The Great Tapestry settled for a while in Aberdeen
and it really increased the amount of foot traffic passing through the doors of the Art Gallery.
The Great Tapestry of Scotland – a unique project to stitch the entire story of Scotland from pre-history to modern times.
If you want to know more about the Tapestry follow the link here and this will also let you know where it is on its journey around Scotland. Go and see it if you can but allow more than one visit - we took two and would have preferred three or four.
My concern here is to look at the poetry so I will focus on the panels about Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Burns (of course) and Robert Louis Stevenson.
The Great Tapestry of Scotland – a unique project to stitch the entire story of Scotland from pre-history to modern times.
If you want to know more about the Tapestry follow the link here and this will also let you know where it is on its journey around Scotland. Go and see it if you can but allow more than one visit - we took two and would have preferred three or four.
My concern here is to look at the poetry so I will focus on the panels about Hugh MacDiarmid, Robert Burns (of course) and Robert Louis Stevenson.
This panel celebrates MacDiarmid's splendidly named poem "A Drunk Man Looks At The Thistle".
from A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle
The function, as it seems to me,
O’ Poetry is to bring to be
At lang, lang last that unity ...
But wae’s me on the weary wheel!
Higgledy-piggledy in’t we reel,
And little it cares hoo we may feel.
Twenty-six thoosand years ’t’ll tak’
For it to threid the Zodiac
—A single roond o’ the wheel to mak’!
This is a very short bite of a long poem but I like the sentiment and it seems appropriate to the aim of the tapestry. This is what Wiki has to say about it:
A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle is a long poem by Hugh MacDiarmid written in Scots and published in 1926. It is composed as a form of monologue with influences from stream of consciousness genres of writing. A poem of extremes, it ranges between comic and serious modes and examines a wide range of cultural, sexual, political, scientific, existential, metaphysical and cosmic themes, ultimately unified through one consistent central thread, the poet's emotionally and intellectually charged contemplation, from a male perspective, of the condition of Scotland. It also includes extended and complex responses to figures from European and Russian literature, in particular Dostoevsky and Nietzsche, as well as referencing topical events and personalities of the mid-1920s such as Isadora Duncan or the UK General Strike of 1926. It is one of the major modernist literary works of the 20th century.
Here's the Burns panel focusing on the wonderful Tam o'Shanter:
Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796)
Tam o’Shanter – a tiny sample
Verse 1
When
chapmen billies leave the street,
And drouthy neibors, neibors meet,
As market days are wearing late,
An' folk begin to tak the gate;
While we sit bousing at the nappy,
And getting fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps, and styles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Where sits our sulky sullen dame.
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
And drouthy neibors, neibors meet,
As market days are wearing late,
An' folk begin to tak the gate;
While we sit bousing at the nappy,
And getting fou and unco happy,
We think na on the lang Scots miles,
The mosses, waters, slaps, and styles,
That lie between us and our hame,
Where sits our sulky sullen dame.
Gathering her brows like gathering storm,
Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.
Verse 5
You sieze the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white--then melts for ever;
Or like the borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow's lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.--
Nae man can tether time or tide;
The hour approaches Tam maun ride;
That hour, o' night's black arch the key-stane,
That dreary hour he mounts his beast in;
And sic a night he taks the road in
As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in.
I love this poem as an adult, especially the atmospheric descriptions and its mix of humour and lyricism.
The Scottish tapestry panel devoted to Stevenson quotes, "Tusitala - teller of tales, dreamer of dreams on gossamer sails." RLS was one of the millions of Scottish migrants and Tusitala was a name he adopted when he lived in Samoa - it is the native word for "storyteller". Illness forced him away from Scotland to warmer climates and childhood illness prompted this clever and sensitive child to become more introspective. Hard to choose one poem by him as he was so prolific but this one is especially Scottish. He must have been so homesick at times.
In the Highlands
IN
the highlands, in the country places,
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
And the young fair maidens
Quiet eyes;
Where essential silence cheers and blesses,
And for ever in the hill-recesses
Her more lovely music
Broods and dies--
O to mount again where erst I haunted;
Where the old red hills are bird-enchanted,
And the low green meadows
Bright with sward;
And when even dies, the million-tinted,
And the night has come, and planets glinted,
Lo, the valley hollow
Lamp-bestarr'd!
O to dream, O to awake and wander
There, and with delight to take and render,
Through the trance of silence,
Quiet breath!
Lo! for there, among the flowers and grasses,
Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
Only winds and rivers,
Life and death.
Where the old plain men have rosy faces,
And the young fair maidens
Quiet eyes;
Where essential silence cheers and blesses,
And for ever in the hill-recesses
Her more lovely music
Broods and dies--
O to mount again where erst I haunted;
Where the old red hills are bird-enchanted,
And the low green meadows
Bright with sward;
And when even dies, the million-tinted,
And the night has come, and planets glinted,
Lo, the valley hollow
Lamp-bestarr'd!
O to dream, O to awake and wander
There, and with delight to take and render,
Through the trance of silence,
Quiet breath!
Lo! for there, among the flowers and grasses,
Only the mightier movement sounds and passes;
Only winds and rivers,
Life and death.
Robert Louis Stevenson
RLS died in Samoa - a long way from home.
The Scottish diaspora pretty much cover the globe and more than 4 million Scots left home for new worlds in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Of course, Sir Walter Scott also gets a panel but he's not one of my favourites and I must admit that his novels make me laugh! Perhaps I'll try again...
The Great Tapestry also celebrates ordinary people and the lives of its women - famous or otherwise which is as it should be. Almost all of the stitchers who created the panels and helped to design and choose the content are women.
These are two of my favourite panels of working women - fishers and knitters:
I don't think that Norman MacCaig features in the tapestry but perhaps he should.
In an interview still available on Youtube here he says in his typical provocative way, that he hates history because it is the story of violence - of battles and destruction; that he doesn't much care for mankind but likes some people.
In his introduction to the book about the making of The Great Tapestry of Scotland, Alastair Moffatt tells how he and the artist Andrew Crummy became very aware of pitfalls when deciding what to include: "....the military option, the temptation to see our history as a series of invasions, wars and battles, many of them grey defeats."
The tapestry is anything but grey and a definite victory.
For me part of the appeal of the Tapestry (and it has become hugely popular) is the vast scope of its timeline and the carefully selected details so that it encompasses so much of human experience. I leave you with some tiny details that the stitchers added around the edges of the main panels. There is even a selection of famous Scottish healthfood.
