was there a scottish war literature? Brooke’, what one finds is an uncomplicated attitude towards the Englishness
thathe had clearly embraced. He talks unhesitatingly in his poetry of ‘this our
England’,^10 and clearly, as in ‘Survivors’, is content to identify its familiar landscape
as home:
We are survivors. We have reached the day,
Desired for so long, scarce hoped for. We could pray
For naught more blessed than this blessed hour,
For see! The welcoming cliffs of England tower,
White, radiant from the waves. Crowded we stand,
With eyes insatiate towards that lovely land;
Her homes appear and o’er the downs the roads
Climb, white and tortuous, to unseen abodes,
While, from the distance seen, her fields of corn
Standmotionlessonthisunrivalledmorn.^11The register and vocabulary here are as solidly English as any historical vignette by
Arthur Bryant—bearing as they do a set of assumptions about a blessed countryside
and its moderate, resolute people that runs in lines of iambic pentameter from
Shakespeare’s John of Gaunt to the speakers of Rupert Brooke’s poems. But it is a
register that Robertson employs as to the manner born, as do many of his fellow
middle-class Scots.
Similar sentiments can be found in much of the poetry written by Scots educated,
not at Oxbridge, but at the Scottish universities. John Stewart was a graduate of
Glasgow University and a pre-war schoolteacher who enlisted in 1914 as a private
in the Highland Light Infantry. Much more characteristic than Sterling of the
Scottish type of the ‘lad o’ pairts’—that of the young man from humble beginnings
who rises to eminence through a combination of native intelligence and formal
education—Stewart moved swiftly through the ranks and was commanding the 4th
Battalion South Staffordshire Regiment as lieutenant-colonel when he was killed in
April 1918, aged 29. The poems in hisGrapes of Thorns(1917), however, inhabit
the same affective and intellectual terrain as that of his more ostensibly Anglicized
peers. Stewart does show a knowledge of, and concern for, the voice of dialect
poetry in the one vernacular poem in the collection, ‘Left her Lane’, which attempts
to come to terms with the suffering of the war’s bereaved:
Aiblins she thocht he’d hap her doon
In the old kirk-yaird ayont the toon
Whaur the kirkspire shadows his faither’s stane—
But she maun tak’ that gait her lane
For at the mirk on yon hill-face
They dug for him a resting-place(^10) Alexander Robertson, ‘To the Kindly Ladies of Ripon’, inLast Poems of Alexander Robertson
(London: Elkin Matthews, 1918), 29. 11
Robertson, ‘Survivors’, inComrades(London: Elkin Matthews, 1916), 31.