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| Pipers from Cameron Highlander Regiment marching to the front from The Daily Record 9 Nov 2014 |
Describing the poetry of Scottish writer Marion Angus, a
reviewer wrote, “To read her verse is like sitting in an empty room where
fingers tap on the window pane, and outside the house, something passes on
noiseless feet.”*
Empty noiselessness: an earlier
post on this blog has noted the unnatural quiet that marked the Armistice. All
along the battlefront, men described the sudden silence:
The silence is oppressive. It
weighs in on one’s eardrums. We have lived and had our being in din …. The air
is full of half-forgotten sounds: the rustling of dead leaves, the organ tone
of wind in the tree tops, whispers through the underbrush, lazy echoes of voices
in the road…. it can’t be true…We cannot comprehend the stillness.**
Silence was experienced by those on the home front as well,
but for them, the stillness echoed with absence and extended down through the
years.
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| James Gray, Scottish WW1 soldier |
Remembrance Day
Some one was singing
Up a twisty stair,
A fragment of a
song,
One sweet, spring
day,
When twelve o’clock was ringing,
Through the sunny
square—
‘There was a lad baith
frank and free,
Cam’ doon the bonnie
banks o’ Dee
Wi’ tartan plaid and
buckled shoon,
An’ he’ll come nae
mair to oor toon. ‘—
‘He dwells within a
far countree,
Where great ones do
him courtesie,
They’ve gien him a
golden croon,
An’ he’ll come nae
mair to oor toon.’—
No one is singing
Up
the twisty stair.
Quiet as a
sacrament
The November day.
Can’t you hear
it swinging,
The little ghostly air?—
Hear it sadly stray
Through the misty square,
In and out a
doorway,
Up a twisty stair—
Tartan plaid and buckled shoon,
He’ll come nae mair to oor toon.
—Marion Angus
Reworking the ballad form, Angus contrasts traditional
Scottish music before the war with the raw and painful ways in which the old
ballads were heard after the tragic losses of the Great War. An estimated 125,000 Scottish soldiers never
returned home.
Angus was known for writing in Scots, but “Remembrance Day” begins
in English, then shifts to Scots to sing of a young soldier “baith frank and
free” who will come no more to his home town. The poem reverts to English as it
describes a bereft voice that sings no more and the sacramental silence that
falls on Remembrance Day, before the poem returns to Scots, closing with the ghostly
notes of an ancient ballad that now keens for the recent war dead.
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| Marion Angus from National Library of Scotland |
Hugh MacDiarmid, a contemporary of Marion Angus and one of
the best-known modern Scots writers of the twentieth century, notes, “the
Scottish consciousness is divided […] this linguistic division means that
Scotsmen feel in one language and think in another, that their emotions turn to
the Scottish tongue.”***
Fluent in both Scots and English, Marion Angus worked during
the war at the Stobs, a British Army training camp in the Scottish Borders that
became an internment camp for civilians and prisoners of war. By May of 1916, there were over 4,500
prisoners in the camp.†
Her first book of poetry, The Lilt, was published in 1922. At the time of her death in 1946, Marion Angus
was credited as being “one of the most distinctive voices of the modern Scots
revival,”†† but her
poetry, which focuses almost entirely on women’s experiences, has been largely
forgotten.
“Remembrance Day” captures the essence of Marion Angus’s poetry:
she had a “genius for telling a story in a few verses, of almost unbearable poignancy.”†††
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* Winifred Duke, “Women Poets of Today,” Glasgow Herald, 15 Jan 1936, p. 8, cited
in Aimée Y. Chalmers’ The Singing Lass: A
Reflection on the Life of the Poet Marion Angus, Thesis submitted to the
University of St. Andrews, 2010, p. 30.
** Robert J. Casey, The Cannoneers Have Hairy Ears, J.H.
Sears, 1927, pp. 329-330.
*** Hugh MacDiarmid (1936) cited in D. Dunn (ed.) The Faber Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry, Faber
and Faber, 1992, p. xxxiii.
†
Chalmers, The Singing Lass, p. 43.
††
Anonymous obituary, “Death of Marion Angus Scots Vernacular Poet,” (1946) cited
in Chalmers, The Singing Lass, p. 82.
†††
Marion Lochhead, “Feminine Quartet,” Summer 1980, cited in Chalmers, The Singing Lass, p. 82.
