This is the first section of a three-part elegy that the Scots poet Norman MacCaig wrote towards the end of his life in memory of his wife who died in 1990. In its understated yet poignant way it fuses the idea of the lost woman with images of the country that he has loved, such that the two hardly seem to be separable. Thus, when he speaks of being exiled from ‘my country’, does he mean from Scotland, with its glens and lochs, its mountains and valleys, or does he mean from the lost wife? Both, I would say, for when you lose a person you lose so much of what went with them and what you shared with them, the knowledge and the joy, and the savour goes out of those things. I am minded of Hardy’s poem that begins: ‘Why go to Saint-Juliot? What’s Juliot to me?’, and of Alphonse de Lamartine’s line: ‘Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé’ (‘You lose one person, and all is unpeopled’).

For more poems by Norman MacCaig (1910-1996) see weeks 180 and 407.

From ‘Myself after her death’

I’m exiled from what used to be
my country. It welcomed me
with gifts of peace and storms,
with heights of mountains
and altitudes of joy.

Not now.

No, says the wall, and I turn back.
No, says the mountain
and I sit sad in the valley
listening to the river that says
Trespasser, trespasser, trespasser.

I stubbornly say, All the same
it’s still beautiful.
And I know that’s true
but I know also
why it fails to recognise me.

Norman MacCaig

‘So Many Summers’ by the Scots poet Norman MacCaig (1910-1996) is a good example of how a poem can be formally constrained and seemingly transparent in its language, yet dense enough with meaning to open up whole avenues of reflection. What is it about the juxtaposition of those two images, of hind’s skeleton and decaying boat, that resonates so? And what is this malice that time adds? As I interpret these lines, it is the way that the living thing becomes indistinguishable from the artefact: that once life has departed from the animate it too is no more than a collection of molecules, subject to exactly the same laws of decay as anything else. But do the phrases ‘neat geometries’ and ‘already dead but still to die’ suggest something about the power of art to preserve for a while some stripped-down quintessence of a thing, before its final dissolution and oblivion? I am reminded here of Keith Douglas’s lines: ‘Remember me when I am dead/And simplify me when I am dead’. And what precisely is the tone and message of the last line: ‘So many summers, and I have lived them too’? Is this a wry recognition that his own time too is coming to an end? Or, read with an emphasis on the ‘lived’, is it a kind of defiant gratitude for his own survival, for having been allowed this enduring richness of experience? 

For me, this is definitely one of those poems where you wish you had had the chance to discuss it with its creator, with the caveat, of course, that poets themselves do not always fully understand, or at least, cannot always articulate in other words, what it is that has been given them to say during the writing of the poem. 

So Many Summers

Beside one loch, a hind’s neat skeleton,
Beside another, a boat pulled high and dry:
Two neat geometries drawn in the weather:
Two things already dead and still to die.

I passed them every summer, rod in hand,
Skirting the bright blue or the spitting gray,
And, every summer, saw how the bleached timbers
Gaped wider and the neat ribs fell away.

Time adds one malice to another one –
Now you’d look very close before you knew
If it’s the boat that ran, the hind went sailing.
So many summers, and I have lived them too.

Norman MacCaig

I find this poem by the Scots poet Norman MacCaig (1910-1996) very satisfying for the way it combines practical observation with transcendent vision in a way perhaps reminiscent of Patrick Kavanagh’s poems of rural Ireland.

July Evening

A bird’s voice chinks and tinkles
Alone in the gaunt reedbed –
Tiny silversmith
Working late into the evening.

I sit and listen. The rooftop
With a quill of smoke stuck in it
Wavers against the sky
In the dreamy heat of summer.

Flowers’ closing time: bee lurches
Across the hayfield, singing
And feeling its drunken way
Round the air’s invisible corners.

And grass is grace. And charlock
Is gold of its own bounty.
The broken chair by the wall
Is one with immortal landscapes.

Something has been completed
That everything is part of,
Something that will go on
Being completed forever.

Norman MacCaig