Untitled

‘death’s proletariat’ 

wife as the symbolic beloved in a series of intensely painful and passionately
conscience-strickenmeditations, exaltations, and bitter complaints that struggle to
find a balance between love and war, passion and politics, selfish and social values,
obsession and reason:

Debhiodhp` og do bhe` oil uaibhrich`

mar ris gach braon den fhuil luachmhoir

a thuit air raointean reota fuara`

nam beann Sp`ainnteach bho fhoirne cruadhach?`

What would the kiss of your proud mouth be

compared with each drop of the precious blood

that fell on the cold frozen uplands

of Spanish mountains from a column of steel?^40

On the outbreak of war MacLean also started to write ‘An Cuilithionn’/‘The
Cuillin’, a long and fervently political poem which took the spectacular mountain
range on Skye as a metaphor of striving and almost unattainable ideals, surrounded
by broken ground and a global morass of human pain and misery, including the
history of the Clearances and his own people:

and until the whole red Army comes

battle-marching across Europe,

that song of wretchedness will seep

into my heart and my senses.

The warriors of the poor mouldering

rotting carcases in Spain,

and the hundreds of thousands in China.^41

The work was never completed to the poet’s satisfaction, and his disillusionment
with Stalin’s Russia after the War led him to leave it unpublished until its appearance
in the 1987–8 issue ofChapmanmagazine. He continued to work on theD`ain
do Eimhirsequence, however, while he was serving in North Africa, writing the
uncollected short lyric ‘Knightsbridge, Libia’ in June 1942: ‘Though I am to-day
against the breast of battle|not here my burden and extremity; not Rommel’s guns
and tanks,|but that my darling should be crooked and a liar.’^42 Yet the fatigue of
war and the reality of battle led to doubts about his writing, if only for the moment,
as he confessed in a letter to Hugh MacDiarmid that he was ‘very much ashamed

sixty-nine poems that were written in a series of creative bursts over a period of ten years. The complete
poems and an extensive account of their history can befound in SomhairleMacGill-Eain/Sorley
MacLean,D`ain do Eimhir, ed. Christopher Whyte (Glasgow: ASLS, 2002).

(^40) Maclean, ‘IV’, inDain do Eimhir, 48; later titled ‘Gaoir na h’-Eorpa’/‘The Cry of Europe’. All
English translations by the poet himself. 41
MacLean, ‘An Cuilithionn’/‘The Cuillin’, inFrom Wood to Ridge: Collected Poems in Gaelic and
English(Manchester: Carcanet, 1989), 75.
(^42) MacLean, ‘Knightsbridge, Libia’, in Maurice Lindsay (ed.),Poetry Scotland: Second Collection
(Glasgow: MacLellan, 1945), 42.