1 - Life, Background, Context
Summary
Scalpay revisited? - more than Scalpay. I
Have no defence,
For half my thought and half my blood is Scalpay,
Against that pure, hardheaded innocence
That shows love without shame, weeps without shame,
Whose every thought is hospitality -
Edinburgh, Edinburgh, you're dark years away.
In ‘Return to Scalpay’ written in 1972 when the poet was sixtyone, Norman MacCaig declares his ancestry, not just physical but also psychological. Scalpay is a small island off the east coast of Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland. When the poem was written, the island's main occupation was fishing, the inhabitants were Gaelic-speaking and severely Presbyterian. Both of MacCaig's maternal grandparents were natives of Scalpay, and his mother, who came to Edinburgh to work in domestic service, was a Gaelic speaker to whom English remained a foreign and awkwardly learned language. His paternal grandfather came from Argyll on the west coast of the Scottish mainland, again a Gaelic-speaking area. Although MacCaig was not a Gaelic speaker, he did know a considerable amount of Gaelic and identified very closely with its culture, particularly in music and song. About the time that he first visited the island in his early teens, a novel in Gaelic was published by his mother's brother; in Gaelic, poetry was the main literary form, and this novel was one of the earliest experiments in fiction in the language. The novelist relative is described in the poem ‘Uncle Seamus'.
Norman MacCaig was born in Edinburgh in 1910. His father owned a pharmacy and chemist's shop in the city and it was there that, with his three sisters, he grew up. In his poem ‘Inward bound’ (published in The White Bird, 1973), he recalls items from his boyhood in Edinburgh:
Journeys. Mine were
as wide as the world is
from Puddocky to Stockbridge [areas of the city]
minnows splinter in a jar
and a ten-inch yacht
in the roaring forties of Inverleith Pond
crumples like a handkerchief
till the web enlarged
choked once with a zeppelin
that dropped the beginning of the end of the world
on the Grassmarket
to enclose places that grew two selves
their own and the one I made of it.
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- Information
- Norman MacCaig , pp. 1 - 15Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2011