david goldie
Whaur the grass is wat wi’ the red-warm rain
Andshe maun tak’ her gait her lane.^12This is plainly a poem in the Scottish tradition, not only in its register and vocabulary
but in its use of the tetrameters of folk poetry. Stewart, though, is perhaps guilty
here of making a common assumption of much ersatz Scottish folk poetry: that
the vernacular only really comes into its own in expressing the simple, if affecting,
sentiments of the common folk—that dialect is the vehicle of simple emotion rather
than complex ideas. When Stewart writes poems of education and formation, as in
‘Alma Mater’, in which he apostrophizes Glasgow University as ‘Grey Mother on
the windy hill’,^13 or poems about literary ideas, such as ‘Of the Poet’, it is to standard
Edwardian English that he turns. Similarly, the more reflective and moving poems
in his collection—the elegies for dead friends and the valedictions on his own
anticipated death—employ a high literary English. ‘If I Should Fall upon the Field’
is typical:
If I should fall upon the field
And lie among the slain,
Then mine will be the victory
And yours the pain;
For this in prospect comforts me
Against all sadd’ning fears
That,dyingso,Imakemyself
Worthy your tears.^14The fact that his most personal poems are also the ones that are most conservative
and conventional in their language and tone—that when he writes most directly
out of his own experience it is English he reaches for—is perhaps significant. There
remains something profoundly moving, given the particularly fraught circum-
stances under which they were written, about poems such as ‘If I Should Fall upon
the Field’ which makes a probing, formal critical analysis seem somehow intrusive
and inappropriate. But it is perhaps not impertinent to point out that this poem,
like so many of its kind, gathers strength not from its originality, or its expression
of a particularly personal feeling, but rather from its very commonplaceness. A
strongly conventional poetry like this arguably gains its effect not only from the
contexts that render its sentiments singularly compelling, but also from its close
similarity to the many other poems of its type. In cases such as this, conventionality
is not so much a sign of the poet’s inability to master his form—though this
may also be an issue—but a guarantee of the authenticity of its sentiments. One
might go so far as to suggest that in war, the rules governing the distaste for cliche ́
are suspended: a familiar, even perhaps rather hackneyed phrase or trope can be
allowed to stand, beyond the reach of possible embarrassment, as it does on a war
(^12) J. E. Stewart, ‘Left her Lane’, inGrapes of Thorns(London: Erskine MacDonald, 1917), 22.
(^13) Stewart, ‘Alma Mater’, ibid. 33. (^14) Stewart, ‘If I Should Fall upon the Field’, ibid. 46.