SCOTTISH VERSE

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31345, 15 April 1967, Page 4

SCOTTISH VERSE

The Oxford Book of Scottish Verse. Chosen by John Mac Queen and Tom Scott 622 pp. Index.

This anthology will provoke interest and mild regret, but will also arouse admiration for a needed job well done. No two readers of this excel-lently-produced book will agree on the selections made, but such disagreement (kind and mild) will help to keep alive the high place in literature of Scottish verse. Where there is ho argument in any sphere of Scottish letters, interest wilts and dies. Anthologies are literary schoolmasters. May they live lohg. The two editors tell us they had two main purposes in mind; to lay greater emphasis on verse written in Scots as opposed to English and to give a balanced collection of Scottish verse written before and after 1603.

Many readers will find that the verse of the fourteenth to the early seventeenth century condemns them to very slow reading, but in this book excellent annotations will be helpful. In the early fifteenth century many readers will appreciate the selections given of the wort of Dunbar and Douglas and give renewed appreciation of the verse of Allan Ramsay of the seventeenth century. Then follows Robert Burns. There is no need to gild the lily but honesty compels agreement with toe editors’ use of the blue pencil.

Of special interest in this anthology is the account of the Scottish Ballads, the gift of the eighteenth century to Scottish literary life. Ballads have played a very special part in Scottish history. The wandering minstrels were really story-tellers. Folk songs were remembered and formed the background of the ballads. Ballads were never danced. Their intrinsic merit lies in their communal origin and thus expressing realities of human experience. Their heyday lasted from the sixteenth century to the eighteenth. There is a magnificent selection of ballads in this

book. Many readers will relish reading again "Lord Ranald,” “The Twa Corbies,” “The Bonny Earl of Moray,” and many others. Poets, mistakenly called minor poets, are well represented. Who can forget "Caller Herrin,” and the “Land O’ The Leri,” by Lady Nairne?; the anonymous poet of the eighteenth century who gave us the tender lyric “John Anderson, my Joe,” and the other anonymous poet who gave us the little song she sang and to which Burns gave literary immortality, ”Ca’ the Yowes to the Knowes.”

Excerpts are given from James Hogg, Writer Scott, Robert Tannehill (the Paisley poet), James Thompson (“The City of Dreadful Night”), and R. L. Stevenson (“The Spas Wife”),

Coming to the end of the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century we experience a more stringent climate. Gone are the love songs, their places being taken by the dire effects of war and economic distress. It cannot but be that the way of life—not chosen but thrust upon us—affects and directs the song of the poet It seems that the prevailing note of modern life is bitterness. The song is in the minor key. The song birds are nearly mute. John Davidson in his "Thirty Bob a Week” is bitter but not unhopeful. Francis Adams (“Looking into your Heart”); Violet Jacob ("The Last Of the Tinklers”) sings a sad lay. Perhaps it could be said that Hugh McDtarmid is the greatest of our modern Scottish poets. Thera is one long poem by him in this anthology "The Great Wheel” that portrays despair and

All told, this is an anthology that cannot be slighted. It probably cannot be bettered. The editors have done very well with a tricky task. They cannot please everybody but will please most They have given us a grand book.