roderick watson
only to be assailed there, in his familiar home surroundings, with an overwhelming
senseof choking guilt and responsibility. Waking up in prison again is a huge relief.
He cannot fathom where such a dream came from unless, he reflects, it was because
of the onion he ate. It is not a convincing explanation. The fine lyric ‘Letter from
Italy’ remembers the stars as a point of contact between the poet and a loved one at
home, concluding:
Perimeters have bounded me,
sad rims of desert and of sea,
the famous one around Tobruk,
and now barbed wire, which way I look,
except above—the Pleiades. ́^66Like Henderson before him, Garioch had contributed to the Army ballad tradition
with ‘Kreigy Ballad’ about the POW experience, but the most profound—if
indirect—response to his wartime experiences can be found in three long poems
written in the 1950s: ‘The Bog’, ‘The Wire’, and ‘The Muir’. All share the sense of
choking guilt and oppression felt in ‘The Prisoner’s Dream’ and a sense, too, of
anonymous crowds held in a vast perimeter of common captivity.
‘The Bog’ takes a distinctively Scottish wasteland of water, peat, and mist to
envisage us all mired together in slime, holding on to dreams of heaven or conquest,
while ‘Thae men that fetch us bombs frae yont the seas,|heich in their Heinkels,
ken the same despair’. The poet remembers the agonizing end to Beethoven’s
piano sonata, the ‘Appassionata’, and imagines the exhilaration and terror of total
disruption as ‘The causey street we staun on shaks and shogs,|freestane fowre-
storey houses flee in air’. Yet the bog is where he is and where he stays. If he keeps
his head down, he can tolerate it, content perhaps with his own tiny portion of gold
at the end of a grim rainbow with ‘colours braw as onie shroud:|broun and dark
broun, black and mair black.’^67
The poet returns to this bleak metaphor in the longest of these poems, ‘The
Muir’, which is an extended meditation on the evolution of science and a pursuit
of knowledge that led to nuclear physics and Hiroshima. Dense with literary and
scientific references from many periods, the poem is haunted by the fate of the
eighteenth-century Scottish poet Robert Fergusson who died young in a madhouse,
gripped by a horror of damnation. Garioch reflects that this was no melancholy
Romantic pose, but a genuine kind of understanding:
yon skeelie makar, aince articulat,
...howled like a cuddy his falsetto bray
wi no wrocht artifice of poesy
or music; here was truth, and it was wae.^68(^66) Garioch, ‘Letter from Italy’, ibid. 70. (^67) Garioch, ‘The Bog’, ibid. 48.
(^68) Garioch, ‘The Muir’, ibid. 61.