121.08 Keep Your Card in This Pocket Books will be issued only on. presentation of proper library cards, ' Unless labeled otherwise, books may be retained for two weeksl Borrowers findina books marked, de- faced or mutilated are expected to report same at library desk; otherwise the last borrower will be held responsible for all imperfections discovered. The card holder is responsible for all books drawn on mis card. Penalty for over-due books 2o a day plus cost of notices. Lost cards and change of residence must be re- ported promptly. Public Library Kansas City, Mo. Keep Your Card in This Pocket 3 1148 00548 9687 THE GOLDEN TREASURY OF SCOTTISH POETRY SELECTED AND EDITED BY HUGH MACDIARMID NEW YORK THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1 94 i PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO MY FRIEND FRANCIS GEORGE SCOTT THE COMPOSER PIONEER AND PATHFINDER IN EVERY DEVELOPMENT OF ANY VALUE IN SCOTTISH LITERATURE AND MUSIC DURING THE PAST THIRTY YEARS, AND BY FAR THE MOST POTENT, IF (THE WORD SHOULD PROBABLY BE THEREFORE) THE LEAST ACKNOWLEDGED, INFLUENCE IN EVERY CULTURAL CONNECTION IN SCOTLAND TODAY INTRODUCTION THE Rose of all the world is not for me. I want for my part Only the little white rose of Scotland That smells sharp and sweet and breaks the heart I have sung elsewhere, and it is the choicest examples of the flowering of that rose in our poetry during more than half a millennium. I have sought to collect in this anthology. But if I have been concerned with the little white rose of Scot- land, I have also been concerned to ensure that its roots are given their proper scope. Those who have tried to root up one of the dwarf bushes of our white rose on the Island of Eigg, say, where they grow profusely know how astonishingly far these run. So it is with our poetry too. It cannot be confined to a little Anglo- Scottish margin. Recent Scottish poetry has been trying to reclaim a little of its lost territory. A study of The Works of Morris and of Yeats in Relation to Early Saga Literature appeared in 1937. Towards the end of his life Mr. Yeats returned to the Upanishads and commended these to the attention of our younger poets. That movement back to the ancient Gaelic classics and then North to Iceland and then East to Persia and India is the course the refluence of Gaelic genius must take. We in Scotland (a Gaelic country) where our Ian- viii The Golden Treasury guage problem has fitted us better than our Southern neighbours to understand and welcome the great work of Charles Doughty, and to note his remarkable knowledge and understanding of the ancient Britons have appreciated in recent years that we must not only transcend the largely false divisions of Highland and Lowland, Scots and Scottish Gaelic. Ify as it requires, our national genius is to refresh itself at its most ancient sources, we must realise that, as our Scottish scholar Colonel L. A. Waddell 1 has shown, the Edda is not, as has been imagined, a medley of disjointed Scandinavian mythological tales of gods, but one great coherent epic of historical human heroes and their exploits, based upon genuine hoary tradition, and an ancient British (i.e. Celtic), not Scandinavian, epic at that. At the present great turning-point in history, too, it is of to in all its im- major consequence appreciate" plications the fact that the Edda deals circum- stantially with the greatest of all heroic epochs in the! ancient world, namely, the struggle for the establishment of civilisation, with its blessings to humanity, over five thousand years ago ". This is the proper perspective of Scottish poetry, and if our national spirit today sorely needs to replenish itself at its most ancient sources, that is surely true of civilisation itself. And if someone quotes East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, 1 See The British Edda, by L. A. Waddell (London, 1930). Dr. Waddell's brilliant reconstruction is, of course, not in English but in Scots. of Scottish Poetry ix here, even more precisely than Mr. Yeats pointed to it in his recourse to the ancient poems of India, is the meeting-place, where we can lay hold of the deepest root in human motivation. In The Chronicles of Eri which the Dictionary of National Biography far too sweepingly (as Dr. L. Albert proves in his latest edition of Roger O 'Connor 's book, where he devotes an admirable essay to the establishment of the essential historical vera- " of these dismisses as city " Chronicles) mainly imaginative the great odyssey whose course we must thus retrace, as Doughty's concern with the English spirit dictated all his wanderings and took him to Arabia Deserta, is shown as having begun near Caucasian Georgia (where the story of Tristan and Iseult had its origin), whence came the migration westward that led to the establish- ment of our Gaelic peoples. Years ago 1 wrote that if the new Scottish literary movement which began just after the Great War were to produce major literature it could only do so by resuming and renewing the traditions of our ancient Gaelic heritage. That opened up great perspectives but here the greatest perspective before us, and the key to all the others, is revealed, and it is un- doubtedly for this that Yeats and Morris and many other poets in the last half-century or so have cast to the North and to the Far East. Our Empire the proper scope of the roots of the white rose is not the Bulpington of Blup's Varangian vision of Canute's Empire (all the north of the world) reaching from Massachusetts to Moscow, but that vast Celtic Empire which, about the x The Golden Treasury fourth century B.C., claimed as its frontiers the Dniester in Russia (where the city of Carrodunum was constructed) in the East and the shores of Portugal in the West, from the ocean off Scotland in the North to the central part of Italy in the South, and even extended through the Balkans to Asia Minor, to the Galatians of St. Paul. The difference or one of the main differences between this anthology and all previous an- of Scottish is that some little thologies poetry " " effort has been made to present an all-in view of Scottish poetry and in particular to give some little representation to its Gaelic and Latin ele- ments. I have been able (with the assistance in regard to Gaelic of Mr. Somhairle Maclean, and in regard to Latin of Mr. George Elder Davie) to include translations of some of our principal Scottish Gaelic poems like Alasdair MacMhaigh- J " " stir Alasdair s Birlinn of Clanranald and " Duncan Ban Maclntyre's Praise of Ben Dorain ", and of some Latin poems by George Buchanan and Arthur Johnstone. I have been unable to cover the whole ground unable, for example, to give any adequate choice of gems drawn from the great little-known panorama of that period in our history which Dr. Magnus Maclean in his The Literature of the Highlands conjures up when he says : "At the beginning of the nineteenth century quite an unprecedented number of bards existed others Highland ; among Duncan Ban Maclntyre, Ewen Maclachlan, Allan MacDougall, Alexander Mackinnon, John Maclean, Donald Macleod, Kenneth Mackenzie, James of Scottish Poetry xi Shaw, James Macgregor, John Macdonald, Donald Macdonald, Angus Fletcher and Allan Maclntyre. The splendid renaissance of the Forty-five had thus culminated in the remarkable result that there was scarcely a parish or a clachan throughout the Highlands and Islands that had not its own poet. And yet the noontide glory had already departed for of the great sons of the Muses, Macdonald, Maccodrum, Macintyre, Roy Stuart, Macpherson, Buchanan, Rob Donn and William Ross, only one was still living the venerable hunter-bard of Glenorchy, who outlived his peers and died at Edinburgh in 1812." Yet I have been able to do a little to alleviate the painful and absurd position Mr. William Power describes in his Literature and Oatmeal (1935), the ablest and most book yet devoted to Scottish litera- delightful " ture, when he says : Gaelic has had a far bigger and longer run in Scotland than Scots or English. Teutonic speech is still a comparative upstart, and its sweeping victory did not begin till well on in the seventeenth century. A conscientious China- man who contemplated a thesis on the literary history of Scotland would have no doubt as to ' his procedure : I will learn a little Gaelic, and read all I can find about Gaelic literature, from the oldest Irish poets down to Duncan Ban and a third of thesis will Maclntyre ; nearly my be on Gaelic literature \ He would be rather mystified when he discovered that historians of Scotland and its literature had known and cared as much about Gaelic as about Chinese, and that they had gone on the remarkable assumption that xii The Golden Treasury the majority of the Scots were Anglo-Saxons and that their literature began with Thomas the Rhymer, in the reign of Alexander III." (" Per- chance before the next century is far advanced," Dr- T. F. G. Dexter in his says fascinating" in pamphlet, Civilisation Britain 2000 .c., the history of Britain will be commenced, not at 55 B.C., the date of the Invasion of Julius Caesar, but at about 2000 B.C., the approximate date of the erection of Avebury. We have a fairly continuous history of Britain for nearly 2000 years from the first invasion of Caesar to the present day.