The famous Islay poet, William Livingston, says:
“The speckled adder lies in coils
On the floor where grew
The big men whom I saw.
Bring this message to the post.
Islay is to-day without people:
The sheep has made her glens waste.
As I heard and as I saw
Bring this message to the poet.”
From Sutherland to Breadalbane and to South Argyll it is the same story, but of all 19th century Gaelic poets no-one said so much in song about the Clearances and later, about the Land League, as Mary MacDonald (Mrs MacPherson), Mairi Nighean Iain Bhain or Mairi Mhor nan Oran. Mary was born in Skeabost in 1821, and her mother was from Uig in Trotternish. Her father and mother had gone to Glasgow on refusing to emigrate, but they had returned to Skye before Mary was born. Because of her birthplace and heredity, Mary knew best the MacDonald lands, where the Clearances were later than they were in the MacLeod districts of Bracadale and Minginish and not so severe. It has been reliably estimated that through the MacDonald estates were bigger in population than the MacLeod estates, three people were cleared from the MacLeod lands for every two cleared from the MacDonald lands.
Mary lived in Skeabost until 1848, when she married Isaac MacPherson, a shoemaker from Skye parents living in Inverness. He died in 1871, leaving her with four children, and in 1872 she suffered the cruel wrong and humiliation “that made (her) poetry live.” The first of her songs heard publicly were in support of Charles Fraser MacIntosh in the Inverness election of 1874, but she had left Inverness in 1872 and was training as a nurse in Glasgow Royal Infirmary. She worked as a nurse in Glasgow, Greenock and in the vicinity until 1882. By this time she was famous for her songs and her championship of the crofters. For several years before 1882 she had visited Skye once a year. MacBain says that in Skye “it is no exaggeration to say that every house was open for reception.” Her principal hosts in Skye were the MacRae family of the big farm of Ose, Kintail people who had a great feeling for Gaelic songs and poetry.
1882, when Mary came home to Skye for good, was the year of the Battle of the Braes and the crofter resurgence in Glendale and Staffin, a great year in the history of Skye and the Highlands and Islands. Lachlan MacDonald, the benevolent laird of Skeabost, gave Mary a rent-free cottage and in 1891 paid for the publication of about 9,000 lines of her poetry, with a preface by Alexander MacBain, a Celtic scholar of European reputation. MacBain says that Mary carried in her head “at least half as much more of her own, and twice as much which she is able to repeat, of floating, unpublished poetry, mainly that of Skye and the Western Isles.” The vast amount of poetry that she knew by heart is significant for the study not only of Gaelic poetry but the study of the genesis of all poetry and especially the relationship of oral and “sub-literary” traditions.
Mary could not write in Gaelic but she could read her own poetry when she saw it in print. It is not clear if she could do the same with the 18,000 lines or so poetry by others that she knew by heart, but MacBain says that all this other poetry was unpublished. Surely some of it would have been printed in rare collections like Turner’s and Gillies’s, which Mary probably never saw, although she had probably seen MacKenzie’s “Sar Obair,” at any rate the outside of it?
It is known that Mairi Mhor never made a song until the year of her great suffering and humilitation, 1872. She was then fifty. Apart from the more or less dedicatory poem in honour of Lachlan of Skeabost, which appears to be of the year of Victoria’s Jubilee 1887, the first poem in the book of 1891 is the famous song “Eilean a’ cheo,” probably made in 1872 from the evidence of the first verse, and with one or two verses added about 1875, the year of Ronald Archibald’s accession to the MacDonald lordship or the year of his marriage (which I do not know). Of its 22 octaves, the first is magnificent and some of the rest are alive with the great warm pride that was in Mhari. Her own land, the land between the lochs of Snizort, Bracadale and the Sound of Raasay is in her blood and every loved name is charged with memories of her youth, her own agony, and is at the same time resonant with the heroic and romantic film over Mhari’s eyes in the contemplation of the pre-Clearance state of her people. The romantic quality is uniquely robust and materialistic. Who else but Mhari would have romanticised the rush ropes and rush bags, the built up heap of potatoes, the barrel full of beef or mutton, the stock well tended and the crops gathered in, the glories of Skye in Mhari’s youth?
The great 13th octave about the misery of the thousands cleared is followed by a kind of optimistic economic survey of iron and coal resources, strangely like the new oil panacea, but the 15th octave says the wheel will turn, with cattle in the folds and the ‘sasunnaich’ driven from the Green Isle of Mist. The complimentary octave on Lord Ronald Archibald’s wedding reminds him of his duty to his people. The last two lines of the poem is the first and most memorable reference to the humiliation "that made my poetry live."
The third poem in the book ‘Civil War’ is a dialogue between Mary and Mrs MacRae, a plea for songs and poetry as part of the failing ethos of the Gael and a bulwark of his failing language, and an optimistic assertion that Winans (of the Pat Lamb case) and others of his like will be driven away to spend their gains in London, and that the Cro of Kintail will again be filled with good men. But Mrs MacRae reminds Mary of the psychological change in the Gael himself as a result of the great Evangelical movement.
“The people have become so strange
That sorrow is wheat to them,
And if you do not go into a whalk for them
You will not be suffered to live”
Mary’s reply is in two splendid octaves ending:
“But since vanity is a plant
That satisfies the flesh,
It clings to me as firmly
as the lace to the shoe.”
‘Civil War’ is thus partly a conflict between Mairi’s natural joie-de-vivre, the many thousands of beloved ‘vain’ songs that she carried in her head, and the ascetism of the Evangelicals, who regarded this world as a ‘vale of tears’ and all poetry except religious as a vanity of vanities. The tone of ‘Civil War’ is hostile to the more showy Evangelicals, but in some later poems Mary’s attitude is ambivalent, perplexed and inconsistent, for in them the name Roderick MacLeod is a poignant symbol. Roderick MacLeod, Maighstir Ruairi, was not only inordinately hard on the "vanities" of the world but also a fearless champion of the common people, and the love he evoked on that account was heightened by the realisation that he was a grandson of a MacLeod chief of Raasay and regarded by some as a traitor to his own class.
Eilean a' Cheo (The Isle of the Mist) and Cogadh siobhalta (Civil War) are not really typical poems in that Mary's own private suffering is not even implied in the second poem, and implied only in the first octave of the Eilean a' Cheo and explicitly mentioned only as a poignant irrelevancy in the last octave. Most of Mary's poetry can be called social poetry but because most of it is impregnated with her own individual suffering, it can be lied confessional poetry as well. Its greatness consists in the fusion of social and private passion, (and passion cans primarily suffering) with extraordinary vitality and natural joie-de-vivre, for of all Gaelic poets not even Alexander MacDonald had more vitality and joie-de-vivre an Mairi Mhor. During her life-time her people had felt the full impact of the Clearances, the emigrations overseas and to Glasgow and the industrial Lowlands, and the miserable congestion of those who remained on the poorest of lands. With this there came the great angelical movement with its insistence that this world is only a worthless vale of tears and that there ought to be no persistence to the ordained powers, however bad they might be, for their spiritual blood was on their own heads. It istrue that from about 1874, and especially from 1882, the end of Mary's life in 1898, there was a resurgence and the new hope from the Land League, and Mary's brave heart responded to that with an optimism that is almost unbelievable in a person of her age who had suffered so much herself.
Mary's courage impressed the best minds among the Gaels of her day. In 1891 Alexander MacBain talked of her "good work and her brave heart." There was also the great pride in her own people, again and again implicit or explicit, sometimes just thrown out with the most resonant of names, MacDonald. "That roused wounded pride in the blood of Clan Donald." Unequal as her poetry is, the fusion of public and private suffering, courage, pride, warm-heartedness, great vitality and joie-de-vivre in it, makes it universal, even if it can be called territorial or even parochial. Her own country was in her blood, and such parochialism is very often a mark of the universal.
It would entail a great deal of research to establish the chronology of Mary's poetry. For instance, An Nollaig Ur, (The New Christmas) is the fourth poem in order in her book, but it cannot be before 1888, when the passions of 1882 were subsiding and when it was clear that the Crofters' Act of 1886 was only a poor palliative though it removed the very worst of the abuses of the miserable status quo. It did not restore the cleared lands to the people, giving only security of tenure and lower rents in the existing crofter lands. An Nollaig Ur is a restrained and very poignant poem but in it the great social wrongs of the century are hardly implicit. The very well known song Soraidh le Eilean a' Cheo, (Greeting to the Isle of the Mist) is full of bathos but it too has the great evocative effects of the roll-calls of Skye names, the angular elbucky Norse sounds lengthened and made wonderfully resonant. Ath-urachadh, m' eolais, (Renewing my acquaintance), is somewhat similar. Sometimes the noble sorrow and noble pride find perfect words, as in the quatrain on cleared Sgoirebreac, but this is followed by the disquisition on William Stewart's well slated shop. Fios gu Clach Ard Uige (Message to the High Stone of Uig) has the flame of social anger fanned by her own private mortification. It contains the famous quatrain about the silence of the ministers in the face of the social wrong.
"Preachers have so little care
seeing the condition of the people of my land,
and they are so dumb about it in the pulpit
as if their audience were brute beasts."
This poem has fierce denunciation of particular landlords and factors and expresses the solidarity with the people of Skye (and of Bernera in Lewis) of many a stalwart Gael in Glasgow and Greenock, who will go up to help them. It ends with two quatrains about the private wrong that "put the edge on her nature/making it sharp with the oil of pain," when she fell "on the field of battle far from her kinsmen." As well as 'The High Stone of Uig" there are many other songs such as 'The Song of Ben Lee,' 'The Hardy Men of Bernera,' 'Letter to the Gaels of Canada,' and the 'Meeting of the Crofters,' alive with a sanguine courage and hope.
Mairi Mhor had one foot in Eden, but it was in her own robust Eden of pre-Clearance Skye, "going in winter to waulkings and weddings/with no lantern light but the (burning) end of the peat" or when she was "foolish" going over the moorlands with the heather "tearing her petticoats." There is no remorse for the "folly," which is not the Evangelical "folly" of the unconverted, but the lost "folly" of youth, which she would have again if she could. I can think of few poems of comparable length the have implicit in them more of human life than Nuair bha mi Og (When I was Young), the most famous of all Mary's songs, and one of the great Gaelic songs that are also great poems. It has nothing of the "humiliation" that made her poetry live and the Clearance motif is only vaguely implicit. There are many songs of sorrow in Gaelic but the sorrow and nostalgia of Nuair bha mi Og is that one who is still full of the world, joie-de-vivre and the pride of life. No poem of nostalgia has more of the "objective correlative," more of a strange counterpoint of joy- and sorrow, and the language has as much consistency as is possible in poetry that is in any way Dionysian (and all poetry is Dionysian) and not just a laboured distillation in the top of the head.
Her sufferings in Inverness in 1872 were largely at the hands of English monoglots, and that may be one reason why she again and again talks as if the wrongs of Skye and the Highlands were the work of the English, but in one poem, Airgead-cinn Alasdair Bhain (The Head-money of Alasdair Ban) she says that all the responsibility did not lie with the English but with "bad worthless landlords" who got into debt in London. I wonder if she vaguely felt that the Clearances could not have been imposed on the Highlands without the backing of English force. Probably she implies that the anglicised landlords, chiefs among them, and their agents were English in all but name. And, of course, English was the habitual language of the landlord class and their chief agents, and the landlords acceptable to crofters were, like MacPherson of Cluny and MacDonald of Skeabost, great friends of Gaelic. Mairi Mhor was not politically acute except where her own people were concerned. I do not remember that she expressed any sympathy with the Lowland working class or with the victims of colonial exploitation in any of her poetry, but one has to remember that about a third of her poetry was never published and is, as far as I know, completely lost, for I have never heard any fragment attributed to her that was not published in 1891. I simply do not know whether John Whyte, who took down her poems from her own dictation, had social and political reasons for omitting anything.
As far as Gaeldom itself is concerned, Mairi Mhor was uncompromising. The Crofters' Act of 1886 was to her only a small beginning. All cleared lands ought to be restored, and would be restored, to the descendants of the crofters who had been driven over the sea. The last poem in her book is the brave sanguine 'Prophecy and Blessing to the Gaels.'
"And when I am in the boards
my words will be a prophecy.
They will return, the stock of the crofters
Who were driven over the sea.
And the aristocratic 'beggars'
will be routed as they (the crofters) were.
Deer and sheep will be carted away
and the glens will be tilled;
A time of sowing and a time of reaping,
and a time to reward the robbers.
And the cold ruined houses
will be built up by our kin.”
That song is significantly to the tune of one of Alexander MacDonald's indomitable Jacobite songs envisaging the return of Charles Edward Stewart to the land of Clan Ranald. Nowadays it is strange in our ears but it is a measure of the high hopes of the Land League of the 1880's and of its best known poet.
Any big body of poetry that is at the same time social, confessional, discursive, with passionate criticism of life, is bound to be sometimes trivial in content, inconsistent in diction and conventional in imagery. Sometimes may mean very often, and Mairi Mhor's unequalities are many and sometimes ludicrous, but the fire of passion in some words, lines or verses has a way of burning up the cliches in and around them so that the very cliches are weed-killers of the precious and the contrived; and as for "purity" and homogeneity of diction, especially in a language with so much dialectal fragmentation as Gaelic had even last century, and with such a rich oral tradition of poetry as Gaelic, "purity" etc of diction is just a flower of a never-never land.
Main's poetry is rich in image and symbol although it is not very rich in metaphor. The images are very often of the natural scenery, the animals, especially cows and calves, sheep ambivalently, plants, implements, utensils, food, dress and so on. Very often those images are symbols as well, symbols of the lost Skye of her youth or what is left of it, or of the sad change, or the new hope. Very likely, she herself did not realise how often her images became symbols. The scenery of Skye is spectacular and breeds the herioc romantic symbol, and therefore even the great roll-calls of Skye names are resonant in many ways and symbols of what was, what is left and what she hopes may be. There is thus a strange complexity in the "simplicities" of Mairi Mhor's poetry. Perhaps it is wrong to use the word "subtle," but there are complexities that are deep if not broad. It is question-begging to use the word "simple" of what is greatly moving, and Mairi Mhor's poetry has always been greatly moving to some of the "sophisticated" as well as to a great many of the "unsophisticated" among those who know her language.
(This article first appeared in Calgacus, Winter 1975)