Scotland 1941

We were a tribe, a family, a people.

Wallace and Bruce guard now a painted field,

And all may read the folio of our fable,

Peruse the sword, the sceptre and the shield.

A simple sky roofed in that rustic day,

The busy corn-fields and the haunted holms,

The green road winding up the ferny brae.

But Knox and Melville clapped their preaching palms

And bundled all the harvesters away,

Hoodicrow Peden in the blighted corn

Hacked with his rusty beak the starving haulms.

Out of that desolation we were born.

Courage beyond the point and obdurate pride

Made us a nation, robbed us of a nation.

Defiance absolute and myriad-eyed

That could not pluck the palm plucked our damnation.

We with such courage and the bitter wit

To fell the ancient oak of loyalty,

And strip the peopled hill and altar bare,

And crush the poet with an iron text,

How could we read our souls and learn to be?

Here a dull drove of faces harsh and vexed,

We watch our cities burning in their pit,

To salve our souls grinding dull lucre out,

We, fanatics of the frustrate and the half,

Who once set Purgatory Hill in doubt.

Now smoke and dearth and money everywhere,

Mean heirlooms of each fainter generation,

And mummied housegods in their musty niches,

Burns and Scott, sham bards of a sham nation,

And spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches,

No pride but pride of pelf. Long since the young

Fought in great bloody battles to carve out

This towering pulpit of the Golden Calf,

Montrose, Mackail, Argyle, perverse and brave,

Twisted the stream, unhooped the ancestral hill.

Never had Dee or Don or Yarrow or Till

Huddled such thriftless honour in a grave.

Such wasted bravery idle as a song,

Such hard-won ill might prove Time's verdict wrong,

And melt to pity the annalist's iron tongue.