Fiction and Poetry

Fiction and Poetry The area of Montrose where Dun was situated was the setting for much of her fiction. In her poetry Violet Jacob was associated with Scots revivalists like Marion Angus, Alexander Gray and Lewis Spence in the Scottish Renaissance, which drew its inspiration from early Scots poets such as Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, rather than from Robert Burns. She is commemorated in Makars' Court, outside the Writers' Museum in Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket. Selections for Makars' Court are made by the Writers' Museum, The Saltire Society and The Scottish Poetry Library. Oh, tell me what was on yer road, ye roarin' norlan wind As ye cam' blawin' frae the land that's niver frae my mind? My feet they trayvel England, but I'm deein' for the north — My man, I heard the siller tides rin up the Firth o' Forth. From "The Wild Geese", Songs of Angus (1915) The Wild Geese, which takes the form of a conversation between the poet and the North Wind, is a sad poem of longing for home. It was set to music as Norlan' Wind. Jacob was a very private person, revealing little of herself even in her diaries, and perhaps less in her poetry. This must have been due to personal preference, but perhaps also to a certain extent to her position as an officer’s wife. Susan Tweedsmuir, later the wife of John Buchan, recalled in her autobiography: Violet had published a small book of poetry, which made her a little suspect to the military society of Cairo. But her charm and beauty and aptitude for getting on with people helped her to live down even poetry. Jacob’s first excursion into published poetry had been in her twenties, with a humorous narrative poem written in collaboration with Walter Douglas Campbell, in 1888. The poems in Verses, which came out in 1905, were all in English, and a long way from the much more direct, grounded language and themes in her next book of poetry, Songs of Angus (1915). In her introduction to Voices from their ain countrie: the poems of Marion Angus and Violet Jacob, Katherine Gordon points out the great differences between the two publications: The poems in ‘Songs of Angus’ are, for the most part, simple in their language and imagery and, unlike the poems of ‘Verses’, spoken almost exclusively by poor rural people, some of whom are exiles. Jacob’s two Scottish historical novels had been written just before and during the decade between the two books of poetry - The Interloper in 1904 and Flemington in 1911 - both containing excellent Scots dialogue. Jacob was obviously interested in using the dramatic monologue form; Katherine Gordon argues that speaking through different personae in her poetry also gave Jacob the means to preserve the anonymity she desired. The great tragedy of Jacob’s life, her only son’s death in the Battle of the Somme, is directly addressed in a single poem in English, ‘To A. H. J.’, which opens More Songs of Angus and others (1918), but the continuing grief cries through many subsequent poems, grief often personified in the voice of a bereaved farm woman, as in ‘The Field by the Lirk o’ the Hill’: Prood maun ye lie, Prood did ye gang; Auld, auld am I, But O! Life’s lang! Ghaists i’ the air, Whaups cryin’ shrill, An’ you nae mair I’ the field by the lirk o’ the hill – Aye, bairn, nae mair, nae mair, I’ the field by the lirk o’ the hill! Never really recovering from her son’s death, Jacob wrote no more novels, but continued writing poetry, much of it first published in Country Life, but also in the emerging publications of the Scottish Renaissance: Scottish Chapbook and Northern Numbers. Hugh MacDiarmid wrote a piece on her in the Scottish Educational Journal in 1925; though not uncritical, he admired her grip of the vernacular and commended her contribution to writing in Scots. To Jacob, though, using Scots was a natural result of her desire to write of and through the lives of the people of her native Angus; as John Buchan put it in his introduction to Songs of Angus: ‘She writes Scots because what she has to say could not be written otherwise’. Jacob had great sympathy with the lives of others, especially those who were not blessed in their lot – the poor, the put-upon, the vagrants. She had a keen eye, too, for the age-old inequalities in the relationships between men and women, giving a voice to the abandoned pregnant girl in ‘The End O’t’: Oh, wha tak’s tent for a fadin’ cheek? No him, I’se warrant, that gar’d it fade! There’s little love for a lass to seek When the coortin’s through an’ the price is paid. Jacob captures young love best in her famous poem ‘Tam i’ the Kirk’ where the lovesickness of the lad burns off the page: He canna sing for the sang that his ain he’rt raises, He canna see for the mist that’s ‘afore his een, And a voice drouns the hale o’ the psalms an’ the paraphrases, Cryin’ ‘Jean, Jean, Jean!’ Violet Jacob received an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh in 1936. Scotland has taken her poetry to heart – her poem ‘The Wild Geese’ was shortlisted in BBC Radio Scotland’s poll of the nation’s favourite poems in 2006. It has been set to music, becoming a very popular song, suffused with the exile’s longing for home: ‘There’s muckle lyin’ ‘yont the Tay that’s mair to me nor life.’ .

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