Somersault

Hugh McDiarmid. The pen name of CM Grieve, a communist and founder of The National Party of Scotland - he was expelled at various times from one for being a nationalist, and from the other for being a communist.

McDiarmid wrote both in English and in Lallans ('Lowland' Scots). He described Lallans as 'a synthetic Scots' - not real-life dialect, but a constructed language borrowing from various contemporary dialects and from archaic Scots. It is readable by English speakers - with effort - but you need a glossary. The difficulty is deliberate. The idea is that you can read for the rhythm, or slow down to catch the meaning.

Somersault

I lo'e the stishie
O' earth in space
Breengin' by
At a haliket pace.

A wech o' hills
Gangs wallopin' owre,
Syne a whummlin' sea
Wi' a gallus glower.

The West whuds doon
Like the pigs at Gadara,
But the East's aye there
Like a sow at farrow.

Glossary (these translations are only approximate):
stishie = stir
breengin = hurtling
haliket = giddy
syne = then, and then
whummlin' = tumbling
wech = weight
gallus = reckless
aye = always

I think it's glorious, myself. The giddy (or haliket) meter. The originality of the description of the earth's rotation as a matter of speed, mass, violence.

It's the final quatrain that made me sit up. There's so much going on there. The mixture of vernacular and literary registers - the 'whud' of the Gadarene swine. And that 'whud' is so appropriate - the sound of a pig dropping off a cliff and of the mass of the earth disappearing over the horizon. But the death of the pig is contrasted with the horizon coming into view - a newborn piglet coming at the teat with the ferocity and urgency of a homing missile.

Norman McCaig (and I must post one of his poems) said this about McDiarmid's originality of thought: McDiarmid shoots at a bird/ And brings down the landscape (probably a misquote. I'll look it up.)