The Heart Of Gaeldom

Sorley MacLean's verses evoke the untamed energy of our landscape

- Cameron McNeish

AS the Raasay ferry ploughed its way through white-tipped waves from the mouth of Loch Sligachan and crossed the Narrows, I settled myself down in the austere setting of the "passenger lounge" and read through the lines of Sorley MacLean's greatest poem, Hallaig.

Somhairle MacGill-Eain was, of course, arguably the greatest of Gaeldom's bards. He was born at Ostaig on the Isle of Raasay in 1911, where his upbringing was rooted in the richness of Gaelic culture. Hallaig is one of his best-known poems, and for years I have been attracted by its underlying themes of nature. Indeed, while much of MacLean's work dwells on the brutality of war and modern exploitation, he often uses landscape as a form of symbolism.

"The window is nailed and boarded

Through which I saw the West

And my love is at the Burn of Hallaig,

A birch tree, and she has always been

Between Inver and Milk Hollow

Here and there about Baile-Chuirn:

She is a birch, a hazel,

A straight, slender young rowan."

I'd never considered Sorley MacLean as a nature poet - at least not in the same way as you might consider some poets of the Romantic period, which began around the end of the 18th century. Poets like William Wordsworth, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, and American writers like Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau.

The Romantic period grew and developed during a time of profound change in the West. The Industrial Revolution was well underway, as was the Enlightenment - that great period of intellectual philosophy and debate.