities and differences between the set poems, but it also seems to me to get some things awry. For example, I don’t read the drunk man on the bus in ‘Good Friday’ necessarily as a character with whom we do not sympathise (which the authors warn students against trying to do – fair enough, they admit, it is possible, but just don’t try it in the exam). Sensible advice, perhaps, but I don’t want to follow it here. Nor do I see ‘alcoholism’ as a key theme of this poem. For BBC Bitesize, the drunk is unquestionably a Catholic. Again, that is not the only reading, nor the likely reading, nor the whole story. A better way of treating these poems may be to consider how they fit into a larger pattern, both in Morgan’s work and in terms of how they inter-relate and bear comparison with each other.

Here are three central themes in Morgan’s poetry:

  1. journeys in time and space (or the space-time continuum)
  2. isolation and social solidarity (the solitary seeks solidarity)
  3. voices for Scotland (tuning in to difference, beyond the single voice)

Journeys in time and space

We know that Edwin Morgan was really engaged by space exploration in the late 1950s and early 1960s, but he was even more puzzled by time, which remained ‘the great mystery’. As a boy he was very interested in science, and the evolutionary variety of human and animal life on earth fascinated him. He was also growing up in an age when the theory of relativity was reshaping the way human beings thought about time and the universe. One work that caught his attention in his late teens was Joseph Dunne’s An Experiment in Time (1927, 1934), which deals with relativity, alternative universes and parallel time zones, which become accessible through our dream states. I think this is the genesis of some of Morgan’s best-known science-fiction poems. But in his other poems the varieties of time are crucial too, and the theme of time is a way into reading them.

‘In the Snack-bar’ seems to slow down time. There is the moment-by-moment movement across the café floor, down the stairs to the toilet, with the poet assisting the old blind hunchback and adjusting to his pace: 

Inch by inch we drift towards the stairs. 
A few yards of floor are like a landscape 
to be negotiated, in the slow setting out 
time has almost stopped. I concentrate my life to his: [. . .]

Time and space are slowed down and distorted. ‘Thematic variation’ (where the adverbial phrase is used to start a clause or sentence, rather than coming, as normally, after the verb) makes ‘Inch by inch’ the ‘theme’ of the sentence, the point that comes first to our minds and is emphasised. The slow pace of time is measured by the small inches taken – not ‘we drift inch by inch’ but ‘inch by inch we drift.’ The use of personal pronouns ‘I’ and ‘we’ here marks a contrast with the objectively-described opening of the poem, where alliteration and onomatopoeia help enact the scene for us. There is an extraordinary technical skill behind the setting of an ordinary scene: 

A cup capsises along the formica, 
slithering with a dull clatter.

But this moment-by-moment journey (‘And slowly we go down. And slowly we go down.’) is set within a final shocking perspective of days, years, spent as a cripple, stretching from birth to age: ‘Dear Christ, to be born for this’. Beyond that again, looking further back in time, there is the poet’s admiration or wonder at the old man’s perseverance, a very human survival trait, as he climbs: 

with many pauses but with that one 
persisting patience of the undefeated 
which is the nature of man when all is said. 
And slowly we go up. And slowly we go up. 
The faltering, unfaltering steps 
take him at last to the door [. . .]

So this one incident, a chance encounter of the poet happening to be present when a disabled man asks for help to go to the toilet, first slows down time and then expands it across one life, and then across human lifetimes and ages – a perspective caught in that sharp and admirable paradox of ‘faltering, unfaltering steps’. This trivial incident of a few moments of kindness towards a stranger pulses with frameworks of time that include moments, days, years, aeons of human survival and progress. (The thematic link to the geological timescale of ‘Slate’ is clear, albeit in a very different poetic form.) 

The final exclamation, ‘Dear Christ, to be born for this’ is not a prayer, but seems to be half an expletive, half a challenge to a divine order that allows such a disabled and limited life. The authors of Scottish Short Texts take this reference to Christ and link it backwards in the poem to the biblical Simon of Cyrene helping Jesus to bear his burden towards crucifixion on Calvary, but I’m not really sure about this. Morgan was well-read in the Bible early and late, both as a smart Sunday-School pupil and as a lecturer on John Milton’s verse and prose, and he would have known that Simon was constrained by the Romans to help carry the cross rather than volunteering to do so. But it is perfectly true that the religious perspective does lead us to ask searching questions. In a supposedly Christian city, why is it only the atheist who volunteers to help the old man? Who is the Good Samaritan here?

This leads us on to consider another sort of time: namely, religious or supernatural time. In theology, the distinction is made between the Greek terms ‘chronos’ (chronological or historical time) and ‘kairos’, which is the crucial or sacred time, the moment of decisive change, which must be seized. Chronos sees time as a quantity, kairos concerns time as a quality. When Jesus says to his mother Mary at Cana ‘My hour is not yet come’, this does not mean he has just checked his wristwatch! It is a different kind of ‘hour’, a different order of time. It means the hour of destiny, or ultimate self-realisation. Now Edwin Morgan had his own disagreements with organised Christianity, both in its Protestant and Catholic forms (his parents were Presbyterians, but for mainly social reasons, he thought, and his father was a Freemason, again for business reasons). Their son gave up going to church about the age of fifteen. As a soldier in the Middle East, Morgan visited Bethlehem, Jerusalem, the holy places – and was not impressed by their commercialism. But the powerful persona of the Jesus of the gospel narratives continued to niggle him, and to fascinate by his difference. This would lead Morgan finally in the year 2000 to write a trilogy of plays on the life of Jesus, entitled AD. This non-traditional version of the gospel story caused some controversy at the time, most of it manufactured by the Scottish media. 

We see that interest in religious or supernatural time in ‘Trio’ and ‘Good Friday’. Morgan questions religion by presenting alternative interpretations of it. In ‘Trio’, it is a bit too easy to suggest equivalence between the three Magi of the traditional Nativity in Bethlehem and the three young people carrying their gifts of the chihuahua in its Royal Stewart tartan coat, the guitar with its tinsel and the Christmas baby ‘in its white shawl’. In this reading, the Christmas lights on Buchanan Street are linked to the star of Bethlehem. But in a chronos/kairos reading of this particular ‘sharp winter evening’ at the ‘end of this winter’s day’, any Christian message is deliberately agnostic:

Whether Christ is born or not born, you 
put paid to fate, it abdicates [. . .]

The quasi-supernatural kairos energy suggested in the references to the defeat of ‘fate’ and ‘monsters’ is more focused here, I think, on the political march of humanity. These three are like a protest march against ‘monsters of the year’ – which might be negativity, oppression, a sour humourlessness. Against these, ‘all three of them are laughing’, and they vanish into the city street crowded with Christmas shoppers, with ‘laughter ringing them round like a guard’ (a nice conflation of the ringing sound of laughter and a protective ring of steel). The moment of significance seems political, about the young and their need for freedom, a very 1960s concern. There is a religious perspective present, of course, but it is not traditionally Christian. Rather, it takes a longer view backwards in time beyond the BC/AD divide of the birth of Jesus towards the pagan world (or simply the human world), one that organised Christianity would to some extent supplant. The most memorable images resonate with the pagan mysteries, not church services:

The guitar swells under its milky cover, tied at the neck 
with silver tinsel tape and a brisk sprig of mistletoe. 
Orphean sprig! Melting baby! Warm chihuahua!

Pagan sensuality and celebration of animal life, of birth and kindness, of gift-giving and keeping small creatures warm – all of these can oust the morose parody of Scottish Protestant Christianity which was later represented in comedy by the character of the Reverend I. M. Jolly.

The poem ‘Good Friday’ opens at the kairos moment of Christian faith: ‘Three o’clock’, the hour of Christ’s death on the cross. The poet has remembered this, but the rest of the poem takes an agnostic or humanistic look at what religion has come to mean for many ordinary working people: ‘I don’t know what today’s in aid of’, says the drunk man. His religious or existential confusion is nicely set against the lurching line breaks, where enjambment constantly enacts the speaker’s drunken sway (even when seated!). Dashes and repetition are used too for the typical speech pauses caused by a drunk man’s need to focus on what he wants to say:

The bus lurches 
round into the sun. ‘D’s this go –’ 
he flops beside me – ‘right along Bath Street? 
– Oh tha’s, tha’s all right, see I’ve 
got to get Easter eggs for the kiddies.’

I’ve already signalled disagreement with the view of the drunk man as not being someone with whom we would sympathise. I do think sympathy is being evoked. I do not think that the poet is silent during the drunk man’s monologue to signal his disapproval, or to ignore him in the hope that he will go away. Nor do I think, as BBC Bitesize suggests, that he is a Catholic. He may be. But most Catholics I know would refer to ‘Jesus’ not to ‘Christ’ in talking about the gospel story. It is true that the economic migration of Irish labourers both Catholic and Protestant into Scotland meant the uprooting and loss of cultural and religious continuities. My sympathy comes from the poet’s portrayal of a man who is smart enough to realise how working-class industrial life has cut him off from education and understanding, that it has wasted his potential: the working man is ‘jist bliddy ignorant – Christ aye, / bliddy ignorant.’ The accuracy of the speech rhythms here is harsh with self-blame. 

The poet-narrator’s silent attention points us towards the causes of cultural loss, the social frustrations drowned or dampened down by alcohol. These are things that need to be heard, not to be commented on but simply listened to. And there is also the positive point of him not having spent all of his money on drink, but having kept enough back to buy Easter eggs ‘for the kiddies’. (That choice of ‘kiddies’ here, rather than the more traditional Glasgow dialect term ‘weans’, led me in the Scotnote to read these ‘kiddies’ as grandchildren. There is no indication of this distinction in the poem, however: it was merely a reflection of my own life at the time of writing it, with six of them to think of – grandchildren and Easter eggs.) The poem ends on a positive note, again one of human survival. The man is last seen heading towards the sun. The wordplay on the Son of God, and the way in which Christian tradition blends the rolling aside of the entrance stone from the Easter tomb with the pagan Spring fertility symbol of rolling eggs, are both understated, but just present, perhaps, in the final mood.

The last dimension of time is where we most often notice it passing – that is, within our own lives, or on the faces of family and friends. Decade follows decade and suddenly it seems that hair has turned grey and retirement approaches. Morgan was born in 1920, at the start of a new decade, and he always took the turn of the year seriously, settling all his bills and taking down old calendars. Even more serious was the change of a decade, which marked turning points in his life. In 1930 he was ten, becoming aware of his own sexuality. In 1940, at 20 he became a soldier for six years. In 1950 he was thirty and beginning to publish as a poet and academic. But 1960 felt much more significant than any of those. Morgan finally left home for a flat of his own in Glasgow’s West End. And he fell in love with John Scott, a working-class Catholic, a factory storeman, an attractive Other to almost everything in his earlier and often lonely life. In his creative life the 1960s brought engagement with international writers, translators and avant-garde artists. In politics there came a thaw in the Cold War that had divided Western and Eastern Europe since the end of World War Two. That was important because of his socialist ideals and horror at the thought of atomic warfare. In local politics, Glasgow saw a bold new programme of slum clearance and the building of social housing schemes, with major road works to improve travel and communication. 

All of that sense of personal and political change is poured into his poem ‘The Second Life’, which provided the title for his first poetry collection, The Second Life (1968). His first major collection, at the late age of forty-eight – and a very successful, award-winning collection too. In the poem he seems amazed at life, its promise and renewal:

But does every man feel like this at forty – 
I mean it’s like Thomas Wolfe’s New York, his 
heady light, the stunning, plunging canyons, beauty – 
pale stars winking hazy downtown quitting-time, 
and the winter moon flooding the skyscrapers, northern – 
an aspiring place [. . .] (CP: p. 180)

I dwell on this because the set poem ‘Winter’ (written 9–10 December 1977) really needs to be read through the mirror of ‘The Second Life’. Some of the optimistic images of the earlier poem are revisited and rewritten. It is not just a poem of complaint (‘But does every man feel like this at fifty-seven –’) – but in some ways it is a poem that is full of complaint. Morgan was very unhappy in his domestic and personal life at this point. There were messy and expensive repairs to his flat, disrupting his work routines. Worse, he had not only quarrelled badly with John Scott, but he had deliberately kept himself aloof. The two men would not be reconciled at all before John’s death from cancer the following year. Morgan felt tremendous guilt over that, made worse by the fact that he had already become attached to a much younger man. In a poem called ‘The Divide’ he talks about ‘the years between us like the sea’. The love affair is described in several poems: ‘Smoke’, ‘The Beginning’, ‘Planets’, ‘Resurrections’ (CP: pp. 369–73). 

Morgan was not only conscious of his own age, but also of the recent death of friends and contemporaries – the young Scottish experimental poet, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, died of an accidental overdose, possibly suicide. Musicians and artists he admired had died: Elvis Presley, Marc Bolan, Maria Callas, Vladimir Nabokov, Robert Lowell. Just three months before composing ‘Winter’, he wrote a poem called ‘A Good Year for Death’, with a verse about each artist, each ending with the same refrain, ‘Death has danced his tune away’. 

So ‘Winter’ is a poem about time as experienced in the aging process, and the impossibility of arresting the progress of time. The myth of Tithonus (in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s re-telling of it in his dramatic monologue, ‘Tithonus’) is used as an ironic commentary on Morgan’s own life. The setting of his poem overlooking the frozen wintry scene of Bingham’s Pond, which he could see from his flat on Glasgow’s Great Western Road, is a bitter reprise of his optimistic ‘The Second Life’ (May 1963), written fourteen years earlier. In the myth, Tithonis had been granted perpetual life but forgot to ask for perpetual youth (a bad mistake!) and so was forced to live on within an increasingly decrepit body. In his poem, Morgan almost seems to be mocking his own 1960s experimental poetry as he plays verbal games with Tennyson’s famous opening lines, which are:

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall, 
The vapours weep their burden to the ground, 
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath, 
And after many a summer dies the swan.

Morgan keeps this autumnal scene, but fast-forwards it into winter:

The year goes, the woods decay, and after, 
many a summer dies. The swan 
on Bingham’s pond, a ghost, comes and goes. 
It goes, and ice appears [. . .].

These fragmenting sentences, stopping and starting in the wrong place and turning the meanings upside down, enact Morgan’s confusion and the loss of coherence in his life – everything is broken, including his usual optimism. The motto he would choose for his Collected Poems (1990) was: ‘Beti zeru urdin zati bat dago: bila ezazu’. No translation is given, but it is a saying in the ancient Basque language:

‘Somewhere in the sky there’s one shred of blue: chase that’.

The saddest line in ‘Winter’ to me is the longest:

Even / dearest blue’s not there, though poets would find it.

If he himself can’t find it, the central core of his life as a poet has vanished. ‘The Second Life’ and ‘Winter’ share the setting of Great Western Road, and Bingham’s Pond with its skaters in the evening dark – but what a change of mood from the happy skaters and their happy audience of the crisp cold early 1960s evenings when

they swung and flashed among car headlights, 
the drivers parked round the unlit pond 
to watch them, and give them light, what laughter 
and pleasure rose in the rare lulls 
of the yards-away stream of wheels along Great Western R

In ‘Winter’ now the scene is ‘stark’ and ‘cut by evening cries, by warring air’. Not communal ‘laughter’ but a sense of violence and threat in the darkness. Not ‘a stream of wheels’ and helpful headlights, but instead it is the fog that is on the move, as it ‘drives monstrous down the dual carriageway / out to the west.’ The monsters of the year which once seemed to have been banished by the happy laughter of ‘Trio’, have come back to haunt the poet. Tithonus had been granted eternal life by Aurora, the Dawn Goddesss of the East, but the poet’s life seems to be heading west with the declining sun, in a fog of uncertainty. The white page he is writing on can’t seem to meet the challenge of ‘the grey dead pane of ice’. In the course of the poem, the ice has altered from ‘swan-white ice’ with glints of ‘crystal beyond white’ to something that is as inert and grey as the poet now feels. The ‘grey dead pane’ is the image of the cold division between life and death. In this mood, time has ceased to be flexible, and any life and any relationship can be seen as limited and finite.

We have looked at various aspects of time in the poems so far:

  • examining the behaviour of time: how it can seem to speed up or slow down (and how the poet’s word order and rhythms can make that seem to happen); 
  • or considering significant or meaningful time, moments of destiny or discovery with the present day set against a sacred past, at Christmas, or Easter time, with Christian and pagan world-views intersecting with the present; 
  • or finally time passing in one person’s life from youth to age, from a sense of life as being open to the future to a sense of life closing down, locked into memories or regrets.

And within this theme of time, we should also think about the narrative movement of the poems, how they move from the upper to the lower level and back again (‘In the Snack-bar’), or from street level to top deck of the bus then back down to the street again (‘Good Friday’); or, within the remembering mind, from the hopeful 1960s to the almost despairing 1970s. Morgan liked to describe himself as a story-teller, and narratives also deal with time – as in that most famous story opening, ‘Once upon a time . . .’. 

Isolation and social solidarity

Themes can intersect within a poem, as in a Venn diagram. ‘Winter’ creates a time, a season, but it also presents an isolation. The grey ice is like a window pane that divides the flat-dweller from the life of the city outside. This takes us on to the second overarching theme in these poems selected for National 5 – a division between the solitary writer and the solidarity of social life outside or beyond him. It is a contrast between isolation and social identity. I am thinking of ‘identity’ as a confident or easy sense of belonging to a community, whether seen as a family, or a social class grouping, or even a sexual identity or orientation. Frequently in Morgan’s poetry we find him on the outside, observing, looking in on other people’s lives, catching them as in a photograph, in an instamatic or Instagram pose.

We find this division in the poems of Glasgow life. The trio in Buchanan Street are happy, instinctual, unreflecting – the poet is alone on the busy street of shoppers. In ‘Good Friday’ he is the almost silent passenger, listening carefully to what the drunk man is saying, taking it in, recording it, reflecting on what it implies. The one person to come to the aid of the hunchbacked man in the snack-bar is the other loner: the poet is in the café but not part of a crowd, on his own, it seems.

Various factors combined to place Morgan in an outsider role. He was an only child, the bookish son of non-reading parents whose main interest was the family business of ship-breaking. The parents were conservatives, their son was a socialist with a particular interest in Russian literature and society. They did not approve of his academic career and would have preferred a more secure and perhaps better-paid job in a bank. In his academic life, Morgan was deliberately not a traditional specialist, and his main areas of interest were not part of the English curriculum when he started teaching: American literature, avant-garde poetry, literature in translation, Scottish literature (then seen as part of Scottish History) and cultural studies that included science and social science. So he was, in a sense, isolated from more traditional colleagues.

What made him most acutely a loner, of course, was his sexual identity as a gay man – a secret identity, since homosexual activity continued to be criminalised in Scotland until 1980. (England and Wales became more liberal in 1967, in response to the Wolfenden Report of ten years earlier.) If Morgan’s sexual life had been discovered and he had been arrested and jailed, then he would have lost his job and been socially ostracised. So the love poems that he wrote for John Scott in the 1960s, such as ‘One Cigarette’ or ‘Strawberries’ were written in a deliberately ‘coded’ manner, where the gender of the loved one is unclear. And this gives the poems their power to speak for love beyond gender and sexuality. There is a sense, which the poet certainly felt, that his poetry in the early 1960s was part of an underground movement for ‘gay liberation’, even before that term had been invented. ‘Glasgow Green’ is the most explicit of such poems, although even here some of his colleagues did not recognise what its implications were. My biography of the poet, Beyond the Last Dragon, A Life of Edwin Morgan (2012 extended paperback edition) provides a full account of these crucial aspects of the poet’s identity.

Morgan was regularly invited to give readings in secondary schools all over Scotland, and was often asked to read ‘Glasgow Green’ which was taught in many classrooms. He sensed a gradual change in pupils’ attitudes towards homosexuality. In 2003 this topic came up in an interview on ‘Gay Writing in Scotland’, for a book called Ethically Speaking: Voice and Values in Modern Scottish Writing (2006). 

If ‘Glasgow Green’ is an appeal for gay liberation, then it is just possible (I put this forward tentatively) that ‘In the Snack-bar’ might also be seen as offering a corrective towards biased views. To be a gay man in a toilet in a basement, helping another man, is not necessarily to be ‘up to no good’. In this poem, kindness and charity and sensitivity to the needs of others are signs of a shared humanity, not an occasion for social prejudice. We may sense here that, just as the pagan and Christian symbols overlap in ‘Trio’ or ‘Good Friday’, so isolation and identity overlap in ‘In the Snack-bar’ and the other Glasgow poems too. The drunk man on the bus is isolated too, despite all his talk – ‘it’s the drink talking’, as the saying goes, and he has cut himself off by inebriation from a society (and a divisive schooling system, as it then was) which has failed to recognise the contribution he could have made. 

The poet, then, presents the light and dark of modern city life, but he is also a witness to its humanity and warmth from which, in the nature of things, he sometimes feels excluded. Often he presents a camera’s-eye view, snapping the urban landscape and letting it speak for itself – as in the poem ‘Death in Duke Street’ where a young man and a young mother hold an old man who has collapsed dying on the street: ‘As if he still belonged / they held him very tight’. The poet is watching this, on the edge of the crowd it seems, but that too is a position of isolation, a single focus. Singleness is not, of course, something we associate with Morgan’s work. He is the most multi-faceted of poets, open to the widest range of experience and poetic forms. But the individual’s perspective, isolated and sharp, is part of a key theme of longing for solidarity. 

Voices for Scotland

This leads onto the third broad shaping force in Morgan’s poetry, which could be called ‘Voices for Scotland’ – a focus on the plural and multiple. If you want a political slogan, you might demand ‘a voice for Scotland’, or present yourself as ‘the voice of Scotland’. These are party slogans. In Edwin Morgan’s world there is no single voice, nor should there be. He was critical of creative writing tutors who advised young writers to ‘find their voice’. For him, the world spoke in many voices. This included its many languages (he translated substantially from a dozen European languages, ancient and modern, and occasionally from several others) but also the imagined languages of machines. ‘The Computer’s First Christmas Card’ is well known, but what about its second Christmas card, and its code poem and dialect poem? Objects are made to speak too (‘The Apple’s Song’) and creatures both imaginary (‘The Loch Ness Monster’s Song’) and real, as in ‘Hyena’. We have already seen how he includes, among Scotland’s voices, the Glaswegian dialect which had formerly been discounted as an unacceptable literary medium.

I sometimes think that these multiple voices were being presented partly against Hugh MacDiarmid’s unique and powerful voice, ambitious for his own poetry and for Scotland. MacDiarmid was knowledgeable on many matters, but not perhaps gifted in knowledge ‘from the inside’ – whereas Morgan was happy giving voices to all sorts of things, not content only with describing them ‘from the outside’. So the techniques of the dramatic monologue appealed, and were extended into new territory. The Hyena’s voice, dispassionate, ironic, cold, insolent, efficient, is a good example of Morgan’s skill in dramatic monologue.

The first-person narration conveys the creature’s character and threat from the start: ‘I am waiting for you’ – followed by a pointed description of how hungry and thirsty it is. The present tense verbs draw the reader in towards this dangerous encounter – we are brought closer to its eyes ‘screwed to slits against the sun’. There is an arrogance about this creature. He sounds like a narcissist, a charming sociopath. Three times the hyena compares itself to Africa in similes that emphasise its rough coat, its craftiness, its energy. The energy is itemised in its tireless prowling movements: ‘I trot, I lope, I slaver, I prowl’.

The essential movement of the poem is towards the reader, in a scary way. Having explored the desolate and ruined places, and described in slow motion how to tear open a dead lion, the hyena moves in on us, by way of listing pieces of anatomy that we humans share with other prey: foot, heart, sinews and glazing eye. In the final lines, it is the reader’s bones that are picked clean and left to the winds. In the creation of the hyena’s voice, the number of questions posed to the reader/listener is a way of turning this encounter into a one-sided conversation. ‘What do you think of me? . . . Do you like my song? Do you like me when my tongue comes lolling over my jaw?’ This gambit of question as threat reminds me of the well-known Glasgow pub enquiry, posed in a somewhat aggressive manner: ‘What are you looking at?’ (There’s no absolutely safe answer to that.) This also makes for interesting contrasts with the dramatic monologue form, partial in ‘Good Friday’ or fully in ‘Slate’. It might strike us, also, that the hyena is a loner, but a dangerous one.

Unlike the other set poems, ‘Hyena’ was specifically written for children, commissioned by Penguin for its early 1970s school anthology series, The English Project. It was in Stage One of a three-stage series. Writing to his friend Iain Crichton Smith in October 1971, Morgan describes the process of writing it:

I am not at all sure that I know what happens when I am creating a poem, and whatever it is basically, it varies a good deal from poem to poem (since my poems are of many different kinds). At one extreme perhaps is the commissioned poem, like ‘Hyena’, ‘Heron’, and ‘Goal!’ which Penguin Books asked me to do for school anthologies: in each case they sent me a photograph of the subject, and my poem was to be an accompaniment to the photograph (a sort of reversal of the more usual habit of finding an illustration to go with an existing poem). It worked reasonably well; I was able to react strongly enough to the photographs to be roused into verbal activity, though not immediately, since I let them lie around for a while and sink into my subconscious, and then eventually had a more intense go at them and tried writing ‘with my eye on the subject’ as in this case it had to be. Having gone through this process I feel it has something to be said for it. Maybe more poems should be commissioned. 
(Edwin Morgan, The Midnight Letterbox: p. 260)

We might note again here the combination of photographic image and an entry point into an estranged moment of encounter, a solitariness or distance that, as we have seen, Morgan had some personal experience of, but emerging powerfully here from his creation of a non-human voice. 

This phrase ‘non-human’ brings us to ‘Slate’. The choice of this poem as the set piece from Sonnets from Scotland (1984) may be slightly puzzling, when there are so many other marvellous ones to choose from in the series of 51 poems. ‘Slate’ is published at the beginning of the sequence, but opens with the paradoxical claim: ‘There is no beginning’. This may a challenge to biblical explanations, whether in Genesis or at the opening of the Gospel of St. John: ‘In the beginning was the Word [. . .]’. But in any case, ‘Slate’ was not the first sonnet written. That was ‘The Solway Canal’ (printed 26th in the series) which imagines a journey by hydrofoil, at some time in the future, along a canal dividing Scotland from England. This dividing line reveals the political impetus behind the sonnet series – the failed Referendum of 1979 when a majority of Scots voted for a Scottish assembly, but not in a sufficient majority of everyone actually eligible to vote. Morgan felt that it was wrong to be too pessimistic over the result, but better to view it as a spur to writers and artists to create a more confident sense of Scottish identity. And indeed Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Tom Leonard and Liz Lochhead (to mention only Glasgow writers) all went on to publish important work in the 1980s.

Beyond the paradox of ‘There is no beginning’ for the beginning of a poem at the beginning of a series, there is the puzzle of the words that complete this first line: ‘We saw Lewis / laid down [. . .]’. Who are ‘we’, who in the next sonnet in the series are to be found scuba-diving in the warm prehistoric seas around Bearsden, near Glasgow, or in the next sonnet again are watching glaciers melt or discovering the ashes of hunter-gatherer fires in the Grampian mountains. ‘We’ are time-travelling intelligences, all-seeing and existing perhaps in the sort of parallel universes that Joseph Dunne proposed in An Experiment in Time, mentioned above as influential on Morgan as a student. The recorded observations of these intelligent beings create the vibrant images of this poem and the other poems in the series, ranging over Scotland in time and place. 

Their exploration of Scotland’s pre-history and lost history and still-to-be-written histories is carried confidently through the series on two formal elements. The first of these elements is the traveller’s voice, which is interested, poised, wise, all-seeing and not unemotional. These intelligent presences are able to appreciate colour and other sensory detail. The words ‘Drumlins blue as / bruises were grated off like nutmegs [. . .]’ bring a close tactile sense, almost a heightened synaesthetic awareness. As they explore Scotland through various epochs of its history, these travellers become fond of the place and its people, and are ‘loth to go’ by the final poem, ‘The Summons’: ‘If it was love we felt, would it not keep / and travel where we travelled?’ As they prepare for lift-off there is a sound: ‘a far horn grew to break that people’s sleep’ – an ancient Pictish horn that is also a political gathering-call. 

The call is political, but it is calm and assured, not panicky or aggressive. The second formal element, the choice of writing in sonnet form, assures that confidence. We can do this, the series seems to say, and we can make it rhyme, with total assurance and without strain, time after time. Morgan was a master of the sonnet form, had translated many examples from other languages and particularly admired John Milton’s use of the sonnet for political themes. The sonnet form is often associated with love poetry, and it could be argued that these are love poems to Scotland, or at least that they are written to show what there is about Scotland, its landscape and its people, that might make it loveable. 

There are other layers of meaning, too, in ‘Slate’. There is the notion of ‘a clean slate’ (making a fresh start) and ‘put it on the slate’ (keeping a record of our debts to the past, as an obligation to repay these in the future). Choosing to place this poem first, Morgan was probably also remembering that as a child he learned to write using a slate pencil on a piece of slate. He described it later: ‘It was a revelation / When words appeared / Writing on a piece of earth / with another piece of earth.’ Scotland is the piece of earth that Scots call home – but this sonnet reminds us of the immensities of time, the slow processes of erosion and change. There are lovely lines and details to look for, alliteration and internal half-rhymes, an almost tactile sense of time passing: 

bens / and a great glen gave a rough back we like 
to think the ages must streak, surely strike, 
seldom stroke, but raised and shaken [. . .]

There is the final onomatopoeic entrance of men: ‘Their heels kicked flint, chalk, slate.’ This was before human memory existed (‘That was to come’) so the onomatopoeia is an apt sonic image: closer to the animal alertness that Edwin Morgan always responded to – sound patterns, sound effects, speech rhythms.

Towards assessment

That ‘Slate’ describes or enacts the passage of time so well also brings us back to the three overarching themes of Morgan’s poetry: journeys in time and space; isolation and solidarity, and different voices for Scotland.

It is possible to see how these themes intersect, and thus to reflect on the final exam question that asks students to make connections and comparisons between the set poems. Scottish Short Texts is really excellent here, with its focused use of Venn diagrams to show similarity and difference, and its very professional assessment guidance.

So we might combine 

  • ‘Winter’, ‘Slate’ and ‘Hyena’ as poems set on alien, inhospitable landscapes.
  • Or ‘Slate’, ‘Hyena’ and ‘Good Friday’ as differing examples of the dramatic monologue.
  • Or ‘Slate’, ‘Winter’ and ‘Trio’ as poems exploring time in overlapping or contrasting ways.
  • Or ‘In the Snack-bar’, ‘Good Friday’ and ‘Trio’ as explorations of urban life and alienation (with advice as to how to cure it).

There are other possibilities, of course. The poems offer opportunities for independent research tasks, where pupils can become aware of cultural and scientific references (Orphic, mistletoe, Tithonus, geological processes) and also features of genre (the sonnet or dramatic monologue). There are many opportunities for group and class discussion of language and dialect, social responsibility, alienation and identity. These six short poems of Edwin Morgan are often astonishing in how they seem to expand and contract, touching on immense distances while remaining local and relevant to the engaging details of everyday life.

Copyright © James McGonigal 2015

Filed Under: Archive Tagged With: Edwin Morgan, James McGonigal, Schools

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