Scottish Poetry Quotes

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie, O, what a panic's in thy breastie!

The world is but a Thought," said he: "The vast unfathomable sea Is but a Notion—unto me.

Landscape is my religion. ...God in a green legend, I lean over the pool In a testament of leaves. I dangle my twinkling mood Before me in a cool cave roofed with branches And floored with a skin of water.

Fortune, if thou’ll but gie me still Hale breeks, a scone, an whisky gill, An’ rowth o’ rhyme to rave at will, Take a’ the rest, An’ deal’t about as thy blind skill Directs thee best.

Is he handsome?” “A stunner. Tall and big-chested, with blue eyes and hair the color of summer wheat. And his accent . . .” “Irresistible?” “Oh, yes. There’s something about a Scottish burr that makes it seem as if a man is either about to recite poetry or toss you over his shoulder and carry you away.” “Maybe both at the same time,” Phoebe said dreamily, sipping her tea.

Blackadder was fifty-four and had come to editing Ash out of pique. He was the son and grandson of Scottish schoolmasters. His grandfather recited poetry on firelight evenings: Marmion, Childe Harold, Ragnarok. His father sent him to Downing College in Cambridge to study under F. R. Leavis. Leavis did to Blackadder what he did to serious students; he showed him the terrible, the magnificent importance and urgency of English literature and simultaneously deprived him of any confidence in his own capacity to contribute to, or change it. The young Blackadder wrote poems, imagined Dr Leavis’s comments on them, and burned them.

An old liar told me here To think ahead and save my money. I should have spent it on ribbons. I should have learned the tune my dead grandfather played When the daft wife heard him resounding In the deep pine woods in early November.

I think these movements and become them, here, In this room's stillness, none of them about, And relish them all-until I think of where Thrashed by a crook, the cursive adder writes Quick V's and Q's in the dust and rubs them out. from "Movements

Sex and love are what make the world go round. It's the heart of poetry and music.

The wrath of Scotland beckons, it's no more the 45 The no votes wakened up to you, Scotland is alive Look at how our parties rise whilst you're in disarray The undertaker's standing by, Scots will have their say.

Beowulf stands out as a poem which makes extensive use of this kind of figurative language. There are over one thousand compounds in the poem, totalling one-third of all the words in the text. Many of these compounds are kennings. The word 'to ken' is still used in many Scottish and Northern English dialects, meaning 'to know'. Such language is a way of knowing and of expressing meanings in striking and memorable ways; it has continuities with the kinds of poetic compounding found in nearly all later poetry but especially in the Modernist texts of Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce.

Pray with a quorum of 10 Debate withassembly of 9 Scottish dance with a collective of 8 Party with a gathering of 7 Play volleyball with a group of 6 Rank on a scale to 5 Practice music with a band of 4 Perceive in a dimension of 3 Make love with the intimacy of 2 Write poetry for an audience of 1

It isn’t so long since a test of Anglican orthodoxy was applied to anyone seeking to study or teach at Oxford and Cambridge universities. One of the most celebrated victims of this theocratic policy was Shelley (1792-1811) who was expelled from University College, Oxford, for writing a pamphlet entitled The Necessity of Atheism. He and his poetry were much influenced by the climate of skepticism engendered by the French and Scottish enlightenments, and he himself was to marry the daughter of the freethinker William Godwin. In this extract from A Refutation of Deism, Shelley sets about the propaganda of the creationists.

Cold-Blooded Creatures Man, the egregious egoist (In mystery the twig is bent) Imagines, by some mental twist, That he alone is sentient Of the intolerable load That on all living creatures lies, Nor stoops to pity in the toad The speechless sorrow of his eyes. He asks no questions of the snake, Nor plumbs the phosphorescent gloom Where lidless fishes, broad awake, Swim staring at a nightmare doom. William Dunbar was one of the first great Scottish poets, and is also known for his poem "Lament for the Makiris" (Lament for the Makers, or Poets). Elinor Wylie "was famous during her life almost as much for her ethereal beauty and personality as for her melodious, sensuous poetry.

He went on thus to call over names celebrated in Scottish song, and most of which had recently received a romantic interest from his own pen. In fact, I saw a great part of the border country spread out before me, and could trace the scenes of those poems and romances which had, in a manner, bewitched the world. I gazed about me for a time with mute surprise, I may almost say with disappointment. I beheld a mere succession of gray waving hills, line beyond line, as far as my eye could reach; monotonous in their aspect, and so destitute of trees, that one could almost see a stout fly walking along their profile; and the far-famed Tweed appeared a naked stream, flowing between bare hills, without a tree or thicket on its banks; and yet, such had been the magic web of poetry and romance thrown over the whole, that it had a greater charm for me than the richest scenery I beheld in England. I could not help giving utterance to my thoughts. Scott hummed for a moment to himself, and looked grave; he had no idea of having his muse complimented at the expense of his native hills. "It may be partiality," said he, at length; "but to my eye, these gray hills and all this wild border country have beauties peculiar to themselves. I like the very nakedness of the land; it has something bold, and stern, and solitary about it. When I have been for some time in the rich scenery about Edinburgh, which is like ornamented garden land, I begin to wish myself back again among my own honest gray hills; and if I did not see the heather at least once a year, I think I should die!

I [...] suggest considering Byron as a Scottish poet – I say ’Scottish’, not ’Scots’, since he wrote in English. The one poet of his time with whom he could be considered to be in competition, a poet of whom he spoke invariably with the highest respect, was Sir Walter Scott. I have always seen, or imagined that I saw, in busts of the two poets, a certain resemblance in the shape of the head. The comparison does honour to Byron, and when you examine the two faces, there is no further resemblance. Were one a person who liked to have busts about, a bust of Scott would be something one could live with. There is an air of nobility about that head, an air of magnanimity, and of that inner and perhaps unconscious serenity that belongs to great writers who are also great men. But Byron – that pudgy face suggesting a tendency to corpulence, that weakly sensual mouth, that restless triviality of expression, and worst of all that blind look of the self-conscious beauty; the bust of Byron is that of a man who was every inch the touring tragedian. Yet it was by being so thoroughgoing an actor that Byron arrived at a kind of knowledge: of the world outside, which he had to learn something about in order to play his role in it, and of that part of himself which was his role. Superficial knowledge, of course: but accurate so far as it went. Of a Scottish quality in Byron’s poetry, I shall speak when I come to Don Juan. But there is a very important part of the Byronic make-up which may appropriately be mentioned before considering his poetry, for which I think his Scottish antecedence provided the material. That is his peculiar diabolism, his delight in posing as a damned creature – and in providing evidence for his damnation in a rather horrifying way. Now, the diabolism of Byron is very different from anything that the Romantic Agony (as Mr Praz calls it) produced in Catholic countries. And I do not think it is easily derived from the comfortable compromise between Christianity and paganism arrived at in England and characteristically English. It could come only from the religious background of a people steeped in Calvinistic theology.

Byron’s diabolism, if indeed it deserves the name, was of a mixed type. He shared, to some extent, Shelley’s Promethean attitude, and the Romantic passion for Liberty; and this passion, which inspired his more political outbursts, combined with the image of himself as a man of action to bring about the Greek adventure. And his Promethean attitude merges into a Satanic (Miltonic) attitude. The romantic conception of Milton’s Satan is semi-Promethean, and also contemplates Pride as a virtue. It would be difficult to say whether Byron was a proud man, or a man who liked to pose as a proud man – the possibility of the two attitudes being combined in the same person does not make them any less dissimilar in the abstract. Byron was certainly a vain man, in quite simple ways: I can’t complain, whose ancestors are there, Erneis, Radulphus – eight-and-forty manors (If that my memory doth not greatly err) Were their reward for following Billy’s banners. His sense of damnation was also mitigated by a touch of unreality: to a man so occupied with himself and with the figure he was cutting nothing outside could be altogether real. It is therefore impossible to make out of his diabolism anything coherent or rational. He was able to have it both ways, it seems; and to think of himself both as an individual isolated and superior to other men because of his own crimes, and as a naturally good and generous nature distorted by the crimes committed against it by others. It is this inconsistent creature that turns up as the Giaour, the Corsair, Lara, Manfred and Cain; only as Don Juan does he get nearer to the truth about himself. But in this strange composition of attitudes and beliefs the element that seems to me most real and deep is that of a perversion of the Calvinist faith of his mother’s ancestors.

[T]here is every probability that, although the historic scenes of many of the Arthurian exploits can be traced to the kingdom of Strathclyde or Cumbria, and the north of England generally, the poems celebrating them were chiefly framed in Armorica - the place of quiet retreat and refuge for the exiled Britons of our island - and that they thence came back to Britain itself, and also spread over the Courts of France and Germany in Norman-French.

The internal evidence in the case of certain of the recognised Scottish romances seems to point to a native origin. The principal figure in these - Sir Gawayn - has both a historical and mythical connection with the Scottish Lowlands, and with Cumberland - the southern part of the Cymric kingdom of Strathclyde. In the earlier course of the story that gradually gathered around him, he fits in with the historical circumstances. He is the son of Loth, King of the Lothians, by Anna, the half-sister of Arthur. Along with his two brothers he assists Arthur in his war against the Saxons. He is made by Arthur Lord of Galloway. He is the friend of the Caledonian Merlin...

The oldest [prophecies] have in many cases a quite distinct Arthurian tinge and cast. They are, indeed, exactly what was to be expected from one who lived in the period of the Rhymour, who was a strong patriotic Scot, who survived the death of Alexander, and was shrewd enough to discern the grasping ambition of the English king, and whose memory and imagination were full of the old Arthurian legends of the Lowlands. Such a man could not but see that the traditional oppression of the ancient Britons was about to be repeated on their Saxon successors: he believed and hoped in a final deliverance; and he readily adapted to the circumstances of his own time the floating legends of Cymric sufferings, temporary deliverance, and at least unsubdued hopes.

It is only within comparatively recent years that the homely stories in the mouths of the country-people have been constituted a branch of learning, and have had applied to them, as such, the methods and the terminology of science. No doubt a very noteworthy gain to knowledge has resulted from this treatment, — a curious department of research has been opened up, and light has been cast upon various outside things of greater importance than the subject of study itself. But, side by side with this gain to knowledge, is there not, involved in the method of treatment indicated, a loss to the stories themselves ? Classified, tabulated, scientifically named, they are no longer the wild free product of Nature that we knew and loved: — they are become, so to speak, a collection of butterflies in a case, an album of pressed wild flowers. No doubt they are still very interesting, and highly instructive ; but their poetry, their brightness, the fragrance which clung about them in their native air, their native soil, is in large measure gone!

Fiona MacLeod provided a particular and peculiar atmosphere of twilit gloom, grim despair, and beauty laden with defeat. Despite the theatrical props and pretences, he was not making it all up, but articulating a genuine psychic affliction. The manner is both excessive and limiting - poetry which continually recreates a single mood by means of a litany of repeated words such as 'sorrow', 'beauty', 'grey', 'old', 'dream', 'pale' and 'sighing'. In one essay Fiona describes the Celtic spirit as a 'rapt pleasure in what is ancient and in the contemplation of what holds an indwelling melancholy; a visionary passion for beauty, which is of the immortal things beyond the temporary beauty of what is mutable and mortal...' Apart from the prose itself, which seems blown up with a bicycle pump, I'm nor sure if he knows what he means. What are these 'immortal things'? One sharp definition would destroy the misty fabric altogether.

The average Christian is never meant to find out that, before it was warped and distorted, everything he reads about between the pages of his Bible, as well as every element of his religion, originally came from Egyptian Amenism and Irish Druidism. The more Druidism is studied the more apparent is its relationship to the revealed religion of the Mosaic Law – Rev. C. C. Dobson (Did Our Lord Visit Britain as they say in Cornwall and Somerset, 1954) The Culdee establishment had now acquired a firm footing in the nation. Some of its members not only excelled in astronomy, poetry, and rhetoric, but also in philosophy, mathematics, and several other arts and sciences (which exactly correlates with the learned Druid magi)…It is among the Scottish Culdees, that we are to look for that pure pattern of Christian life, such as was exemplified in the African, Greek and Egyptian Anchorites – Rev. Alexander Low (History of Scotland from the Earliest Period, to the Middle of the Ninth Century, 1826) Nothing is clearer than that Patrick engrafted Christianity on the pagan superstition with so much skill that he won people over to the Christian religion before they understood the exact difference between the two systems of belief – Dr. Donovan (editor of The Annals of the Four Masters)

Better than Medicine   A glass of bitter beer or pale ale, taken with the principal meal of the day, does more good, and less harm, than any medicine the physician can prescribe.   Dr Carpenter in The Scottish Review, (1750)

As decisively as Lincoln left the rural life, he left the Baptist church as well. In New Salem he became widely known as an infidel. He rejected eternal damnation, innate sin, the divinity of Jesus, and the infallibility of the Bible. For a time it seemed that there was nothing sacred that Lincoln didn’t reject. He recited the poetry of Robert Burns, the notorious Scottish freethinker. He carried around a Bible, reading passages and arguing against them. It reached a point where it hurt Lincoln politically, with people loudly refusing to vote for a man with such “shocking” views. When Lincoln put his ideas about the Bible and Christ on paper, even one of his fellow skeptics thought he’d gone too far, and threw the manuscript into the fire. Lincoln

Nuair a bhagras an nàmhaid, Air a' Ghàidheal a dh'éighear - Bidh gach morair is iarla Guidhe dian leibh gu éirigh, Bidh sibh measail aig diùcan 'S bheir an Crùn a chuid fhéin dhuibh; Ach nuair cheanglar an t-sith leibh Cha bhi cuimhn' air bhur feum dhaibh, Cha bhi cuimhn' air mar smàladh Thar sàl do thìr chéin sibh, Mar chaidh fearann a dhiùltadh 'S mar a chum iad na féidh bhuaibh, Mar a chu iad an t-iasg bhuaibh Agus ianlaith nan speuran. When the enemy threaten, It's the Gael who is called - Each earl and each lord Implores you to rise, Dukes show you respect And the Crown gives you its share; But when peace is secured by you They'll forget how you served them, They'll forget you were banished Far over the sea, And how land was refused And they forbade you the deer, And forbade you the fish And the birds of the air. - Ruairidh MacAoidh

in describing the various writers of his idolatry he more than once lets fall a phrase that could equally apply to himself. 'To read Spenser,' he says, 'is to grow in mental health.' What he values in Addison is his 'open-mindedness.' The moments of despair chronicled in Scott's diary cannot, he claims, counterpoise 'that ease and good temper, that fine masculine cheerfulness' suffused through the best of the Waverly novels. Most of all it was the chiaroscuro of what Chaucer called 'earnest' and 'game' that attracted him. He found it eminently in the poetry of Dunbar, that late-medieval Scottish maker who wrote the greatest religious poetry and the earthiest satire in the language

There is a definite linkage between the Humanist legacy and the vernacular movement, in the sense that those scholars who did most to preserve the prestige of Buchanan as a classic text for Latin classes in Scotland were also the same men who did most to encourage the idea of the Scottish tongue as being as suitable as a vehicle for classic poetry as any other modern language.

All Fergusson's verses, indeed all humanist verse, has within it an eligiac seam; always present beneath the surface is the assumption that the world is imperfect, that it has fallen from grace. As with the disintegrating Tory ideal in the country, there is in Fergusson's poetry an ideal, imagined city of the past, hopelessly toppling as the new Babylon lays down its foundations: city of chaos, dirt, noise, broken communication, luxury, disorder. In essence the poet follows in his representation the timeless humanist imperative, attempting 'to create order out of disorder, and to make sense of life'. Hallow-Fair and Leith Races to a degree make just such a clear demarcation between the two cities of past and present in their thesis - antithesis structures. The two cities embody two different Scottish cultures: Auld Reekie, the pastoral, civilised, humanist culture; and Edina, the Athens of the North, but more often, Babylon, the counter-pastoral, brutal, Whig culture. Hallow-Fair, Leith Races, The Election, The King's Birth-Day in Edinburgh, satirise the new Babylon; the poems of this group celebrate an older Scotland, and Auld Reekie, in the same eligiac vein as The Daft Days. Yet, as we have seen, the poet, at times, undermines too rigorous a humanist position: demarcations are not all that clear; ideals don't always elevate the human codition; the endless wheel of change and creativity, diversity and unrest, may be forging themselves into a new order.

In 1766, James Boswell, having returned from a grand tour accompanied by Rousseau's mistress, left London for his native Edinburgh, where he took his final law examination and joined the Scottish bar. Meanwhile, ensconced in the Advocate's Library, the Professor of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy, Adam Ferguson, was completing his pioneering work, shortly to appear (despite David Hume's misgivings) as An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767). These were heady days in the precincts of the Scottish Parliament Building, when cultural conversation in the Old Town was as high as the odours of its teeming streets. On 16th August 1773, Ferguson dined at Boswell's house, with Samuel Johnson who had just begun his Scottish journey. They debated the authenticity of Ossian's poetry, and their colleague, Lord Monboddo's ideas about human evolution, Johnson ridiculing the latter's notion that men once had tails.

PASTICHE WITH LINES FROM CONAN DOYLE Milwaukee, 2012 I have pinpointed the particular flaw in our relations: it’s how you transpose each small riot into sadness but have no Stradivarius to mourn on—you have my ears, and my feet freeze in our bed, and the knocking in the night is just a dear friend looking to score, our cat is named for a knave. We tweak our epaulets, we make margaritas in rooms populated by the ephemera of other lives that I cannot shore up my own against. This fashion rag tells me to think of the highlands so I eye-drop water into my Laphroaig and when later, for work, I stand on the Scottish street on which I once lived, it is blue melodrama or it is not real, and if the stories tally I’ll watch it again on the plane. This may appeal to your lurid taste in fiction, darling: I am your constant companion, and we have never both lived within these same walls.

Scotland's contribution to American balladry is a subject which was either glossed over or neglected entirely by Cecil Sharp, the English folklorist and ballad collector, when he came over to the United States in search of traditional song poetry. Over here we are indebted to Sharp and to Miss Maud Karpeles for exploring the back country and helping us find what we had. Their visits were fruitful and their English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians is an exemplary work. But it is regrettable that a Scottish folklorist, familiar and in tune with Lowland traditions, was not close at hand to make a few claims of his own. Somebody needed to suggest that Scotland had as good a claim to half the British ballads Sharp collected in Tennessee, Virginia and North Carolina as England has. Somebody might have suggested that English Folk Songs from the Southern Appalachians is a misleading title - that British Folk Songs would have been more accurate. For, after all, the most authoritative editor in the business, Francis J. Child, had clearly recognised two national traditions in his monumental English and Scottish Popular Ballads, which is the keystone work on which all subsequent studies have been based.

It is said that Edward had very enlightened, advanced, and comprehensive ideas of statesmanship; that he wished to fuse England, Scotland, and Wales into one grand monarchy, with anticipation of a great future for the whole. The extreme exasperation he felt, and the savage cruelty he showed to the patriotic Scots who opposed him, were quite a natural result of the baffling and frustration of his wise conception and benificent designs. In the history of nations, as in that of philosophy, we are very apt to interject into ancient actors and thinkers modern ideas, at which, probably, they would have stood amazed. At the best, this view of the character and motives of Edward is a mere hypothesis. But, supposing him to have held that it was infinitely better for Scotland to submit to his rule, that hardly gave him a right to use violence, brutality, and murder to enforce his views.

There Was A Man of Double Deed There was a man of double deed, Who sowed his garden full of seed; When the seed began to grow, ‘Twas like a garden full of snow; When the snow began to melt, ‘Twas like a ship without a belt; When the ship began to sail, ‘Twas like a bird without a tail; When the bird began to fly, ‘Twas like an eagle in the sky; When the sky began to roar, ‘Twas like a lion at my door; When my door began to crack, ‘Twas like a stick across my back; When my back began to smart, ‘Twas like a penknife in my heart; And when my heart began to bleed, ‘Twas death, and death, and death indeed.

He came to my office in wet clothes, all muscles and smolder. I hardly knew where to look." "I think you knew exactly where to look," Phoebe said, her light gray eyes sparkling with amusement. "Is he handsome?” “A stunner. Tall and big-chested, with blue eyes and hair the color of summer wheat. And his accent . . .” “Irresistible?” “Oh, yes. There’s something about a Scottish burr that makes it seem as if a man is either about to recite poetry or toss you over his shoulder and carry you away.” “Maybe both at the same time,” Phoebe said dreamily, sipping her tea.