A Poet's Search for Mary MacLeod:
More Richly in Earth
McGill/Queens University Press
“Much we long for what we lack, for what is closed within the grave, our treasure and triumph, our glee without gloom. What I myself have received thereof I shall remember long.”
Mary MacLeod, Marbhrann / Dirge
Many, many, many years ago, back when I was still a poet, I decided to explore my Scottish roots in an oblique way that has much in common with the poet Marilyn Bowering’s parallel exploration of her own heritage via the shared roots of a cultural compatriot, the mysterious, magical and much misunderstood Gaelic poet Mary MacLeod. As usual for me, there’s a striking synchronicity between our mutual investigative journey to discover the deep vibrations we share as Celtic-Canadians who both embarked on a voyage into the rough and tumble worlds of Gaelic poetry and songcraft. In my case, I first traveled to England with a hippie chum of mine to visit his grandfather’s bucolic homeland in Lancashire, before embarking on a walking tour (tramping, the Brits call it) all over the island empire and ending up at the Alexandra Palace in London where we accidentally attended a massive gathering of mahatmas and followers of Guru Maharaj. Feeling somewhat claustrophobic from all the guru worship, I decided to hop on a train and zip up to northern Scotland to reconnect with long lost family members prior to their own emigration to Canada.
North of Edinburgh is the tiny former coal-mining village of Motherwell, where my mother had told me her own mother lived before escaping from a confining Victorian life there and traveling by ocean liner, by herself at only eighteen years of age, to make a daring new life in Canada. It was a new life that brought about my own existence as a classic baby boomer, and I now realize that I was going back in time and space to encounter the same mythic origins that so magnetized Marilyn Bowering. I met the doddering patriarch of our clan (tweed cap, pipe, indecipherable drawl) and during insanely long bouts of Guinness consumption, he would regale my addled hippie sensibility with ancient Gaelic poems, stories and songs, all of which left me baffled, teary and appreciative. This was especially the case when he explained, on the rare occasions I could penetrate his brogue, that many of these Gaelic poems and songs (he didn’t differentiate between the two disciplines) were created by a mysterious and controversial lady bard, as he called her, named MacLeod.
Marilyn Bowering’s captivating poetic-roots journey has resulted in this magnificent memoir (one far more elegantly chronicled than my Guinness-soaked concerts delivered by a great great Uncle, John Dockerty) and is a twin tale of both her own life and literary interests and the cloudy historical figure who came to utterly fascinate her, the relatively unknown Seventeenth Century Gaelic bard (or bardess) Mary MacLeod. More Richly in Earth is a marvel of a memoir and a monument to the musical mind of a truly revolutionary woman, so far ahead of her time that she still seems to dwell mostly in a far off future. “Aye,” Dockerty exclaimed, “she lived in the way back times, and lives there still. She was wrongly called a witch, but what she really was was one of the wise women.” To my amazement, even though he couldn’t remember where he left his shoes or pipe, he could still declaim in part poem/part song, not unlike Dylan Thomas’ delivery tone, the lilting oddity of “Hilliu-An, Hilleo-An”, which I recall a cousin back then transcribing for me, and which I was amazed to find in Bowering’s book on Mary.
“S e m’ fheadagan is m’eoin thu
S e m fheadagan is m’eoin is m’uigghean
S an luachair bhog far an suidhinn.”
(“You are my plovers and my chicks
My plovers and my chicks and my eggs,
And the soft rushes where I would sit.”)
Ahhh, here’s my pipe, Dockerty would then conclude, before requesting yet another pint of unnecessary Guinness.
Poet Marilyn Bowering on the Scottish island of Scarpa.
Mairi nighean Aladair Ruaidh, 1615-1707 (hereafter known as Mary MacLeod) apparently has multiple birthdates and demises, depending on what source one finds, which is not surprising I suppose for someone who had the posthumous indignity of being buried face down, as was the bizarre custom in those sad cases of the many wise women who were misogynistically mistaken for witches. She hailed from Rowdil, Harris, and was connected to the Chiefs of the MacLeods, with most of her life being spent at Dunvegan, Skye. She is widely regarded, when remembered at all, as one of the stalwarts of a new school of poetry that was then emerging in the 17th Century, a style which eventually subsumed the classical Gaelic bards. The 1893 Brittanica expressed that “MacLeod’s poetry is celebrated for its simple natural rhythms, full of energy, as was customary in the verses of bardic poets. Of those poems that survive, the elegies are the best, poignant yet fresh in their style.”
MacLeod is often referenced, when appreciated fully in Scottish folklore, as composing her poetry “neither indoors nor outdoors, and that she would croon them from the threshold in between.” Even more startling to me, apart from the fact that Dockerty would recite some of her dirges when drunk (the experience of hearing them causing me inexplicably to shed tears despite the fact that I couldn’t comprehend them) is the persistent feeling I had as I followed Bowering’s narrative of her own and Mary’s memoirs intertwining, that the closest thing to MacLeod I ever heard (apart from some Dylan Thomas) is the bardic-like incantations of our own contemporary troubadour Bob Dylan. Strange but true, especially the lyrics of a deceptively simple dirge such as his “All Along the Watchtower”, from his 1968 album John Wesley Harding. It struck me at some point that Dylan too crooned, or croaked if you will, his haunting odes on a threshold space located in a liminal dimension. And that too was Mary MacLeod: liminal all the way.
“Since though art dead and livest not, I am melted
with grief for my kindly patient youth, noble, merry
and young, that sat the stateliest around a board; alas,
to find thee without the strength to arise.”
“Dirge for the Lord of Applecross”
In a fantastic chapter of her Mary book called “The Language of Birds”, Bowering clarified some of the heady mix of personal and professional motivations for her detective work (and it really does at times come across as a Simenon novel) in a way that first put me in mind and memory of that plastered great great Uncle John, when she put it like this: “I became more curious, and cautious, about the reality of what is remembered and what is forgotten. Some of Mary’s songs were still recalled in the 1950’s when they were recorded by field workers from the University of Edinburgh and added to a collection first begun in the 1930’s. Travelers kept this oral tradition alive, but there is no way to know, or to recover, what or how much is missing. Poems and songs are time capsules that preserve the mental patterns and bodily senses of the originators. The poems were witnesses to what was done in secret. They were not easy to destroy. Oral culture is a living entity with multiple variations, but a fading culture faces a problem. This is not news, but I am not glad to be thinking of it as I try to make my way through the contradictions of what is written about Mary MacLeod. I am glad though, to find that, in another way, I am on familiar ground.”
One key reason that this ground is familiar is that Marilyn Bowering is herself an acclaimed Canadian poet in her own right, having published five novels, seventeen collections of her verse, three theatrical works and multiple radio pieces. Bowering’s work has been translated into a number of languages, including Spanish, Finnish, German, Russian, Greek and Punjabi. She was born in Winnipeg Manitoba and grew up in Victoria British Columbia, has lived in various parts of Canada as well as in Greece, Scotland and Spain, and now makes her home on Vancouver Island in Sooke. It often strikes me that if Mary MacLeod had lived in our century instead of her own she might have received the same renown that female authors such as Bowering and Atwood have done. Instead, she is often described as myth-shrouded, which is what happens when someone is intentionally disappeared from history.
Bowering by Xan Shian.
And instead of any well-earned acclaim of course, Mary was exiled and reviled, maligned and mistrusted, for offering critiques of her clan (which was a natural role of the leader’s bard) for being utterly unique (taking whisky and snuff late into her long but arduous life) and worst of all, falsely accused of being a witch and buried upside down (“to cover her lies”). Bowering’s lovingly composed chronicle of Mary’s mysteries, part memoir of the poet MacLeod, part memoir of the poet Bowering, part travelogue and personal journey, part conversation, part historical archival contribution, and all respectful tribute, redresses some of Mary’s omission from the annals. In her article for the British Columbia Review, “Obscurity is the fate of the poet”, Linda Rogers totally hit the target when addressing Bowering’s ode about the enigmatic Gaelic bard, the result of her decade of introspective study: “It is a quest in the compost of dreams, where poets forage for truth.” I absolutely love that line!
And Bowering’s own lines, even when they are delivered in a prose narrative about another poet, in what she calls ‘a poet’s search for Mary MacLeod”, are still essentially poetic in their bones. As she so eloquently states: “Mary MacLeod’s story rests in the in-between of memory and the recording of oral culture; what exists beside it, along with it, what we do not see because we have never suspected its existence, is in there too. It can only ever be provisional to examine what is written about the life and work of Mary MacLeod for what it has to say about her. I am a poet drawn by what feels like a recognizable poetic process and poet. Opinions about Mary’s worth as a poet are as divergent as the accounts of her life.” Indeed, this is especially the case when dealing with poems that were originally vocalized melodies.
As Carmichael Watson points out in his work Gaelic Songs, he counsels against the search for Celtic Mysticism but reminds us that Macleod’s poems were actually songs not meant to be printed but to be sung. “We are to approach her,” he cautioned, “with the ear and the heart, and not attempt to judge her poetry as if it were meant to appeal to the intellect.” Perhaps the finest example of the different locations (heart and mind) where one might look for her core is expressed in her lament called “Applecross”:
“O it is that I am sad and sorrowful, the tinge of weeping on my cheek. Sore is the bitter pang that I have suffered; comely rider of swift steeds, prime leader over a host, alas, thou has forsaken me in the time of my need.” Such a dirge suddenly makes more sense if you try reading it aloud in the lilting voice of Dylan Thomas. As Bowering puts it, “She is speaking to and from her times to anyone who has ever been bereft.” In other words, she is speaking to all of us today, and to those still to come in the future. “I may not find exactly why Mary’s way crossed mine as it did,” Bowering concludes, “but the reach to understand has helped me bring a poet’s story to those who have not heard of her, and it has restored my love of poetry.”
The hybrid nature of Bowering’s quest, which often reads like an intimately shared diary of sorts, is what makes it unique and allows the author to share with the reader discoveries about her subject and theme in real time as she comes upon people who can shed light on a poet who almost feels like a distant relative or mentor. One of many such encounters is her interview with poet/translator Aonghas Phadraig in which she expresses her concern that Mary might not have received the attention she deserves and has been undeservedly dismissed. Phadraig concurs, “Mary MacLeod has been in plain sight, but little seen.”
Mary MacLeod’s final resting place, St. Clements in Harris.
For Linda Rogers, long an admirer of Bowering’s own poetry, “Her mission is to crack the enigma: she joins personal history and herstory in a labyrinth of opportunity. Bowering’s accumulation of evidence is a Rosetta Stone for comprehending the layers of civilization that dictate our short lives, as women of courage continue to push envelopes filled with candid observation.” Hear hear. And remembering the encouraging words of the curator of the Berneray Historical Society to Marilyn Bowering when she expressed interest in some ancient Gaelic maps: “You will never get to the bottom of the mystery of Mary MacLeod.”, therefore I’ll let one of Mary’s own bottomless envelopes have the last word:
“Mar taid duile agus daoline
‘s na Heradh d’a egcoine
‘n mhuir-si a bhfoltaibh na bhfiodh
‘s gan tuigsi ar foclaibh fileadh.”
“Sad the state of creatures
and of men in Harris
for that this sea is risen
among the foliage
of the woods:
men understand not
the poet’s phrases.”