What Is Mackays Purpose in This Essay in the Art of Communal Bathing

1"I dislike 'confessionalist poetry' very much indeed," declares the Scottish poet George Mackay Brown (1921-1996) in a strikingly assertive tone (Annwn 1991, 19). His unabridged Nerveless Poems [1] testify to that. Not just does he hardly ever use the kickoff-person pronoun (although this is by no means a sign of the field of study'south absence in his text), simply the vast majority of his poems are either 3rd-person narratives, unremarkably pruned downward to the stark objectivity of a traditional ballad or saga, or, quite often, instances of Bakhtinian polyphony (like "Bethlehem," CP 148-9, interweaving the voices of "Angel, Innkeeper, Our Lady, Captain of Herod'south Guard, Shepherd, Magus", or "The Stranger," CP 22-3, those of "the tall proud adult female," "the milking girl," and "the obstinate human being"), sometimes featuring only dramatis personae to the absolute exclusion of an overarching poetic voice (as in "Stars: A Chrismas Patchwork," CP 209-12). As Alan Bold puts it, "when an 'I' speaks it is normally in the context of a dramatic monologue" (Bold 18). This is a very apt point provided we understand by it that it implies neither the Browning kind of dramatic monologue with its born irony, nor the translucent Eliotian or Poundian "mask-lyric" (Rosmarin 110) only a pure expression of the Keatsian "poetical Character" (beingness "every matter and nothing" and "having no Identity. . . and filling some other Body"—Letter to Richard Woodhouse, 27 October 1818). To phrase it differently, the concept of persona (from personando: "sounding through"), defined as "that through which the poet seems to speak" (Rosmarin 110; my emphasis) and thus implying overlaps betwixt the poet'south voice and the created voice, appears to be irrelevant to the report of Brown's poesy. Impersonality here is, indeed, of a more radical nature than that of his more famous modernist predecessors, Yeats, Eliot or Pound (Ellmann 2-3; Selden 63), leaving the reader with the odd feeling that the authorial voice is impalpable, superseded past "fictive" voices (Cambridge 44).

2This is doubtless related to Brown'southward bardic affiliation, namely the tradition of praise poetry: "Poet, this fort that our architect and masons are edifice so strong and true," says Thorfinn Ragnarson in the novel Beside the Ocean of Time, "it must be celebrated in a verse form, or a trip the light fantastic toe of words" (Brown 1995, 81). "In his role of celebrant of homo reality," George T. Wright observes, "[t]he poet is a singer. Whatever else he is remains irrelevant" (Wright 30). And indeed, celebration in Chocolate-brown's verse is often and then anonymous and depersonalized every bit to go liturgical, as in the many "Stations of the Cross" poems; even in his fiction, "to celebrate the mystery properly the story-teller must requite fashion to a ritual vocalisation" (Brown 1977, 25).

3The "bardic mask" (Cambridge 46), however, may too conveniently muffle aspects of the poet's personality—as masks have, from the Greeks downwards to the Victorians and the Modernists. And it does not really come as a surprise that the homo who once wrote in the Orkney Herald (8 March 1949) that "everything about me revolts me beyond belief" should also declare: "In the north it is considered shameful to show ane's feelings and emotions. The stoical mask must always be worn, whatsoever befalls" (Brown 1997, 69). Hence his rather suspicious claim that in "the whole fabric of what I've written there are only ane or 2 unimportant shreds of myself" (Annwn 1991, 19), a claim which I advise to put to the test of his rare honey lyrics—poems normally suffused with "1's feelings and emotions." Almost all of them are ostensibly "authored" by either real historical, more often than not medieval, poets (whose original compositions may or may not appear in the sagas) or, occasionally, fictitious ones. To all intents and purposes, these "poems are spoken in projected voices; few can be linked to an autobiographical 'I'" (Cambridge 43): has George Mackay Brownish, then, vanished from them, and from all the others, for that thing?

4Comparing a Viking crusader's lyric with a love verse form written by Brown in his ain name (an exceptional occurrence) will reveal that, dissimilar though the two pieces may exist, the cocky-concealment strategy that characterizes Brown's poetry in general and that is very obviously at work in the second i also, is non enough to prevent the "unintentional intrusion of an uncontrolled voice" (Dolar 25) which it turns out to share with the showtime i. Though pro-jected, this vocalisation not just retains its link with the authorial self, but, every bit the voice of the unspeakable, also plunges deep into his unconscious.

5The and so-called "12th Century Norse Lyrics of Rognvald Kolson, Earl and Saint," published in George Mackay Brown'due south sixth drove of poems, Winterfold (1976, 21-24), "have their origin," says a note past the author, "in the medieval Orkneyinga Saga" (p. vi), a work whose translation by A. B. Taylor (1938) he "read with please many times," as he confides in An Orkney Tapestry [2]—a book about the history and the sociology of his native islands published seven years earlier (Chocolate-brown 1973 [1969], ii) which already included some of them. But the aforementioned annotation besides makes it articulate that these pieces are "'imitations'," or instances of what he calls in An Orkney Tapestry "very costless paraphrase," as he has "had to wrench skaldic verse into a shape acceptable to modern readers" (OT 3, two). Then he both acknowledges Rognvald Kolson's authorship (which the editors of the Collected Poems fabricated even more conspicuous past putting the earl's name under each poem—CP 157-64) and makes no mystery of his ain forceful rewriting of them. While he is fully aware that they "may disturb Norse purists," he as well claims to have tried to "preserve some of the gaiety, savagery, piety of the originals" (Winterfold half dozen). The "poet's licence" (OT three) to which he admits might very well, then, exist a fashion of reclaiming the personal voice that he has disowned. This would account for the "tentative advent" (Winterfold vi; my emphasis) that those poems first made in An Orkney Tapestry. But before we keep farther, we need to grasp how Brown relates to Kolson in his fiction.

6Amongst the multiple historical or imaginary poet or writer figures that migrate freely, either every bit characters or as authors, from the world of his brusque stories, novels or plays to the universe of his poems, Rognvald Kolson takes pride of place. "He is," by the author's own account, "the nigh attractive person in the Saga of the Orkneymen—soldier, statesman, poet, lover, charlatan" (OT 102). At the same fourth dimension, he is treated by the story-teller in a very dissimilar fashion than most of the other similar figures. Simon Olalfson in "Sealskin" (Hawkfall), Colm in "The Tarn and the Rosary" (ibid.) or Arn, the old bullheaded poet in "The Corn and the Tares" (The Masked Fisherman) all have a roundness and a verisimilitude that brand them likely candidates for Dark-brown's projective identification. Rognvald Kolson, on the reverse, hardly ever acquires fictional depth or substance. In the brusk story "The Eye of the Hurricane" (A Time to Go along) he is but a grapheme in an historical novel whose author, Barclay, certainly bears more resemblance to Brownish, if any is to exist constitute, than Rognvald does. (The latter's barbarous deeds on his pilgrimage to Jerusalem in the mid-twelfth century, as they are depicted without embellishment in the "Crusader" chapter of An Orkney Tapestry, would be enough to preclude whatever such association.) The Viking poet is mentioned in "The Corn and the Tares" alongside two other poets, Arn and Bjarni, but, again, non on the same narrative level; he is at a second remove from the narrator, but referred to past the protagonist as the well-nigh mythic initiator of a new kind of poesy unknown in the North. True, he does appear as a cardinal character in "The Masked Fisherman," but as a "stranger. . . wearing a hood" and who "didn't speak like us" (The Masked Fisherman 130, 134). Equally a rule, then, he is abstract, remote, absent: in short, "masked."

7Yet his part is central. In the "The Eye of the Hurricane," for example, Barclay is having difficulty with the 5th chapter of his novel about "the holy voyage of Rognvald Kolson, Earl of Orkney, who sailed from Norway to Palestine. . . in 1150-51" (Brown 1969, 167). After "a satisfactory start" (168) dealing with the factual description of the journey, he is now floundering in his endeavour to relate the dotty and erotic encounter betwixt the earl and the countess Ermengarde of Narbonne, "something between lust and sanctity" (170), "a romance of the rose, passionate and chaste" (168) which occurred after "their eyes faltered" and "their lips fell silent" (168). His repeated efforts to break the "minor delicious silence" which was "in the saga besides" (168) fail: "Nothing happened" (170), the reason being that "Love is as well deep a subject area for prose—only music and poesy can build bridges between the rage of the seed in the furrow, the coupling of beasts, the passion of man and woman, the saint'south prayer" (180). This is not simply the narrator speaking, only George Mackay Brown, the writer, who is on familiar basis hither, for all his fictional works illustrate this impossibility for prose to stand for love, in particular erotic dearest, adequately or fifty-fifty conceive of it: as a rule, information technology tends to be confined to fantasy (Delmaire 55-58). Significantly, here too, some time later on finding himself unable to write the honey scene in his novel, Barclay has a lustful dream virtually Miriam, a adult female whom he barely knows—a "masque of rape" as he was to call it shamefully later on (172):

eight

And all at one time, quite involuntarily, a scheme of seduction arranged itself in my mind, and unfolded sombrely and inevitably. It concerned Miriam and myself. We moved together from station to station of lust.. . . The white hart stirred backside the trees; the quiver was loaded; the dogs of animalism raised near and far their broken music. . .

9But while Barclay has little option other than to seek imaginary compensation, Rognvald Kolson "made rapturous lyrics" (168) about Ermengarde after he had left Narbonne. These lyrics happen to constitute the 5th section of the Winterfold Kolson poems, filling in the blank, equally information technology were, of the fictional novelist's "unfinished" chapter five. So where Barclay the novelist failed, Rognvald the poet succeeded. In other words, the medieval poet exists less equally a grapheme than as an idealized and inaccessible model; and this applies to Dark-brown as well, since he, likewise, uses the saga equally his source textile. Remarkably, they share a articulation intuition nearly the importance of silences in verse: while the latter confesses his "organized religion [in] … sounds and silences bearing verse" (Brown 1997, 12; my emphasis), "Earl Rognvald Kolson of Orkney" self-confidently defines himself as a "poet,/ A man skilled at ordering sounds and silences" (CP 449, ll. four-5). We will shortly discover the pointedness of such remarks.

10In "The Corn and the Tares," a brusk story published twenty years after, the amateur poet Bjarni Kolbeinson is defenseless up in the contest between the onetime skaldic narrative poetry and the "new" lyric mode. "Verse is not for praising girls or skylarks or cornstalks. Poesy is for putting courage and strength into human being," declares Arn, his mentor (98). Merely he nevertheless "will—no matter how difficult it is—make a great love-poem for Biorg the corn-gatherer" (97-98), the young woman with whom he has fallen in love. Although we are non shown the poem he vows to compose, we learn that, there again, Rognvald Kolson's beloved lyrics are his inspiration (101-2). Two of these are actually quoted in the story; they are identical to their Winterfold counterparts. Nosotros have at present come full circle, except for a few modest alterations that occurred betwixt the early Orkney Tapestry versions and the afterward ones in Winterfold. For obvious reasons of space, I volition quote fully merely ane poem which has the combined advantages of appearing in the saga too every bit in "The Corn and the Tares," in Winterfold and in An Orkney Tapestry; and I take chosen its earliest version (OT 111) considering its "tentative" character, as we call up, makes it more likely to reveal the speaker's phonation in its inchoative phase.

11Taylor'south "original" for this poem is substantially different and longer, simply what nosotros need to bear in listen for the purpose of this analysis is that, despite a few standard variations, it is in iambic meter. It is arguably the case hither too, peculiarly as of line 4, notwithstanding the rhythmic disruption in the terminal line caused by a "rising inversion" (Attridge 1995, 120)—that is, a sequence made up of a double offbeat followed by ii emphasized beats with an unsaid offbeat in between—which, though syncopated, still preserves the beat-offbeat alternation of regular poesy considering "the misplaced emphasis is potent enough to attract the beat out without permanently dislocating the metrical grid" (Attridge 1982, 182). The beginning iii lines are more difficult to business relationship for in terms of metrics. Here, the afterwards version of the verse form may help. Its first line is strictly iambic ("The summer oral cavity of Ermengarde"), bearing out the possibility that such is the prevailing, though occasionally subconscious, meter in the present verse form. If so, the original first line appears unduly upset: an implied offbeat occurs betwixt two emphasized beats without any prior or subsequent compensation in the class of a double offbeat, reverse to what happens in the last line, where a similar stress clash is rhythmically balanced out by the initial double offbeat. Within the context of a poetry which cannot be termed "free" since it has retained definite metrical consistency, this constitues a major deviation. Nor would it be less and then in an alternative scansion that would overlook the metrics of the second function of the poem and regard "The small oral fissure of" as an initial inversion in a trochaic line (Attridge 1982, 194); the "implied offbeat without a balancing double offbeat" (194) would still amount to "the nearly confusing of the deviations" (195).

12This extremely pregnant dislocation occurs three times consecutively (ll. 1-three), but get-go and foremost in the only line that refers to Ermengarde and, fifty-fifty more remarkably, to her mouth. "Why does my heart miss a vanquish when I wait at Biorg?" asks Bjarni ('The Corn and the Tares" 97), the young poet who feels such empathy with Kolson'south poetry. The answer lies, of course, in the question. Similar a hiccough, the missed shell betrays that "involuntary voice rising from the torso'south entrails" which "means that it means" (Dolar 25). Simply it tin can likewise be described in more than technical terms. Every bit the narrator explains, "His heart missed a beat, then gave out a cluster of pulsings, for pure joy" (99). This is virtually the language that Derek Attridge might exist using to depict the "vocalism outside speech" (Dolar 23): the offbeat between "small" and "mouth" falls on no pronounced syllable (reverse to the Winterfold poem), since "the vocalization is exactly what cannot exist said" (Miller 51; m. t.); instead, ii "pulses" (Attridge's synonym for "beat"—1995, 46) follow i another in a "cluster," enclosing the tight vacant space—also reflected in the "modest mouth" of the beloved—where this "aphonic" voice (Miller 48) of unutterable desire originates.

13As he attempts to express his honey in a poem, Rognvald Kolson, George Mackay Brown's platonic poet, chokes with emotion and, "circling around the ineffable object" (Miller 51; m. t.), swerves from lyric to ballsy poetry (recounting by and large the devastation of war). To study Brown's own efforts on the aforementioned path, we now turn to a personal dear poem that he wrote at most the same time.

xiv"The Escape of the Hart" (CP 167) presents itself every bit a narrative poem which takes up the onetime theme of Bonnie Prince Charlie's escape at the battle of Culloden, too found in other pieces past Chocolate-brown such as "Ballad" (CP 67) or "Prince in the Heather" (CP 72-3). At the same time, it is an acrostic poem explicitly dedicated to Stella Cartwright, the young adult female the poet met in 1957 while a educatee in Edinburgh, and with whom he had a beloved affair which came to an terminate two and a half years later. More than than just i of the customary acrostics he was then to write her on her birthdays (Brown 1997, 139), it is an authentic love declaration, as attested by the address on line 4. This is an extremely rare occurrence in George Mackay Brownish's poetry. Like all the subsequent acrostics for Stella, it presumably originated as a private poem meant only for her, and became public simply after, and gradually so: kickoff in a small collection entitled Twelve Poems (published in 1968 by Festival Publications, Queen's University, Belfast, and for the most part "reprinted from journal or album"—Murray and Murray 117), so in Winterfold and, eventually, in other collections.

15Because in such a poem poetry intersects with real life (quite literally for Stella equally well, with her horizontal initials under the title referring to the real person whereas her vertical name signals her poeticization), the speaker occupies a middle ground between the empirical subject expressing his personal emotion and a "rhetorical, figural 're-description'" of the former which may be called the lyrical bailiwick (Combe 56; thou. t.) for, as noted by Chiliad.T. Wright, "[p]oetry, dramatic or lyric, does not nowadays fragments of human experience, but formalized versions of information technology" (Wright 7-8). This is magnified past the peculiarity of Stella Cartwright, who was such a popular figure with the Scottish Renaissance poets of the Edinburgh Rose Street pubs that "[i]t could almost be said that all the contemporary poets in Scotland were in beloved with her, at in one case or some other" (Chocolate-brown 1997, 137). To that extent, it could be argued that "The Escape of the Hart," though a private honey poem, rises to the status of occasional poetry, as the poet virtually speaks in the proper name of an entire group, and publication is alike to a communal commemorative event. At this juncture, the autobiographical author is poised to become a persona, and indeed far more than that. If, equally I intend to demonstrate, Prince Charlie can be regarded as a projection of George Mackay Chocolate-brown and the scene as an unconscious fantasmatic scenario, then the poem is staging in a literal sense what Dominique Combe calls the "fictionalization" of the autobiographical bailiwick, an integral function to its transformation into a lyrical subject (Combe 55).

16Against all odds, Prince Charlie, referred to as the white hart, a symbol of royalty, cuts a rather amiable figure. Although he does run abroad from his pursuers ("Suddenly, on the hill, pursuit and flying!" as the first line abruptly asserts), we too see him make an "Enormous jump" and valiantly "movement in power. . . beyond the hunter's hill" despite being wounded past an pointer, before staring down his enemies with a fearless, "cold eye" at the end. His dishonorable flight is thus redeemed, and he also, to some extent, reaches the heroic and saintly condition of his avatar in "Carol" (CP 67) who was similarly "obedient to the arrow." There is thus ground for possible self-identification on Brown'south part. "[M]ythical idealization of the empirical bailiwick" (Combe 58; m. t.) is nothing new with him. It is manifest in the very early on poems in item. In the case of "Dream of Wintertime," [4] for case, considering he was "not also fond of this poem, though the experiences [were] real enough," [v] he erased the personal, psychological elements from the manuscript and, in the published version (Brown 1954, 12), added "Brodgar"—the name of the famous Orcadian prehistoric stone circle—to the championship, thus archaizing its content. Accordingly, the text was contradistinct so as to fit the new framework. Not only was it entirely rewritten in the third person, but the mythic dimension became office of it: "I saw my torso pinned confronting the night/ With burning stars" was replaced by "He saw his torso nailed against the night/ With ritual stars" (fifty. eight; emphases added). (In a later manuscript, the give-and-take "myth" was used instead of "dream" at the beginning of the last stanza; in the published version, however, Chocolate-brown retreated from that possibly likewise obvious movement.) Similarly, the "reddish" wound (fifty. 12) turns "bright," as if to impart a resurrectional feel to the easing of his own psychic torments; hence "his body nailed confronting the nighttime" rather than "my trunk pinned" (l. 8).

17But, mostly, on closer exam, information technology turns out that, contrary to what takes place equally of line 7, the poem does not begin as narrative sensu stricto. It initially consists of a hasty succession of uncoordinated snapshots, each a miniature freeze-frame scene, rendered past means of substantives ("pursuit and flight", "leap") instead of the corresponding verbs of movement. Just as the "taut bows" (fifty. 2) are seen stilled in position—and literally and then every bit well, due to the two sequent long vowel sounds combined with strong stresses slowing downwardly the rhythm—, the "stag'south/ Enormous spring" (ll. 2-3) is figuratively immobilized astride the enjambment owing to the accent on "stag" at line-end. Rather than a story, this is a tableau, in which time is suspended and chronology abolished. The only time that matters is, in fact, the present moment of the speaking subject field, who is not yet the narrator of lines 7-16 referring to past events, but who, due to the nominal syntax, coincides, as information technology were, with his utterance and identifies with its contents (Collot 285-86). This "immediate, non-reflexive relation to the 'thing seen''" (Collot 284; chiliad. t.) is emphasized past the exclamation betoken in the first line ("Suddenly, on the hill, pursuit and flight!") and reinforced past the initial trochaic inversion on "Suddenly" in an otherwise regular iambic line, the effect of which is to thrust the scene upon the speaker'due south (and the reader's) consciousness, in keeping with the medias res incipit. Merely the added upshot hither is the sense of mesmerizing finality brought on by the position of the exclamation mark at line-end. The speaker'southward utterance is suspended past the expression of amazement. He is overwhelmed by, and unable to detach himself from, the imaginary spectacle with which he has truly become one, as further evidenced by his literal self-erasure from the text: in these outset lines, he never appears, as a grammatical "I." Following Collot's analysis of nominal syntax, it could be argued that the scene described here is both something external to the subject and a effigy of the latter (Collot 286). In fact, its vividness and immediacy, its timeless present, its "abruptly stopped" "cinematographic motion" and "frozen" characters (Lacan 119-twenty; one thousand. t.), and its effect on the speaker—whose fascination makes him momentarily neglect Stella, the intended object of the poem—suggest that it could very well be a fantasy, in the Freudian sense of an imaginary scenario "staging, in more or less covert terms, a desire" (Chemama and Vandermersch 130). For confirmation of this, we need but wait back to Barclay's "masque of rape" in "The Eye of the Hurricane." This estimation would account not simply for the field of study'southward fascination, but also for his sideration, which, according to Freud, coincides with the Aufhebung of repression and, subsequently, the end of denegation (Salomon-Clisson, function III). This sideration is perceptible in the general paralysis of the actors in the opening scene, that is, projectively, of the subject in particular. What the speaker is facing here is then his ain repressed desire, revealed in allegorical form—peradventure as part of the paradoxical "process of self-allegorization" which Combe considers an integral part of the making of the lyrical subject (Combe 58; k. t.)—and fully expressed in the address to Stella (ll. 4-6), now incorporated into the fantasy.

18As if the sexual symbolism of the white stag from Celtic mythology or the myth of Actaeon, the hunter who surprised the goddess Diana as she was bathing in the river, non to mention the Song of Solomon (2:9) and the motif of Cupid'due south dear arrow, were non obvious enough, the plea of the speaker is unequivocal:

19The imperative mode of "Let" alliterating with the vocative "Beloved" shows that he strongly wishes Stella to allow "the white beast," that is, himself, "break through" the complex entanglement of his desires then as to reach her "hush-hush water," a symbol both of her femininity and of sexual satisfaction. David Annwn's comment that the poem is "a plea for the free passage of human love" (Annwn 1984, 206) is peculiarly apt. Indeed, the stag is no longer stilled in mid-air only enjoined to "move in power." Accordingly, line v, in sharp contrast to the previous monosyllabic one, lunges forward with a powerful trochaic pulse— the only such rhythm in the verse form except for lines vii and 9, and, to a lesser extent, line 8 which may be regarded as trochaic with an initial inversion (Attridge 1982, 194), the other stressed beginnings resulting from initial inversions (ll. ane, 12) or demotions (ll. ii, xiv). Due to the exceptional length of the line, information technology is continuously propelled through twenty syllables over two line breaks: an actual one, just earlier "All," and a virtual one before "hunter's." The motion of the line thus implemented is besides thematized past the main verb "movement," equally well as the two gerunds ("breaking" and "dancing") and several prepositions ("across," "through," "to").

20And nonetheless, as was clear from the very title, this urge is not unhampered. Iii strong stresses, falling precisely on "white brute move" and the three long vowels or diphthongs ranging across the unabridged spectrum of phonatory positions, from front to dorsum and from low to high, undercut the briskness of the line'southward pace and, by implication, slow downward the motion of the stag, that is, allegorically, his own sexual drive. Moreover, the initial demotion on "All" in "All tangled desires" (l. 6) echoes that on "Taut" in "Taut bows" (l. 2), suggesting a similar tension, hence a like blockage, all the more so as "Taut" and "tangled" alliterate. But the "entanglement" of the speaker'south "desires" in, possibly, the fearfulness of the castration represented by the dogs (of Diana) threatening to tear the deer to pieces is actually what stands out amongst the rhythmic irregularities of these lines. It shows in the disturbance caused, here too, past the rising inversion on "All tan[gled desires, dan] cing (- o - B ô B). As Thomas Carper and Derek Attridge comment,

21

This rhythmic figure mounts a challenge to the smoothness of the meter: start the double offbeat postpones the expected beat, so the 2 emphasized beats momentarily retard the onward movement.. . . It's a figure poets volition utilise sparingly—also many of these, and the meter volition break down.

22In the present case, the disruption is only intensified by the syntactic interruption between the two beats, something unusual in this kind of rhythmic effigy (Attridge 1995, 121).

23In this context, at that place remains to account for the highly aberrant "virtual offbeat"—that is, an implied offbeat associated with a syntactic break—between "hill" and "breaking" (l. 5). Certainly, if we take this extended line as a whole and if we consider it together with the double offbeat (- o -) on "eve[ning a]cross," it may be interpreted as a "rising inversion" with "postponed pairing," that is, with "a double offbeat and an implied offbeat. . . not immediately adjacent" (Attridge 1982, 185); as such, it would "[totter] on the edge of unmetricality" (ibid.). But we might also read the line as it is physically written on the folio (regardless of the edition), that is, in two segments that expect like two separate lines, in which case the second 1 is simply:

24It then appears that the virtual offbeat betwixt "hill" and "breaking" is not compensated for, which is a major bibelot in a poetry which, though "free," is never far from regular metric. Interestingly, this rhythmic ga(s)p happens to coincide with the thrust of the subject's desire "breaking through" from the voiceless glottal depths (/h/ repeated in "hunter'southward hill") of what Dolar terms, as we recollect, "the body's entrails," "bring[ing] to the foreground, but in a movement of suspension, of retreat, that of which the speaker has no cognition" (Lagaay 57-8; the writer's accent). The parallel with the poet Rognvald Kolson is obvious: equally he tries to express his desire, the speaker, one time over again, misses a shell and falters, caught upward as he is in his own ambivalent and "tangled desires," between, in fact, love and the escape of the h(eastward)art.

25The latter part of the poem leaves no dubiety every bit to the outcome of this reverie: "Cold it was. . . that morning" (l. 7) in the story that has non yet begun to exist told. The emphasized beat on "Cold" and the self-distancing shifter "that" (in contradistinction to "this evening" two lines before) bespeak the abrupt render to an orderly enunciative scene. This is no longer the dreamy, intimate intertwinement of discourse and narrative: conjugated verbs accept reappeared and the speaker is now a full-fledged narrator telling a story in the preterit that exceeds the narrow limits of his own private love proclamation. As the shift from the implied though never stated start person of the singular to the collective "we" (ll. 11; or "our," 50. fourteen) makes clear, he is part of the larger Jacobite customs. By the same token, he has dissociated himself from the stag who has now plainly become the "prince" (l. 14) and, by and large, a "He" (l. 15) capable of looking on the scene "with a cold centre," that is, unaffected; simply equally in real life "[he] did what he always did when things got also hot—he withdrew, both emotionally and physically" (Ferguson 281).

26As a lyrical field of study, then, he has retreated and gone under comprehend, morphing into either a projected grapheme or an epic poet, nonetheless unable to fully mask his peculiar, hesitant, stumbling lyrical vocalization. Having too much in common with his alter ego, Rognvald Kolson, he only cannot play the "Young Pretender" for long, and nosotros now know a little better where to look for him.

Notes

• [1]

  Henceforth abbreviated every bit CP.

• [2]

  Henceforth abbreviated as OT.

• [iii]

  The scansion symbols used conform to Derek Attridge's system as it is set out in The Rhythms of English Poetry (1982). "B" or "b" indicates a beat; "o" or "O," an offbeat (which can sometimes exist double [- o -], when the two side by side unstressed syllables "are together felt as an offbeat" (Carper and Attridge 35), or unsaid [ô], when there is an unpronounced offbeat between two adjacent stresses). When a beat out or an offbeat falls on a stressed syllable, its symbol is capitalised; if information technology falls on an unstressed syllable, it is non.

• [iv]

  MS (Kirkwall Library Annal, D31/xxx).

• [5]

  Letter to Ernest W. Marwick, 24 Nov. 1953 (Kirkwall Library Archive, D31/30).

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