Thirty years ago, in the issue of September 9, 1977, a few months before the poet's death, the TLS published "Four Poems by Hugh MacDiarmid". Two are reprinted here.

MacDiarmid, whose real name was Christopher Grieve, was born in Langholm in the Scottish Borders in 1892. Almost single-handedly, as poet, editor and propagandist, he had engineered a "Scots Renaissance" in literature (but especially in verse).

The four pieces printed in that issue marked a late return (here in his eighty-fifth year), after long experimentation with poems in standard English, to the lyrics in a composite Scots or "Lallans" with which MacDiarmid had made his name in the 1920s and early 30s.

The poems were accompanied at the time with the following glossary: kittled, tickled; lift, sky; lourd, heavy; marrow, equal; clarsach, harp; lichtnin', lightning

Ulysses' Bow

Better violen never screeched on a silken cord
Or kittled a cat's tripes wi's finer-en's,
But the lift is yalla as biest milk,
And the eagle roosts wi' the hens,
And the licht o' life is lourd,
And the voices nocht but men's.

My hert-strings werena broken – then why's he gane
And left them when hecanna fin' their marrow
– A clarsach made for his playin',
A warld to mak' a star o' ! –
To the feckless fingers o' sunlicht
Or the lichtnin's random arrow?

HUGH MACDIARMID (1977)

The Black Rainbow Over the Minch

A black rainbow owre the Minch
Needna mak' onybody flinch.
It means juist aboot the same
As gin the usual colours came.

HUGH MACDIARMID (1977)

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