Readers of the Scottish poet W. S. Graham tend to regard his work as falling into two periods: an early phase of Apocalyptic extravagance, heavily influenced by Dylan Thomas and culminating in the long poem The Nightfishing (1955), and, after a gap of fifteen years, an extraordinary Modernist interrogation of the nature of poetry and language. In career terms – in which he was never interested anyway – this was a disaster: The Nightfishing appeared in the same year as Philip Larkin’s The Less Deceived, which helped usher in a decade of Movement irony in which Graham emphatically did not belong. His first commitment was not to experience but to the struggle to “use the obstacle / of language well”. In a rare foray into critical prose, he wrote that “the most difficult thing for me to remember is that a poem is made of words and not the expanding heart, the overflowing soul, or the sensitive observer” and is “not to be judged by any other value put upon it by imagining how or why or by what kind of man it was made” (Poetry Scotland, 1946).
This view of the poem as a created space, a constructed solitude that “can be used by the reader to find out something about himself”, is evident in “The Answerers”, discovered in the W. S. Graham Estate Archive and published in the TLS in 2018, and later republished in The Caught Habits of Language (2018), an anthology celebrating the centenary of Graham’s birth. Although it might look like a nonsense poem, it could be read as a comment on the way we hide in words, and on whether a self unmediated by language is possible: “How would you like to ever find / At long last what you really are?” The answers to this question come from a variety of Scottish poems and ballads: John Barbour’s “The Bruce”, a narrative poem from 1375 about the political battle for the Scottish throne (“Thai said successioun o Kyngrik / Was nocht tae lawer feys lik”, ie “They said the succession of a kingdom / Was not like a minor landholding”), and “The Ballad of Sir Patrick Spens” (“And the tear blinded his een”). Perhaps Graham admits, in this celebration of his ancestry, that we have no choice but to derive our sense of who we are from what we write – that life without the protection of “all the ghosts in the language” would be terrifying.
The Answerers
How would you like to ever find
At long last what you really are?
Duck said the flying samovar.
Home said the fighting temeraire.
How would you like to find what
The man who lurks inside is like?
Thai said successioun o kyngrik
Was nocht tae lawer feys lik.
And would you ever like to drop
Into your true self not ready?
You’ve come a long way said he.
The man you want has gone to sea.
How would you like to find at last
The lost wee girl you have always been?
Don’t seek that said her good man
And the tear blinded his een.
How would you like to drop dead
And see yourself from outside?
Aye said the tink o’ Gairlochside.
Aye said all the ghosts in the language.
How would you like to ever find
At long last what you really are?
No said the Lady o’ Dunbar
No said the marching Earl o’ Mar.
W. S. GRAHAM (2018)
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