To meddle wi the thistle and to pluck/ The figs frae't is my metier, I think... ll.341-2. The figs are the thistle's flower heads.

It is one of the major modernist literary works of the 20th century.^[1]

Description

The Scots poem A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is an extended montage of distinct poems, or sections in various poetic forms, that are connected or juxtaposed to create one emotionally continuous whole in a way which both develops and consciously parodies compositional techniques used by poets such as Pound and Eliot.^[2][3] Much of the poem is comic, especially in its earlier sections, but the rhapsodic structure, 2685 lines long, is able to accommodate broad swings in tone from remarkable lyric passages at one extreme to colourful invective, diatribe and flyting at the other. Although initially comic in mode, it ultimately builds to produce deeply serious and even transcendent effects, particularly in the climactic final sections.

One of the most distinctive features of the poem is its language. MacDiarmid's literary Scots is principally rooted in his own Borders' dialect, but freely draws on a wide range of idiom and vocabulary, both current and historic, from different regions of Scotland. His sustained and innovative use of the leid in the work, though sometimes loose and idiosyncratic, did much to increase awareness of the potential for Scots as a medium of universal literary expression at a time when this was not well appreciated. The smeddum, or expressive drive, is integral to the entire effect of the poem.

Some of the poem's initial sections include interpolated Scots translations of other European poets, including Blok and Lasker-Schüler. These introduce the mysterious and lyrical tone that begins to offset the comic persona of the poem's thrawn narrator.

MacDiarmid claimed for his poem national literary ambitions similar to those Joyce did for Ulysses in Ireland.^[4]

Selected themes and content

• Jean
• The Thistle
• Robert Burns
• 1926 General Strike
• Sexual Reproduction (Science)
• Undersea Life
• Bannockburn and Flodden

First lines

The poem's opening lines run:

I amna fou' sae muckle as tired - deid dune.

It's gey and hard wark coupin' gless for gless

Wi' Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and the like,

And I'm no' juist as bauld as aince I wes.

Listen: External link to MacDiarmid reading the poem

External links

Ian Hamilton QC, uses the title of the poem as the tag line for a political blog which can be found at www.ianhamiltonqc.com.

References

1. ↑ MacDiarmid, A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle
2. ↑ Hugh MacDiarmid - Introduction by Alan Bold
3. ↑ Karmic Traces, 1993-1999 by Eliot Weinberger
4. ↑ Publications - Alan Riach

See also

• Modernism
• Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and the literary existentialists
• 1926 United Kingdom general strike
• Scottish national identity
• Robert Burns