NAPOMO, Day 2: Empty Vessel

[tree_and_leaf]

Empty Vessel

I met ayont the cairnie
a lass wi tousie hair
singin til a bairnie
that wes nae langir there.

Wunds wi warlds ti swing
dinna sing sae sweet,
the licht that bends owre awthing
is less taen up wi’t.



Hugh McDiarmid, proving that he's actually more comprehensible in Scots (Or it would do, if anyone could actually face reading "On a Raised Beach", or the "Hymns to Lenin". McDiarmid is probably the only poet in the world to have been kicked out of both the Communist and the Scottish National Parties....)

NB: if you're struggling, try reading it aloud. A cairnie is, in this case, a field boundary marker, tousie means 'tousled', and a 'bairnie' is a baby or a child (a good old Germanic word, cognate with 'bear' as in 'to bear a child, to give birth' - the bairn is what is born)

Comments

[parrot-knight.livejournal.com]

The only problem word was 'Wunds' where I anglicized the vowel in a different direction... presumably we are thinking winds now wounds. It's also Northumbrian, I find from the net.

There's a story about Hugh McDiarmid and Basil Bunting in The Poet as Spy - a group of Scots workmen recognized McDiarmid when he was drinking with Bunting in a Tynedale pub and each insisted on buying him a round. He needed to return home that night, but Bunting nonetheless bundled him off in a car on the grounds that no-one was ever on the road between Biggar and Moffat at that time of night, and there was plenty of room to swerve...

[tree_and_leaf]

That's a good story - and a bit of an indication of how the times have changed.

McDiarmid once refuse to tell an importunate student (in a pub) the meaning of one of his poems with the words "Writing them is my job. Telling me what I meant is you buggers'"

[sacred-sarcasm.livejournal.com]

Wunds wi warlds ti swing

That's the only line foxing me...

[tree_and_leaf]

"Winds with worlds to swing"