Untitled

 david goldie

narrowly that of the country manse. Poems of the war, such as ‘On Leave’, come
nearto achieving a brooding, Housman-like resonance in their depictions of a
death-haunted landscape:

I saw a thoosand hills,

Green and gowd i’ the licht,

Roond and backit like sheep,

Huddle into the nicht.

But I kenned they werena hills,

But the same as the mounds ye see

Doun by the back o’ the line

Whaur they bury oor lads that dee.

They were juist the same as at Loos

Whaur we happit Andra and Dave.—

There was naething in life but death,

And a’ the warld was a grave.

A’ the hills were graves,

The graves o’ the deid langsyne,

And somewhere oot in the Wast

Was the grummlin’ battle-line.^36

Too often, however, they find resolution in an easy recourse to rural piety: in this
case the double blow of the death of the speaker’s comrades and his child is softened
by a simple prayer:

Iflangmedounonmyknees

And I prayed as my hert wad break,

And I got my answer sune,

For oot o’ the nicht God spake.

As a man that wauks frae a stound

And kens but a single thocht,

Oot o’ the wind and the nicht

I got the peace that I socht.^37

Scottish Dialect Poetry and the War

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

Buchan was not alone in this attempt to revive the dialect poetry of Scotland
during the war—and perhaps not alone in creating vernacular speakers markedly
less sophisticated than their creators. A mixed group consisting mainly of ́emigr ́es
and indigenous gentry, among them Charles Murray, Violet Jacob, J. B. Salmond,
and Mary Symon, published work before and during the war that attempted to

(^36) John Buchan, ‘On Leave’, inPoems, Scots and English(London: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1917), 56–7.
(^37) Ibid. 58.