A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle by Hugh MacDiarmid
"A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle" is a long poem by Scottish poet Hugh MacDiarmid, composed in the early 20th century. The poem is structured into multiple sections, showcasing a variety of poetic forms and styles, reflecting MacDiarmid's engagement with contemporary intellectual movements. Central to the poem is the figure of the "village drunk," who symbolizes both the poet's personal journey and the broader Scottish experience. Through humor and shifting moods, the poem captures a spiritual quest for identity and significance against the backdrop of Scottish culture, symbolized by the thistle—a complex emblem representing both fragility and strength.
MacDiarmid's work draws on a rich tapestry of influences, including figures like Dante, Paul Valéry, and T. S. Eliot, illustrating a blend of personal narrative and cosmic themes. The poem also emphasizes the power of the Scots language, which MacDiarmid believed was vital for expressing the complexities of modern existence. Over its extensive 2,685 lines, the poem weaves together personal, cultural, and existential reflections, ultimately affirming MacDiarmid's faith in his land, culture, and the transformative potential of art. This multifaceted approach invites readers to explore the depths of human experience through a distinctly Scottish lens.
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle by Hugh MacDiarmid
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of World Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1926
Type of work: Poem
The Work
In a letter to his publisher in 1926, MacDiarmid described A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle as a “long poem . . . divided into several sections having within the sections a great variety of manners and measures of verse.” The various forms MacDiarmid employed were designed to demonstrate the poet’s intellectual alliance with the most advanced currents of thought of his time. The basic stanza of the poem, the abcb of the classic Scots folk ballad, roots the poem in a cultural context that the poet wished to elevate to international significance. The drunk man who is the narrative consciousness of the poem is somewhat ironically labeled the “village drunk.” He is a representative of the poet’s ambitions and a Scots Everyman. His spiritual quest to become something like “A greater Christ, a greater Burns” is treated with considerable humor as the narrative action—patterned after Burns’s “Tam O’Shanter”—shifts abruptly to follow the fleeting moods, emotions, and ideas of the poet’s imagination. The poem is about visionary experience.
Joycean influence on the poem includes a final section in which a woman named Jean gives the poet—as Molly Bloom in Ulysses gives her husband Leopold—the promise of love. MacDiarmid also incorporates elements from Dante (a man in a dark wood), from the French surrealist poet Paul Valéry, from a number of Russian writers, and especially from T. S. Eliot, whose The Waste Land is quoted in the poem and who is directly addressed. The thistle that is the object of the poet’s attention is a traditional symbol for Scotland, and the poet sees it as both a “wretched weed” (a version of himself) and an emblem of Scottish strength—“The stars like thistle’s roses floo’er.” An important aspect of this flowering is the power MacDiarmid invests in the Scots language, the vernacular that he has taken from the past. MacDiarmid concluded that since English society was exhausted, its formal language was bereft of redemptive possibility. He could follow Pound’s dictum to “make it new” only by exploring the energy latent in fallow linguistic fields.
MacDiarmid needed every resource he could find to sustain a poem that took a year to write, has 2,685 lines, and ranged from the intensely personal to the epic and cosmic. Its collage of texts, mixture of modes, and erratic symbology is held together by the force of the poet’s convictions. It has a compelling mental presence that assumes a distinct personality through the masterful manipulation of a language foreign to almost all of its readers. In the poem, he declares a faith in his land, his culture, and ultimately his art, which he believes is strong enough to accomplish the most difficult and necessary of human tasks—a reconciliation with the trials of existence.
Bibliography
Baglow, John. Hugh MacDiarmid: The Poetry of Self. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1987.
Bold, Alan. MacDiarmid: Christopher Murray Grieve, a Critical Biography. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
Buthlay, Kenneth. Hugh MacDiarmid. Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1982.
Glen, Duncan, and Hugh MacDiarmid. The MacDiarmids: A Conversation—Hugh MacDiarmid and Duncan Glen. Preston, Lancashire, England: Akros, 1970.
Herbert, W. N. To Circumjack MacDiarmid: The Poetry and Prose of Hugh MacDiarmid. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Lyall, Scott. Hugh MacDiarmid’s Poetry and Politics of Place: Imagining a Scottish Republic. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.
O’Connor, Laura. Haunted English: The Celtic Fringe, the British Empire, and De-Anglicization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.