Poets' Corner

Number Fifteen : 20^th November 2013

Bagpipe Music

Louis MacNeice (1907-63) was the author of the following poem. He can be heard reading it on a Youtube copy of a radio broadcast. He introduces it with a comment that the nonsense-rhyming scheme attempts to reproduce the sound of bagpipes and that its focus was the disappearance of West Highland folk-culture under the encroaching influence of modernism (it was written in the 1930s).

Its no go the merry-go-round , its no go the rickshaw ,
All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow.
Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine , their shoes are made of python ,
Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison.

John MacDonald found a corpse , put it under the sofa ,
Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker ,
Sold its eyes for souvenirs , sold its blood for whisky ,
Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty.

Its no go the Yogi-Man , its no go Blavatsky ,
All we want is a bank-balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi.

The hashish-smoking Russian émigré Madame Blavatsky founded the Theosophical Society in 1875 and its blend of mediaeval western mysticism and eastern esoteric traditions attracted many writers and artists of the earlier twentieth century. Their aspirations to access her 'divine wisdom' required credulity on an heroic scale : “ Before incarnating into physical bodies , human beings had existed in a purely spiritual form. First came the Lemurians , who had no memory at all and so , like absent-minded children , promptly forgot everything they were told. The succeeding Atlanteans , by contrast so much more incarnate , possessed extraordinary memories , thought in pictures and used the energy latent in plants to drive a kind of hovercraft. ”

Willie Murray cut his thumb , couldn't count the damage ,
Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage.
His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish ,
Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish.

Its no go the Herring Board , its no go the Bible ,
All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle.

Beyond the Outer Hebridean islands of Harris and Lewis , into the lonelier reaches of the north Atlantic , lie the five small islands of St. Kilda. The last 36 inhabitants were evacuated in 1930 but a short documentary film made in 1928 shows a way of life little changed over centuries. There was footage of men abseiling down steep sea cliffs to collect sea-birds and their eggs. Their sparse agriculture was eventually compromised by the use of bird-corpses as fertiliser. Remote enough to escape the hand of political authority or (until the mid-nineteenth century) , the stern gaze of the Church , no resident of St. Kilda was known to have fought in a war and , over four centuries of historical records , not one serious crime was reported. This was truly a world apart and so modernity was late on the scene here , when the first year-long inhabitants for decades became military personnel manning part of a missile-tracking range in 1957. A few decades later and the defence contractor QinetiQ took over their installation. Understanding this sort of thing is a monumental taski. You'll get more sense from Madame Blavatsky than from any of the political manoeuverings of our last dismal half-century.

Poets' Corner

Number Fifteen : 20th November 2013

Bagpipe Music

Archive

Number Fifteen : 20^th November 2013