At first sight, the idea behind this poem seems a bit daft. The poet imagines a bridegroom on his wedding night apparently about to be shocked by the realisation that his virgin bride is actually the product of a long process of genetic mingling. Well, unless he had thought up till then that the human race had survived throughout the millennia by parthenogenesis, it shouldn’t really have come as a surprise. Nor is it clear why he should view the process as malevolent and despoiling: it’s just the way things are, and after all his bride wouldn’t be there without these contributions from his predecessors. And yet, viewing the matter from another angle, perhaps MacDiarmid is right: just because things are the way they are doesn’t mean that there is not an intangible and disturbing mystery about them, and if we normally shut our eyes to that mystery, then it is all the more the poet’s job to open them. Still not quite sure I grasp his thought, and yet it seems to me a remarkable poem.
O Wha’s The Bride
O wha’s the bride that carries the bunch
O’ thistles blinterin’ white?
Her cuckold bridegroom little dreids
What he sall ken this nicht.
For closer than gudeman can come
And closer to’r than hersel’,
Wha didna need her maidenheid
Has wrocht his purpose fell.
O wha’s been here afore me, lass,
And hoo did he get in?
– A man that deed or I was born
This evil thing has din.
And left, as it were on a corpse,
Your maidenheid to me?
– Nae lass, gudeman, sin’ Time began
’S hed ony mair to gie.
But I can gie ye kindness, lad,
And a pair o’ willin’ hands,
And you sall hae my breists like stars,
My limbs like willow wands.
And on my lips ye’ll heed nae mair,
And in my hair forget,
The seed o’ a’ the men that in
My virgin womb ha’e met.
Hugh MacDiarmid
David Sutton 
Hi David, I was reading the dialogue as marked below. Is that right?
Husband: “O wha’s been here afore me, lass,
And hoo did he get in?”
Wife: “A man that deed or I was born
This evil thing has din”.
Husband: “And left, as it were on a corpse,
Your maidenheid to me?”
Wife: “Nae lass, gudeman, sin’ Time began
’S hed ony mair to gie.
But I can gie ye kindness, lad,
And a pair o’ willin’ hands,
And you sall hae my breists like stars,
My limbs like willow wands.
And on my lips ye’ll heed nae mair,
And in my hair forget,
The seed o’ a’ the men that in
My virgin womb ha’e met”.
That’s the way I read it, yes.
Hi David, thank you. “gudeman” – husband? “But” (in the penultimate verse) – indeed? (It doesn’t seem to mean “but”!)
Yes, ‘gudeman’ here just means husband or householder; the Scots form of ‘goodman’, and the feminine equivalent is ‘gudewife’ or ‘goodwife’. ‘The ‘but’ in the penultimate verse does seem to me just a normal ‘but’ – ‘I can’t give you a virginity unsullied by any genetic inheritance – no woman since time began has been able to give a man any more than that – but what I can give you is kindness etc.’ As I say, it’s a bit of a strange, even slightly macabre idea that doesn’t make too much sense taken literally.
Your reading makes better sense than mine. (I was trying to read “Nae lass, gudeman, sin’ Time began / ’S hed ony mair to gie” as a boast – “No lass since Time began has had more to give than I”. Then I thought “But” didn’t make sense. I was wrong.) Regarding the idea of a “corpse” maidenhead, is it the kind of idea Hamlet might have had? Eg consider: “A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm”.
I find ‘as it were on a corpse’ a bit hard to explain. You feel like saying ‘Come on, man, you’ve got a live and willing woman waiting for you, stop rabbiting on about corpses and count your blessings’. I did wonder if there was some echo here of the Penthesilea legend, Penthesilea being the Amazon queen who came to fight on the side of the Trojans in the Trojan war and was killed by Achilles, who then promptly fell in love with her virgin corpse. But that doesn’t really explain anything.
Hi David, thanks for this. I’m struggling to see exactly why the lines, “A man that deed or I was born/This evil thing has din” indicate that the sort of virginity she lacks is only some trans generational impossible idea? Why not think that this is a metaphor and the poem is about regular virginity? Thanks.
I don’t see that the poem can be about regular virginity. Look at the lines ‘Nae lass, gudeman, sin’ Time began/’S hed ony mair to gie’. What can this mean except ‘Whether any woman comes to the bridal bed as a virgin or not, the fact is that the seed of countless generations of men before her husband have gone to her making’? My problem with the poem, as I indicate in the preamble, is that a) this being a well-established fact I don’t see why it should cause the bridegroom any consternation and b) it seems bizarre to equate the mechanics of genetic inheritance with a kind of preemptive rape.
But I am entirely open to the idea that I may be misinterpreting or missing something, so do let be know if you disagree.
Hi David,
Thank you for replying to my question. I agree that it is bizarre to equate genetic inheritance with a kind of rape. It’s so bizarre, in fact, that it made me want to search for alternative reading–such as trying to see if it can be read to be about regular virginity. But, I also agree that the line ‘Nae lass, gudeman, sin’ Time began/’S hed ony mair to gie’ is the biggest obstacle to reading the poem as about normal virginity.
There seems to be three options for how to read this line: either the line is literal and it does refer to a characteristic shared by all women, which supports your reading. Or it is hyperbole, implying that many women do not make it to the alter with their virginity intact across brutish history. Or it is metaphor, something like every women, virgin or not, comes to the alter with some connection to others, some baggage, etc. In such a way, the wife would be claiming that the value of virginity stems from a deeper desire to have a wife who is unfettered in all ways, but no one has that. Those at least are the options I can think of at the moment.
I’m also confused by the line “A man that deed or I was born
This evil thing has din”. It would be odd for the wife to call her mere genetic inheritance evil if that’s what the poem is about. The “or” has me confused, as it is hard for me to make sense of that as a disjunction on a literal reading. It seems it should be an “and” on the literal reading.
The metaphorical reading can make sense of this (but I guess that’s not much evidence given the intrinsic pliability of metaphor). The birth claim could be about coming into new life out of evil; a la the sin in the garden of eden led to human life as we know it. I don’t know. It’s a tough one.
I’ll be eager to hear your thoughts.
Thank you,
Everett
It is indeed a tough one and I don’t think I can offer much more insight, but I can help with the ‘or’ that has you confused: this is not our ‘or’ meaning ‘alternatively’, but a Scots word meaning ‘before’, related to our obsolete ‘ere’.