I had been meaning some time ago to add to Robin Hamilton's dialect thread
a mention of Tom Leonard's anthology _Radical Renfrew_, a key text, it
seems to me, in his lifelong declaration of independence and a real
eye-opener to me. A product of a residence at the library in Paisley, where
he found a trove of poetry, much of it in lallans, from the late 18th to
the early 20th centuries. I would guess that other counties might yield
similar collections--a lot of forgotten work.
So this morning I was thumbing through the book, when I was stopped by the
headnote on Charles Marshall, who seems, from the sample Tom includes, to
have written primarily temperance verse. But I was stopped by the prase "he
became a minister at Dunfermline in 1840," and the grimy history of the
region (and the import of the book, which is decidedly wedded to the
actual) dropped away. The place name was a sort of hot link to "Sir Patrick
Spens," in which "The king sits in Dunfermline toun,/ Drinkin' the bluid
red wine," and suddenly I'm in a different world, political enough, as
those lines indicate, but I think throughout:
O laith, laith were our guid Scots
lords,
To weet their cork-heel'd shoon;
But lang or a' the play was play'd,
They wat their hats aboon.
It's forty miles frae Aberdeen,
And fifty fathoms deep,
And there lies guid Sir Patrick
Spence,
Wi' the Sects lords at his feet!
But it's a world of that wears for me a sheen of glamor, wed to the
childish Arthur in "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," who also doesn't
hesitate to send men out into the bitter cold--archetypes set in a wild
landscape.
I've never been to Dunfermline (or to the Wilderness of Wirral, for that
matter). Probably a perfectly ordinary place. But I've travelled pretty
extensively within the American mythic landscape. I used to live in Tucson,
a couple of miles from the permanent movie set where a good proportion of
the westerns were filmed, and I've spent a lot of time in the Rockies and
on the big Indian reservations of the southwest. I was drawn to them,
initially and for a long time, as much by the myth as by the stunning
beauty and emptiness.
I was sitting at the counter of a luncheonette in southern Louisiana,
fascinated by a nearby table of to all appearances cowboys speaking French.
Some of the bloom was off the peach when, eavesdropping on their
conversation, I realized they were talking about the prices of recycled car
parts.
I think we often set off on travels in search of the sacred and in the
process secularize the places we come to know. Through familiarity the West
has lost a lot of its glamor for me. The conflicted actuality is of course
often wonderful enough. Britain and Ireland for a lot of Americans, myself
included, remains so laden with mythic association--it's why hordes descend
on Stratford every year--that the actual is barely visible. Not just the
"Olde England" stuff, but also the great struggles of the 19th
century--there were heroes in those days, one might say, and even grinding
"Dickensian" poverty carried the glamor of archetype."
This has to be an awful bother to Brits not engaged in the tourist
industry, altho I suspect, based upon old films that were immensely popular
in their day, that a lot of Brits once believed the myth themselves. A lot
of Americans, because of our own entertainment industry, still do live
internally in a mythic landscape, and it shapes the way they behave
politically. But it's easier to maintain fantasies about other places, like
the French and Germans who dress up as Sioux Indians every weekend. The
call for papers that Gabe posted suggests that something similar happens in
Britain.
Poetry has always been the bearer of a lot of mythic freight, the
accidental, which is what I'm talking about (what accrues to difference) as
well as the intentional. I lived a few miles outside Amherst for several
years during two parts of my life. I would imagine that British and Irish
readers set Emily Dickinson in an imagined world. I don't think I do,
except to the extent that the past is always an imagined world. Charles
Marshall, on the other hand, is swimming in myth.
Just some thoughts.
Mark
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