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Scottish Poems 2004 Introduction |
The Poems | Acknowledgements
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The poems |
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| Edwin Morgan |
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LoveLove rules. Love laughs. Love marches. Love From Love and a Life (Glasgow: Mariscat,
2003). ‘Love’ is from a sequence of fifty poems I wrote between September and November 2002. These were largely autobiographical, recreating a diversity of love experiences over many years. I aimed at honesty, and often included names of the persons involved, together with indications of time and place. But I wanted also to open out the sequence into a consideration of love in general, sometimes doing this by writing about real or fictional historical characters (St Teresa, Shakespeare’s Titania, Pushkin’s Tatiana), and sometimes giving life to the abstractions of love, lust, and desire. The present poem is in the last category, and offers a series of images, some obvious (bashed pillow, crumpled sheet), some paradoxical (the wolf that guards the gate), all suggestive of the enormous actual power and unmappable potential of love. There are reminders of danger as well as delight. Lovers can kill, and be killed. Honour, seemingly a virtue, may have terrible consequences. But for all that, the poem emphasises the creative possibilities of one of the strongest of our emotions. Shakespeare may have suggested that music is the food of love; the poem would claim that love is the food of music, and indeed of all the arts. Without love we are dumb, senseless, unquickened. And I use the image of absinth (a drink I am fond of) swirling round the ice-cubes in a glass to evoke the desired quickening, which we are fidgin-fain (physically eager) to produce. My final imagery in the poem, taken from space flight and the sending of probes to distant parts of the universe, reminds us of love’s most mysterious value, its exploration of the unknown, its commitment to something beyond convention and control, its open acknowledgement or declaration (‘I love you’) from which there is no going back. No going back, and despite all the risks involved – rebuff, jealousy, separation, violence, bereavement – the signals sent back by the probe are positive and encouraging. The stanza form I used for all the poems in the sequence combines a strict rhyme scheme with a free rhythm, a somewhat unusual approach which I hoped would have the effect of giving the emotions their head, held by a loose rein, but periodically tugging them back with a smart whip of rhyme, to remind them, if they wanted reminding, that they are being deployed in terms of art, in a structure devised to give pleasure to the ear, whether inward or outward. We want life, and we want art. The ‘life’ part of the sequence followed the events during its composition: the season of autumn turning to winter, visits to hospital for scans, the putting up and taking down of scaffolding while the house was having its brickwork cleaned and repointed. The ‘art’ part of the sequence refused the reader any easy escape from the actual language it evolved. Edwin Morgan I have to declare an interest here, since, as Mariscat Press, I published the sequence from which the poem comes, Love and a Life. The poem perfectly summarises the aspects of love, its contradictions, its terror and ecstasy. No ‘shadows and disguises’, here Morgan opens his life to us candidly and unflinchingly. The poem is written in his recent invention, the ‘Carthurian stanza’ (after the ancient name for Glasgow): long lines, single rhyme (except for a couplet before the last line) – it seems to be a very freeing form for him. Hamish Whyte Born Glasgow, 1920, Morgan has lived in Glasgow all his life, except for service with the RAMC in the Middle East during the Second World War, and his poetry is grounded in the city. He retired from Glasgow University as titular Professor of English in 1980, serving as Glasgow's first Poet Laureate 1999-2002. The title of his 1973 collection, From Glasgow to Saturn, suggests the range of Morgan's subject matter. Endlessly curious, open-minded and humane, Morgan has experimented with the language of machines as well as translating brilliantly from a variety of European languages. He has translated plays into Scots, and written a trilogy on the life of Jesus, AD. His Sonnets from Scotland rank as one of the most important works of post-war literature, exploring the life, landscapes and potential of the country. Morgan's poetry is marked by inventiveness, acceptance of change and an exhilarating energy. His collection Love and a Life was published in 2003 by Mariscat. On 16 February 2004 it was announced that the Scottish Executive had appointed Edwin Morgan as 'Scots Makar', in effect Scotland's poet laureate. He is the first to hold this post, created to recognize the achievement of Scottish poets throughout the centuries. The SPL in association with Akros Publications and Mariscat Press published his translation The Battle of Bannockburn to celebrate this appointment. 'Makar' is the old Scots word for poet, and if anyone can make it new, it is the innovative Edwin Morgan, undoubtedly Scotland's best living poet. |
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