roderick watson
of dye with which a scientist colours a piece of matter before looking at it under a
microscope.It allowed detail to stand out and take on symbolic value.’^35
The same intensity can be found in the work of Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean, who
was born and brought up, the son of a tailor, on the island of Raasay, between Skye
and the Scottish mainland. He was still more ambivalent than Henderson about
fighting for an empire and an English-speaking hegemony that had, in effect, done
much to marginalize (and at one time to suppress) his own native language and
culture. The relationship between Highland Scotland and ‘Great Britain’ had been
a complex one ever since the Jacobite uprisings in 1715 and 1745—the last civil
wars to be fought on British soil. These conflicts had Scots fighting on both sides
and then, with the formation of the frontier-guard Black Watch in 1725, the start of
a military tradition that saw Highland regiments recruited to fight for the glory of
the British Empire in battlefields all round the globe. Henderson saw the paradoxes
of this situation, and viewed the Highland soldiers with a romantic eye: ‘conscripts
of a fast vanishing race, on whom the dreadful memory of the clearances rests, and
for whom there is little left to sustain them in the high places of the field but the
heroic tradition ofgaisge(valour)’.^36 Sorley MacLean was more brutally pragmatic,
at least with what seemed like the certainties of the 1930s:
My fear and hatred of the Nazis [is] even more than my hatred of the English Empire. My
only hope is that the British and German Empires will exhaust each other and leave the
Soviet the dominating influence on the oppressed people of all Europe including Britain
and Germany....The only real war is the class war and I see my own little part merely as
one that contributes to the mutual exhaustion of the British and German Empires. I support
the British Empire because it is the weakest and therefore not as great a threat to Europe
and the rest of the world as a German victory.^37
MacLean disliked what he saw as the ‘vile, cast iron, bourgeois class rule in
the British army’,^38 but his anxieties about the rise of fascism had been clear
since the 1930s, when he had agonized about whether to volunteer for the
International Brigade to fight against Franco in Spain. The emotional upheaval that
MacLean underwent in the struggle between his socialist principles, painful family
commitments, and a series of intensely complex love affairs produced theDain`
do Eimhirsequence, which many critics regard, along with Christopher Whyte,
as arguably the major achievement of Scottish Gaelic poetry in the twentieth
century. These love poems to ‘Eimhir’ were written between 1931 and 1941 before
being collected and published in 1943.^39 They take the name of Cuchulainn’s
(^35) Giles Romilly, quoted in Henderson,Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica, 63.
(^36) Henderson, ‘Foreword to the 1948 Edition’, 60.
(^37) Sorley MacLean to Hugh MacDiarmid, 8 Mar. 1941, quoted in Joy Hendry, ‘Sorley MacLean:
The Man and his Work’, in Raymond J. Ross and Joy Hendry (eds.),Sorley MacLean: Critical Essays
(Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1986), 27.
(^38) MacLean to Douglas Young, 27 Oct. 1940, ibid.
(^39) Sorley MacLean,Dain do Eimhir` (Glasgow: William MacLellan, 1943). Critics have argued that
this should be regarded as the definitive edition, although the volume contained only forty-nine out of