Poetry
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
Hugh MacDiarmid · 1926
Synopsis
A man comes home from a pub, falls into a ditch by the roadside and stays there, facing a thistle lit by the moon. Two thousand six hundred and eighty-five lines follow: he addresses the plant, his wife who is waiting for him, Scotland, the whisky he has drunk, Dostoevsky, the poets who came before him, and moves from the comic to the grave without warning, from sex to metaphysics and from politics to the cosmos.
Context
The poem appeared on 22 November 1926 and is the founding text of what is called the Scottish Renaissance. Its language is spoken nowhere: its author fabricated it by drawing on a dictionary of Scots and on the court poets of the sixteenth century, adding borrowings from Gaelic, so that people have spoken of a synthetic Scots. The volume is dedicated to the composer Francis George Scott, who had suggested the idea, and part of it had first appeared in the columns of a Glasgow daily.
Who it is for
Two thousand lines in a reconstructed Scots, with a glossary essential even for a Scottish reader. There is no French translation.
Prizes and reception
The text that reopened a literature in the Scots language after three centuries of interruption.