Poetry in Scots II

A while back I wrote about my enthusiasm for the Makars of the 15th and 16th centuries. What has been their legacy? Well, not a single strand, I would argue; in fact a division between the language people spoke - leading to a demotic tradition in Scots poetry, and on the other side a tradition of Scots as a distinct literary language.

The Scots ballads are a marvellous flowering in the 16th and 17th centuries, based on an oral tradition of storytelling in poetic form. Thus they're mostly narrative poems, sometimes sung, mostly anonymous, and collected by scholars in the 18th and 19th centuries. As spoken or sung poems, they're mostly in the tradition we'd call demotic. So, in Sir Patrick Spence (or Spens), we have:

The king sits in Dunfermling toune,
Drinking the bluid-reid wine:
'O whaur will I get a guid sailor,
To sail this schip of mine?'

There are several versions, and I won't go into who collected what and when, but note that the poem conflates a 17th century Aberdour mariner lost at sea with an ill-fated voyage to bring the king's daughter to marry Eric of Norway in 1281. The Border Ballads originated where it says on the tin. We also have the Bothy Ballads, which come from the farming lands of Buchan in North-East Scotland, and many of them embody the local forms of speech now called Doric.

There seems to have been a decline in writing in Scots, until Allan Ramsay (1685-1758) sparked a revival, paving the way for Fergusson and Burns. During the hiatus, if such it was, Gaelic poetry flowered, and it seems to me that the finest poetry of Scotland in the 17th and early 18th centuries was written in the Gaelic.

I find it difficult to characterise the language of Fergusson or Burns as either literary or demotic Scots. They both use words that would not be used by Scots in ordinary speech today, and I don't know enough history to know if they were at that time. But, I can almost always understand them on the page without reference to a Scots dictionary - something I can't say about the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid.

Coming to late 19th and early 20th centuries, the fine poetry of Marion Angus, Violet Jacob and Helen Cruikshank wrote in elegant spoken Scots. When we come to Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) we're definitely in the realms of literary Scots, specifically Lallans, and some of the words used go back to the language of the Makars. I have to put my hand up here and say that I can't stand his polemical verse, nor his egotistical outbursts. The geologist and botanist in me loves his poems on these subjects, however.

William Soutar, a wonderful poet, wrote in demotic Scots, but Robert Garioch, who I met in the 1960s, wrote in a sort of mixed tradition.

I'm not going to do a roll-call of today's Scottish poets, but I'll give two examples which might help to exemplify the two traditions. Tom Leonard writes in Glasgow dialect, and my friend David Purdie writes in literary Scots. As his publisher I'm biased, but I think his poetry embodies the finest features of that tongue.

As for my own poetry, I maistly think in English, so I write thon wey, but I have written in Scots - literary and vernacular - and I find that some (English) poems demand the use of the occasional Scots word, when no other word will do. Look at Robert Crawford's poetry for another example of this way of writing.

The next generation? W N Herbert writes wonderful poetry in Scots, both literary and in his Dundonian accent. And Andrew Philip and Colin Donati are inspirational writers in Scots (and English).