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Speaking of Scotland

Maurice Lindsay

What do you mean when you speak of Scotland?
The grey defeats that are dead and gone
behind the legends each generation
savours afresh, yet can’t live on?

Lowland farms with their broad acres
peopling crops? The colder earth
of the North East? Or Highland mountains
shouldering up their rocky dearth?

Inheritance of guilt that our country
has never stood where we feel she should?
A nagging threat of unfinished struggle
somehow forever lost in the blood?

Scotland’s a sense of change, an endless
becoming for which there was never a kind
of wholeness or ultimate category.
Scotland’s an attitude of mind.


Maurice Lindsay

from Collected poems 1940-1990 (Aberdeen University Press, 1990)

Reproduced by permission of the Estate of Maurice Lindsay.

Tags:

abstract identity Poetry By Heart Scotland post-1914 Scotland Scotland tradition & heritage
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Maurice Lindsay1918 - 2009

As poet, writer and broadcaster, Maurice Lindsay was the foremost champion of Scottish culture in the second half of the twentieth century.
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