All Is True

By W. L. Tarbert - Own work, Public Domain.

The scent of pine needles after autumn rain — lots of it — fills my nostrils. A mist hangs low over the River Tay and I am standing on Telford’s bridge which joins the Perthshire villages of Birnam and Dunkeld. Dunkeld, in particular, is a special place for me as my parents brought me here summer after summer for holidays when I was a teenager. My imagination ignited here by the streams and forests around the village. Often, on mornings like this, my brother, sister and I would encounter little posses of wild deer just beyond the boundaries of our holiday cottage. There would be enormous fat slugs crawling over the doorstep and the little burn that formed one of the borders of our imaginary kingdom was full of rush and bustle in anticipation of the day to come. A typical day, if it was rainy like today, would definitely involve a trip into the village to visit the wonderful bookshop, now long gone. I spent most of my pocket money in there on a staple diet of novels by Nigel Tranter and Mary Stewart. In those days I was obsesssed by medieval Scottish history and I usually featured personally in my childish embellishments of these stirring romances as a bloodthirsty and ambitious pretender to the throne.

     Today, my ambition is to get across the bridge and along to the ruins of the great Dunkeld Cathedral before it starts to rain again. Medieval history is still present however as my route takes me past the place that was once the episcopal palace of the great Scottish makar, Gavin Douglas, who was Bishop of Dunkeld from around 1516 to his death in 1522. Douglas is famous principally for his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid into Scots, The Eneados, although each of the books is prefaced by prologues of Douglas’ own making. The prologue to book VII seems to describe exactly the scene I have just witnessed:

     Revereis ran Reid on spait with wattir broune,
     And burins hurlis all thair bankis downe… 

The whole poem conveys a brilliant description of a Scottish winter landscape and this is, presumably, one of the reasons for its inclusion in the recently published The Golden Treasury of Scottish Verse (ed: Jamie, Mackay, Paterson). Wise scholars, however, have been at pains to debunk the ‘realism’ of Douglas’ verse noting how the imagery here reflects and draws on religious writing, particularly the literature of Doomsday and how the movement of this prologue mirrors the descent of Aeneas down into the underworld. Douglas was, it seems, the kind of writer who ‘wrote through’ other writers and who saw translation as an expansion of the original’s potential, a vision of poetry that has guided my own work through thirty years and more.

     I reach the narrow cobbled street leading up to the Cathedral gates and note the blue plaque on one of the white cottages that acknowledges Douglas’ presence. A light snaps on inside. Despite the scholars, it is difficult not to imagine him here and be seduced by the charming autobiographical portrait that concludes the poem. We see the poet getting up in the morning, shivering with cold. He moves swiftly to the fireside:

     And, as I bownit me to the fyre me by,
     Bayth wp and downe the hous I did aspy;
     And seand Virgill on ane letterune stand,
     To writ anone I hynt ane pen in hand… 

Douglas is grumpy. His work table looks at him askance and he laments:

     Thair restit vncompleittit so gret ane part

There’s nothing for it then. He takes up his pen despite the cold and sets to finish the work that will — eventually — immortalise him. And while Douglas is undoubtedly engaged in a savant game of literary echos he also saw what he describes. Just as we have seen what he describes and cannot help relating to our contemporary obsession with climate change. The hard winter of this poem is not so frequent as it once was. Our winters now seem dangerously mild and unendingly wet.

     Bewtie wes lost, and barrand schew the landis…

     The light in the house snaps off and I make my way back up the street to the square reflecting that this is, of course, all in my imagination. It is pure fiction. Douglas’ translation was completed in Edinburgh prior to the Battle of Flodden in 1513. By the time he became Bishop of Dunkeld he had become a politician, mired in the struggles to assert the ascendancy of his family over the infant James V and Dunkeld was just a career move as he aimed higher for the archdiocese of St Andrews. A post he never got.

     I am heading back to Birnam now where my family has rented an old house for a family reunion. On the way, I pass a new invention: a communal orchard where I am invited by signs to pick whatever fruit I want. Little tickets hanging from the trees inform me which ones are ripe although the windfalls leave you in little doubt. I wander briefly among a profusion of apple and pear trees and then head over the bridge, taking a detour down to the river to visit the famous Birnam oak which has been dated to the 11th or 12th century. This tree is part of the ‘great wood’ that eventually brought MacBeth to his doom at Dunsinane. A rather mouldy placard standing in front of the tree reminds me that Shakespeare himself may have visited this part of the world with his troupe of players and that he may therefore have stood where I am standing, contemplating the very oak that would feature in his ‘Scottish play’.

     So many signs! All is literature. All is life.

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This blog was originally published by Carcanet Press