"Lochiel's Warning" (Thomas Campbell)

The Clan Cameron grave marker at Drumossie Moor (Culloden)

[Image source: http://jackdeighton.co.uk/tag/culloden ]



Proud Cumberland prances, insulting the slain,
And their hoof-beaten bosoms are trod to the plain.
But hark! through the fast-flashing lightning of war,
What steed to the desert flies frantic and far?
'Tis thine, Oh Glenullin! whose bride shall await,
Like a love-lighted watch-fire, all night at the gate.
A steed comes at morning: no rider is there;
But its bridle is red with the sign of despair.

(from Lochiel's Warning , by Thomas Campbell)


I've been threatening for ages to write a post about Scott's A Legend of Montrose, which I read while we were on our travels through France and Spain back in September. This is an offshoot.

Scott  always prefixes his chapters with poetical epigraphs. Ann Radcliffe seems to have initiated this practice; Fennimore Cooper did it too.  In Scott's later novels he often made up the epigraphs himself (and palmed them off as Old Play or similar). But in his early days the epigraphs are an enriching dialogue with other material.

Chapters 6 and 7 of the Legend are both headed by highly pertinent quotations from "Lochiel's Warning" by Thomas Campbell: in relation to highland uprisings, and to foreseeing the future. More distantly, these epigraphs hint that the uprising in Scott's book is doomed to end badly.

Campbell is a poet I often seem to cross paths with. He had a happy knack for encapsulating an idea in a memorable line, in this case (re "the second sight"):


                    And coming events cast their shadow before.


Campbell was a contemporary of Scott's and they were both based in Edinburgh for a few years around 1800-1810 so I suppose they knew each other fairly well.* "Lochiel's Warning" is an exciting recitation-piece that Campbell wrote in 1801 and I should think it was highly influential on Scott's own narrative poems. Campbell, in his turn, was much taken with Scott's brilliant ballad of "Cadyow Castle", written in the same year.

*Yes, they did. According to Scott and his Circle (Scottish National Portrait Gallery booklet, by R.E. Hutchison) Scott "was one of the first to recognize and welcome Campbell when he came to Edinburgh and they remained life-long friends".

In a note about "the second-sight" in The Lady of the Lake (1810), Scott writes: "The exquisitely beautiful poem of Lochiel will at once occur to the recollection of every reader". 

Campbell's contemporaries lamented his early loss of poetical powers; his poems subsequent to 1809 were not admired. Scott himself said: "Thomas Campbell's afraid of the author of The Pleasures of Hope"* - i.e. the splendid poem with which Campbell had burst onto the scene in 1799.

*John Wilson et al, Noctes Ambrosianae ,Vol ii Page 67.

In his Journal (29th June 1826), Scott pondered further: "I wonder often how Tom Campbell with so much real genius, has not maintained a greater figure in the public eye than he has done of late -- somehow he wants audacity, fears the public, and what is worse, fears the shadow of his own reputation. He is a great corrector too, which succeeds as ill in composition as in education. Many a clever boy is flogged into a dunce, and many an original composition corrected in mediocrity. Tom ought to have done a great deal more; his youthful promise was great."

*

"Lochiel's Warning" is a dialogue between a prophetic seer and the historic figure of Donald Cameron of Lochiel. The poem transforms into mythical terms something that was actually true. The "Gentle Lochiel", like many of the other chieftains who agreed out of loyalty to follow Bonnie Prince Charlie in 1745, sensed that this ill-judged enterprise would be bound to end in calamity. Contrary to the hints of the poem, Lochiel didn't die on the field of Culloden but he was badly wounded and fled to France, dying two years later without ever returning to Scotland.

The Battle of Culloden, 16th April 1746, was the last pitched battle on British soil. Around 2,000 highlanders and 300 government troops were killed.  It led on to brutal reprisals by "Butcher" Cumberland. The name of Culloden was long and resentfully remembered.

The streets of Soho did reverberate
With drunken Highland men
Revenge for Culloden dead
The North had rose again
But it would turn out wrong

(From "The NWRA" by The Fall, 1980 Lyrics in full)

Mark E. Smith's lyric re-evokes the mythic motif of a northern rebellion that is foreseen as going wrong from the start. Despite the sardonic side-glance just quoted, the song is really about northern England rather than Scotland.

Indeed historically the two regions have often taken different sides, just as in Scotland the highlands and lowlands were often opposed to each other. As regards the most recent Rising of the North, most of Scotland and at least one Mr Cameron were on the other side. Whether this rising will "turn out wrong" too I don't know, but the spirit of doom-laden presentiment lives on.

Scanlon, Hanley, Hanley, Smith, Riley: The Fall on 24th October, 1980 (at the General Wolfe in Coventry) 

[Image source: http://thisthen.co.uk/bands/the-fall/general-wolfe/ . Photo by Mark Osborne.]


"The NWRA" appeared on the album Grotesque (After The Gramme), Smith's most coherent realization of northern existence.

I'm sure it's pure coincidence, but in another song on the album, "Impression of J. Temperance",
the monstrous birth is delivered by an overpaid vet whose name is Cameron.


*

According to Byron, the pipers played the "war-note of Lochiel" during the battle of Waterloo:

And wild and high the 'Cameron's gathering' rose,

   The war-note of Lochiel, which Albyn's hills

   Have heard, and heard, too, have her Saxon foes:

   How in the noon of night that pibroch thrills

   Savage and shrill!  But with the breath which fills

   Their mountain-pipe, so fill the mountaineers

   With the fierce native daring which instils

   The stirring memory of a thousand years,

And Evan's, Donald's fame rings in each clansman's ears.

(Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Canto III, Stanza 26.) 

This was the 79th Regiment of Foot (Cameron Highlanders), one of just four regiments singled out by Wellington for mention in his Waterloo dispatch: "The troops of the 5th division, and those of the Brunswick corps, were long and severely engaged, and conducted themselves with the utmost gallantry. I must particularly mention the 28th, 42nd, 79th, and 92nd regiments, and the battalion of Hanoverians." Of the regiment's 675 soldiers, 103 were killed and 353 wounded. 

The march in question was the Piobaireachd Dhomhnuill Duibh (Pibroch of Donald Dubh), also known as the Cameron's Gathering, a tune that may go back to the fifteenth century. 

More details:

https://bagpipe.news/2020/05/04/pibroch-of-donald-dubh/

for st catherine's day

I am a votary of St Catherine, because this is the day when, perceptibly, my winter blues start to fade away. I guess a scientist would have a stab at explaining that - perhaps it's when, though the days are still growing shorter, this shortening has slowed down so much that it no longer upsets me. Whatever, today is Christmas and spring rolled into one, for me.

So let's write sentimentally about some Christmas songs. Because this year, instead of the usual feeling of misanthropic loathing, I'm really enjoying hearing them as we walk around the lit cities and sparkling shops. Big inspiration, by the way, from this post on Chris Goode's wonderful blog.

Judy Garland: "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" (1944). This is such a sad song! It's been getting gradually less sad over the years: even by Judy Garland's time some of the words had been brightened up, and with Sinatra this process went further. Gradually the meaning of the song changed from consolation (take your mind off things and enjoy Christmas, I know next year looks pretty bleak but God willing we'll make it) to celebration (The future's looking good and Christmas is so special). Garland's version catches the song in mid-transformation, hence at its most emotionally complex and open-ended, and her performance is emotionally intelligent in a fragile way, she already knows too much for her own good, but it's a priceless gift for the rest of us. There's a bit where she switches from one melody to another, in the blink of an eye, that still deceives you after a hundred listens, though you've never noticed it.

Three Degrees: "Mary's Boy Child" (1998).

Jester Hairston's great song of 1956, one of the few Christmas carols of modern times to be known everywhere. Hairston, whose grandparents were slaves, studied music at the Juilliard school, was a long-time composer, choirmaster, arranger, services to the TV industry, etc. Also an occasional bit-part actor in a surprising number of Hollywood movies (he's on Hollywood Blvd). In his song as it originally stands (e.g. Harry Belafonte), the message is a warm comfort to all humanity.

The Three Degrees, long-running MOR soul girl trio from Philly, with variable personnel, chiefly remembered for Gamble/Huff hits in the 1970s when they were said to be Prince Charles' favourite artistes. Their album "Christmas with the Three Degrees" is not so well known perhaps, and it's been repackaged so many times that it's difficult to pin down the orginal release date, but I'll go for 1998 because that's what the group's own site says, though when I heard this song I was quite satisfied that it came from their golden era. With its sleek, discreetly funky backing - the kind you could sway to without toppling off high heels, and the marvellous way that the lead (Valerie?) pronounces "Bethleham", this is totally infectious, and so concise as to be nearly disdainful - they don't bother with half the lyrics e.g. so the climactic key change is made, not to celebrate Jesus being born, but to herald Joseph and Mary's rooflessness in a strange town. In this reorientation the song now becomes inescapably about motherhood seen from a grandmotherly distance.

The Fall, "Rowche Rumble" (1979). None of Mark E Smith's ramblings make any sense, we all know that, so this can't possibly be about towns on prescription drugs and global capitalist profiteering in the business of non-cure addictive medicine dished out with legal and governmental backing to vulnerable people. The drums sound like cardboard on the studio version, the song kind of drags and whizzes at the same time, but this is somehow great. If I had to choose between this and the more fuelled-up version on Totale's Turns, ...well I don't. I'm in complete agreement with Robin Purves about the exact moment when the Fall Experiment, until then on a planet-expanding trajectory, suddenly hits its ceiling (in 1981, 3/4 of the way through Hex Enduction Hour). Despite all of the good stuff since, (mainly, it was in the next few years) ambition perceptibly shrank, vision became restricted, the music turned in on itself. It started mining a vein. Purves says it's when the band really did stop being democratic, when Riley could no longer stand up to Smith, when Smith was no longer humbled by Megas Jonsson. You judge the later work in terms of pop music, though sometimes frightening pop music. But the Fall up to Hex was a different thing. Its influence on alt-poetry is massive. [The flip was "In My Area", and is now further immortalized by being mentioned in Richard Makin's Dwelling.]

Marina and the Diamonds, The Family Jewels (2010). Don't lose sight of these prodigious three-minute wedges of disaffection.

I'm a stray cat on the roam
choking on a chicken bone

Happy Xmas!

*

And anyway, I've loved St Catherine since I read her very legendary legend in the South English Legendary, and also read (truly or not) that the tale of Catherine the martyr, inasmuch as it has any historical credibility whatever, is dimly based on a heathen princess who was martyred by Christians. So I think she should be a saint for all of us, and a comfort against persecution by all authorities. [Though I must admit, in her heyday it was her royalty, intellect, and independence that commended her to noble women throughout Christendom.]

*

By the way, Purves' piece also includes a spirited attack on Derek Bailey's improvisational music - exemplifying yet again the surprisingly familiar pattern that when people in the alt-poetry community really want to think honestly about their poetic, they'll more likely talk about music than poetry. This may be partly because we don't want to accentuate differences between each other, we need each other's support too badly; maybe, too, because most of our fundamental ideas about art in fact originated when we were thinking about pop music in our teens. If I can extrapolate from my own experience. (This is definitely a good way to look at Chris Goode's piece, for example.)

Rose the Red and White Lily

How much refrain can you tolerate, has always been a question for me. As a child I was annoyed by the way that “I Saw Three Ships” kept harping on about Christmas day in the morning, and it was a trial I could never endure to submit to a rendering of the interminable later verses of “The Twelve Days of Christmas”: once one had the five gold rings firmly in hand, the rest was just a knees-up. Even such songs as "One man went to mow" and the great "Old MacDonald had a farm" were, I am sorry now to confess, only half-tolerated by me. And in my teens I despised any pop song that descended into chorus-repeats half-way through: Mott the Hoople's Honaloochie Boogie was my paradigm case, if you want to know. I just always wanted more invention, I wanted to be kept busy and entertained. I needed stories.

I didn't guess at a different way of listening until I heard this:

     repetition-
     in-the-music-
     &-you’re-never-
     gonna-lose-it



It took Salford to sneer at me what ought to have been obvious and in fact ought to have been instinctive in my dancing feet if I'd had any, that neither music nor verse are fundamentally about serving up content in that bedtime-story kind of manner. But never mind that for the moment.

In "Flower of the Holy Ghost", a poem from the anonymous collection Carmina Agnetae (London, late 19th c.), the slender narrative of Lady Eglantine and Sir Eynyon is manacled to an especially punitive refrain. There are 34 stanzas in all but I think you will find stanzas 5-9 an adequate sample:

     And crowned queen of beauty there,
          (Flower of the Holy Ghost,)
     Sat Eglantine that maid so fair.
          (Earthly flowers will fade away,
          But the lilies of heaven bloom for aye
          To pleasure the angel host.)

     Upon a dais, enthroned on high,
          (Flower of the Holy Ghost,)
     Beneath a gold wrought canopy.
          (Earthly flowers will fade away,
          But the lilies of heaven bloom for aye,
          To pleasure the angel host,)

     Clad in white samite, fair to see,
          (Flower of the Holy Ghost,)
     With surcoat of silken broidery.
          (Earthly flowers will fade away,
          But the lilies of heaven bloom for aye,
          To pleasure the angel host.)

     And kneeling lowly at her knee,
          (Flower of the Holy Ghost,)
     To take the prize of chivalry,
          (Earthly flowers will fade away,
          But the lilies of heaven bloom for aye,
          To pleasure the angel host.)

     He came, Sir Eynyon the Fair,
          (Flower of the Holy Ghost,)
     The victor of the tourney there.
          (Earthly flowers will fade away,
          But the lilies of heaven bloom for aye,
          To pleasure the angel host.)

I had to use cut-and-paste to avoid the unspeakable boredom of all that retyping. The printers at New Temple Press, Fleet Street, had no such recourse. They had to set up the lines of type 34 times. Once they missed the full stop after “host”, and once they made it a comma – in stanza 6, above. They couldn’t make up their minds if the fifth line deserved any kind of end-stop. On 16 occasions they gave it a comma, on 18 occasions they didn’t bother.

But whether anyone, even the author, even the hapless typesetter, has ever “read” the poem sequentially from beginning to end, this I find hard to credit. I certainly haven’t. After a couple of stanzas I just skimmed through the narrative lines and skipped all the rest, the same way I handle any other poem with a stupid refrain.

But I think this is quite a good poem, all the same. There are a lot more things to do with a poem apart from reading it.

The “Flower of the Holy Ghost” (which is also the poem’s title) is columbine (Aquilegia vulgaris) – poetically to be conceived in its white form, where the resemblance to communing doves is more striking.



The Lady Eglantine makes a chaplet out of columbine at the beginning of the poem: something few people today would know how to do: you need a base, e.g. dried woodbine.

The contrast between earthly and heavenly blooms is in several respects confused: one must suppose, deliberately. Is it sensible to choose, as your instance of an earthly bloom, one with such transcendent associations as the "flower of the Holy Ghost"? Is it sensible, in this already blurry context, to name your earthly heroine after the fragrant Rosa rubiginosa or sweetbriar?



Perhaps it’s also Eglantine, despite being a model of chastity and submissiveness, who is set in contrast to the lilies of heaven?

Red roses and white lilies have gone together in literature for a very long time. There were not many other flower names that literate Europe would commonly understand: they were principally interested in useful plants. For the decorative, "roses and lilies" was a sufficient shorthand, like "gold and silver" for wealth. The historian Athenaeus (fl. 200CE) on the accession of a Ptolemy:

As for the whole floor, it was strewed with every kind of flower; for Egypt, thanks to its mild climate, and the fondness of its people for gardening, produces abundantly, and all the year round, those flowers which are scarce in other lands, and then come only at special seasons. Roses, white lilies, and many another flower never lack in that country.

From this skeletal alphabet of only two letters, a vast symbolism effloresced. From classical literacy the trope of roses and lilies filtered down into European folk culture. These immemorial pairings in European lyrics and ballads are founded more on earlier symbolism than on real flowers; more on the debris of imported literacy than on native wisdom. As with folk-art generally, the bit that matters is the transmutation.

But what plants were the authors speaking about, originally?

The original white lily is the “Madonna Lily”, Lilium candidum (formerly known as Lilium album), native to the Balkans and west Asia, iconographically connected with the Virgin Mary (for centuries there were usually lilies in paintings of the Annunciation)



The original cultivated red rose (in Europe) is Rosa gallica – thought to have been introduced in Roman times to southern Europe (including of course Gaul) from western Asia.



By the middle ages (as e.g. the red rose of Lancaster), the cultivated rose was already usually semi-double, as in the ancient variety known as the “Apothecary’s Rose”, Rosa gallica officinalis (below) . As you can see the colour is light crimson rather than scarlet, the golden stamens still well out in the open.



It is obvious that looking at these 21st century digital photographs does not give you, cannot give you, an accurate idea of what was seen or imagined by a 2nd Century historian. Our interpreting eye is quite different from his: consider for example that it was unknown until the 18th century CE that flowers had a sexual function! We also see the colours differently; if you have no word for magenta then this flower is red, as in all paintings and illuminations. Besides, when you look at the photo and you are morally certain that this picture is only a year or two old, you make all sorts of inferences about where we are and what is outside the frame: a modern garden with machine-mown lawns - for example.

Thus in a sense more than merely literal, these are modern blooms...

103B.5 The knights they harped i their bower,
         The ladies sewd and sang;
         There was mair mirth in that chamer
         Than a’ their father’s lan.
103B.6 Then out it spak their step-mither,
         At the stair-foot stood she:
         I’m plagued wi your troublesome noise!
         What makes your melodie?
103B.7 O Rose the Red, ye sing too loud,
         White Lillie, your voice is strang;
         But gin I live and brook my life,
         I’se gar you change your sang.

I talked about a common understanding, but what was commonly understood was a decorum about appropriate usage. The exact images with which one imbued the words "rose" and "lily" was a more personal matter. The singer of the Child Ballad 103 about the two sisters, Rose the Red and White Lily would most likely have no personal acquaintance with the flowers pictured above, and would imagine local equivalents: in Scotland, dog-rose and lily-of-the-valley, perhaps. When we read the poems ourselves, we conceive not the living instances at which the digital camera is pointing, but legendary red and white flowers of dream-like size and simplicity.

Carmina Agnetae has masses of poems but only one theme, the early loss of love through bereavement. And the lilies of the afterlife. Its characters, its Eglantines and Eynyons come to grief so quickly that there is no chance of individualizing them. Only when gone for ever or mourning for ever are they faintly aglow with erotic life - as if having only now understood their purpose. Only among the lilies of the afterlife is there a glimmering of pleasure.