Poems and Pictures

Bog Cotton in flower in May

Bog Cotton after flowering in June
Photo: James Lindsey from Wikipedia

According to Wikipedia: Euriophorum angustifolium, commonly known as common cottongrass or common cottonsedge, is a species of flowering plant in the sedge family, Cyperaceae. Native to North America, North Asia, and Europe, it grows on peat or acidic soils, in open wetland, heath or moorland. It begins to flower in April or May and, after fertilisation in early summer, the small, unremarkable brown and green flowers develop distinctive white bristle-like seed-heads that resemble tufts of cotton; combined with its ecological suitability to bog, these characteristics give rise to the plant’s alternative name, bog cotton.

This is a poem by Naomi Mitchison, 1897 – 1999, written as part of Three Poems for the Highlands and Islands Advisory Panel. It was published in the collection The Cleansing of the Knife in 1978. The repetition of bog cotton in each last line initially struck me as a fun poem, but upon deeper reading, the content is more sombre, marking the advance of the bog cotton as the villagers were cleared from the highlands by the lairds in the 19th century. By the mid 20th century, the remnant abandoned their villages as life became too hard in a changing society, leaving crofts to fall to ruin. Since this poem was penned, the abandoned crofts have been bought for a song by incomers and transformed into second homes, reflecting the shift in tides and the changes in society.

Wester Ross

Naomi Mitchison

Stone and rock,
Boulder and pebble,
Water and stone,
Heather and stone,
Heather and water
And the bog cotton that is not for weaving.

Peats uncut
And the orange moss
Under sharp rush
And spiked deer-grass,
Under tough myrtle
And thin blue milkwort,
And ever, ever,
The silver shining
Of the bog cotton that is not flowers.

The stones drop
From the height of the bens,
In the low houses
Of the dead crofters
The rafters drop
And the turf roof:
Stone after stone
The walls are dropping,
And the bog creeps nearer
With the bog cotton for the fairies’ flag.

Photo: Bengt Oberger from Wikipedia

Poems and Pictures

The poem below reminds me very much of a holiday spent in Scourie, in Sutherland. The old croft had been converted – to a degree. It looked down over still very evident lazy beds to Scourie bay, with the pyramid of Ben Stack looming to the east, and heathland scattered with remnants of the glacial age running to the sea in the west. An old, almost falling-to-pieces bench, backed to the house, gave a place from which to view the sunset in the evening, and on one occasion we were visited by a Wheatear.

July Evening

Norman MacCaig

A bird’s voice chinks and tinkles
Alone in the gaunt reedbed –
Tiny silversmith
Working late in the evening.

I sit and listen. The rooftop
With a quill of smoke stuck in it
Wavers against the sky
In the dreamy heat of summer.

Flowers’ closing time: bee lurches
Across the hayfield, singing
And feeling its drunken way
Round the air’s invisible corners.

And grass is grace. And charnock
Is gold of its own bounty.
The broken chair by the wall
Is one with immortal landscapes.

Something has been completed
That everything is a part of,
Something that will go on
Being completed forever.

Poems and Pictures

CONNECTIONS

‘Island of Dreams’,

‘The Ring of Bright Water’,

‘The Marriage of Psyche’

For a long while I have had an edition of ‘The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine’ sitting in the poetry section of my bookshelf. A pristine edition which from time to time has beckoned me to dip in and read. But always with the same result. I have found her poems too morose, depressing even, and I failed to understand or make a connection.

A few Christmases ago, following shared holidays in Scotland, I was given a hardback copy of Dan Boothby’s book, ‘Island of Dreams’. At the time of receiving it, I didn’t open the book, and it sat in the ‘travel section’ of my bookshelf unread. In those days, I was more interested to read books about the Outer Hebrides, Harris, Lewis, Eriskay, Mingulay, The Uists, and life higher up the West Coast of Scotland. The Isle of Skye didn’t feature in my interest zone. That is, until the other day, when looking for something to read that would engage me, I picked up Dan Boothby’s ‘Island of Dreams’. Immediately, I was hooked.

Dan Boothby’s book tells of his time spent on Eilean Ban seeking to find out more about the life and lifestyle of Gavin Maxwell, author of the bestselling 1960s book, ‘Ring of Bright Water’. Gavin Maxwell and Kathleen Raine were friends, though her love for him was unrequited, and caused her much unhappiness. On picking up a copy of the trilology based around Gavin Maxwell’s life at Sandaig, it is prefaced with a poem by Kathleen Raine. It is, however, with some trepidation that I turn to the pages of ‘The Ring of Bright Water’, as Dan Boothby’s book has revealed that the idyllic world described has been lost in the passing of time. Friendships became soured, Gavin Maxwell died an early and tragic death, and the construction of the Skye Bridge destroyed the remoteness of the islands that feature in account of Maxwell’s time around Sandaig, and latterly the opening of the NC 500 Route is destroying the very unspoilt haven of almost inaccessible tranquility for which people travelled to the Highlands of Scotland to escape the madness of the modern age.

The Marriage of Psyche
Kathleen Raine
1. The House
In my love’s house
There are hills and pastures carpeted with flowers,
His roof is the blue sky, his lamp the evening star,
The doors of his house are the winds, and the rain his curtains.
In his house are many mountains, each alone,
And islands where the sea-birds home.

In my love’s house
There is a waterfall that flows all night
Down from the mountain summit where the snow lies 
White in the shimmering blue of everlasting summer,
Down from the high crag where the eagle flies.
At his threshold the tides of ocean rise,
And the porpoise follows the shoals into still bays
Where starfish gleam on brown weed under still water.

In sleep I was born here
And waking found rivers and waves my servants,
Sun and cloud and winds, bird-messengers,
And all the flocks of his hills and shoals of his seas.
I rest, in the heat of day, in the light shadow of leaves
And voices of air and water speak to me.
All this he has given me, whose face I have never seen,
But into whose all-enfolding arms I sink in sleep.


2. The Ring
He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water
Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,
He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter
Broadcast on the swift river.
He has married me with the sun’s circle
Too dazzling to see, traced in summer sky.

He has crowned me with the wreath of white cloud
That gathers on the snowy summit of the mountain,
Ringed me round with the world-circling wind,
Bound me to the whirlwind’s centre.
He has married me with the orbit of the moon
And with the boundless circle of the stars,
With the orbits that measure years, months, days and nights,
Set the tides flowing,
Command the winds to travel or be at rest.

At the ring’s centre,
Spirit or angel troubling the still pool,
Causality not in nature,
Finger’s touch that summons at a point, a moment
Stars and planets, life and light
Or gathers cloud about an apex of cold,
Transcendent touch of love summons world to being.

Poems and Pictures

Up Loch Fyne

By Naomi Mitchison

Naomi Mitchison (nee Halbane) CBE, was born in Edinburgh on 1st November 1897. She was a Scottish novelist and poet and acclaimed as the doyenne of Scottish literature. She died on 11th January 1999. She wrote on a wide range of topics, though only published two collections of poetry and those 50 years apart.

The Japanese artist, Hokusai, referred to in this poem, lived between 1760 and 1849.

Because ‘humped grey fish-watchers’, as they are described by Mitchison in this poem, do not have great photographic appeal, the heron in the photos to accompany this poem takes a different pose.

The humped grey fish-watcher has
become with one wingflap
The elegant trailing heron that
Hokusai dreamed up,
Far from Loch Fyne.
May my own squat and spear-beaked
mind
Fishing and gulping its needs
among weedy statistics
Or in the dazzle of every-day
reflections and refractions,
Sometimes take wing and re-create
a myth.

From ‘The Cleansing of the Knife and other Poems’ (Canongate 1978)