September 2014
Tho goal agam ort.
A thistle can draw blood,
so can a rose,
growing together
where the river flows, shared
across a border it can know,
where, somewhen, Rabbie E Burns might
swim
or pilgrim Keats come walking
out of love for him.
Aye, here’s to you,
cousins, sisters, brothers,
in your brave, bold, brilliant land,
the thistle jags our hearts,
take these roses,
from our bloodied hands.
Tha goal agam ort == I love you
Dear friends and readers,
I hope my Scots readers (if I have any) and those who voted “yes” to separation in Scotland yesterday will not take offense as I understand why someone might have voted “yes” since I’m going to say tonight that I was intensely relieved when the Scots voted to stay.
Though only partly or scarcely British (a British subject is what my 1969 English working papers once said) by marriage, because of Jim and my long years together, my lifetime of reading and studying English literature and art, and the living there and times visiting and re-visiting, I felt involved. We had what was our honeymoon there, Jim could speak Scots. To me Scots and English people are one, they are utterly inter involved: people in England are related to people in Scotland, everyone has moved continually about. The Scots are a nation, and have invested well over 300 years in this island world. Practically speaking the Scots have a parliament of their own (for the last 10 years), they are part of a National Health program that still works well (at the point of contact, no money paid out), they have the British, pound, they are central to the UK in the BBC. They can and this election was working for change (they received more concessions from the British Parliament) within the UK, and as leftist, they can help their cousins down south.
It’s suggested the vote for separation was strongest among the poor and among more left-leaning people. Up in Yorkshire and the West Riding, what I loved so was precisely this culture that did not despise you if you could not buy the super-duper item in the store, that did not define success in life sheerly materially and competitively as increasing down south and east where London is (the financial center as it’s sometimes called). I don’t think there is this hard and fast chasm between the Scots and the English, and I felt that many English people from down south that I met (Hampshire) were strikingly different from the materialism and abrasiveness of NYC. It’s a continuum and I would not want to disvalue or re-shape the north as a mirror of the financial and upper middle and Tory-leaning southern counties. Scots culture is vibrant and does not change and will not change and will carry on evolving.
What did the SNP have to offer? vague idealistic goals; its basis nationalism. Unfortunately those who get into power are ever the power-hungry, competitive, not inclined by personality to feel for those who not so. Their record not any more open to ordinary people than other parties.
For me no meant “yes,” here. I love the writing of Robert Louis Stevenson, Margaret Oliphant, Robert Burns, even Jonathan Swift, and once upon a time James Thompson. My favorite Peter Wimsey novel is the Five Herrings one which took place in Scotland. Anne Murray Halkett is one of my heroines on my website. When Yvette took a graduate course in Irish literature at GMU (for no-credit as a post-graduate) she was told Irish literature begins with Lady Gregory: that is to erase hundreds of years of culture and writing.
Sylvia
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 