Kate Armstrong: Scottish Poetry

The writing of the poem For a New Museum results from a double involvement. Armstrong loves the sense of building and building materials and she is aware of a form of wild cheerfulness integral to many Scottish people. Here is what she writes:

'I wrote the poem after picking up a leaflet in the Royal Museum of Scotland (Chambers Street, Edinburgh), where I had been thrilled by the exhibition of plans and drawings for a proposed extension. I can still remember standing there, in a broad corridor which ended in a dusty plate-glass window overlooking the building site, and yellow sunlight pouring through. I love stone as material, and build drystane dykes as a leisure interest. I meet many Scots speakers who practise the craft.'

(For those who, like me, are not sure what a drystane dyke is, she explains: 'Drystane dyking - the agricultural craft of building walls of undressed stone without mortar').

'The "marriage" idea in the poem comes from my husband's family. They come from Fife, a part of Scotland where people are famed for broad humour, great cheerfulness and commonsense : they are "gallus". At my husband's grandmother's funeral, for instance, they apparently went through the formal bit and the reminiscing bit and they drank a fair amount in the hotel function room and sat around gossiping and getting more and more raucous and eventually one stout auntie climbed up onto the table and, posing like de Milo, said, "Leuk - Venus!" What we have in the poem is the same combination of a formal situation with ordinary cheerfulness breaking through.'

The poem may at first look like a narrative piece. It opens in a very formal way, with some Master of Ceremony announcing the marriage of thought and time in clipped standard English. The insistence in what follows on the common and unsophisticated - on the actual building site by contrast with the expected exhibits ('the steam engine, the silver spoons') already provides a humourous element. Then as the voice reports that the bride (restraining thoughtfulness?) cannot be found, a wild sense of enjoyment sweeps all order and propriety away, and language veers into Scots. Eventually it turns out that the marriage to be celebrated was already consummated since their child is born.

Read more... The Translation

Picture of Cottage:© Tom Steel

Picture of Bride:© Mary Cameron

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