A corner of the road, early morning by Norman MacCaig
The thorny light
Scratched out a lanky rose bush in the air.
Goats had been at it, leaving five flowers there.
Scrabbles of bright
Water ran linking down the pink road. Pink
Rocks shouldered it to the left. The ditch ran ink.
I felt the night
Inside my head, like the one outside it, fade
Till its last shadow swallowed its last shade.
And into sight
Of inner as of outer eye there grew
Shapes into shape, colours becoming true.
By holding tight
To loosing every hold, I began to see
What I was not helping myself to be.
I looked up: white
Against a blue – five suns. And this I wrote
Beneath the constellation of the Goat.
November, 1962
This week’s poem is from a collection recently assembled by the poet’s son, Ewen McCaig, entitled Between Mountain and Sea: Poems from Assynt. All the poems draw their material from Norman MacCaig’s 40 years of visiting his beautiful home-from-home on the west coast of the Scottish Highlands.
Sharing his father’s memories of their family holidays in Achmelvich, McCaig writes a moving foreword (Norman MacCaig adopted the extra “a” in his name after rather taking to a misspelling in print). He notes that fishing expeditions rather than poetically inclined scenic nature walks were the main activity, and that the poems were usually written later. To the end of his life, when he could no longer visit them in person, MacCaig was remembering the landscape and people, writing poems that are bright with the excitement of the place, and have a variety of imagery, form and mood which precludes repetitiveness.
The white rose is a Scottish emblem, famously extolled in Hugh MacDiarmid’s quatrain. There’s little hint of symbolic resonance in MacCaig’s opening depiction of the poor, goat-nibbled rose bush. Perhaps rebellion is inscribed. The word choices, “thorny”, “lanky”, “scratched out,” suggest harshly weathered reality and generally thin times.
MacCaig’s poetry often demonstrates metaphorical daring. Here, the first stanza’s five remaining flowers will be transformed in the last, both as inner, imaginative vision and in the brightened landscape – “white / Against a blue – five suns”. MacCaig starts out with the mundane: when he fires it into an epiphany, he makes sure to keep his feet on the ground and include “the constellation of the Goat”.
Very specifically a poem of place and time, A corner of the road, early morning adheres to a strict formal discipline that has some interlocking corners of its own. Each stanza begins with a crisp dimeter, the “A” rhyme being repeated over all six tercets. The ensuing, metrically more expansive, rhymed couplet in each gives MacCaig room for further observation and some introspection, too. The effect is of an exchange between the observer of the landscape and the observer of the self.
MacCaig is a listener as well as a sharp-eyed observer. Fine aural effects are conjured in the second stanza, the sound of running water picked out in rhymes ending in “ink”. After the emphasis on “pink” it’s quite a surprise to learn that “the ditch ran ink”. Now the bright-sounding word signifies its opposite, the dense darkness of lingering night.
The shadow fades, and the illumination is celebrated in the realisation of emergent shapes and “colours becoming true”, but there is still an internal resistance, it seems. The solution forms a lesson to self. “By holding tight / To loosing every hold, I began to see / What I was not helping myself to be.”
Ewen McCaig remembers that Assynt brought his father happiness, as well as many remarkable poems, but not contentment. His roots were in the Highlands but as an English speaker, born and raised in Edinburgh, he felt unable fully to participate in the Gaelic-speaking community. The images given to him by the landscape are a different matter, there to take without reservation, to own in a poem or in simple pleasure, making self-categorisation as an outsider irrelevant. Identity seems implicated in that complex fifth stanza, but so too is the process of poem-making, the achievement of balance between technical control and allowing the vision to flower through a more instinctive and ebullient dawning- into-language. MacCaig rarely falters in the art of achieving both.
• Between Mountain and Sea: Poems from Assynt by Norman MacCaig and edited by Roderick Watson is published by Polygon (£9.99, paperback)
