The Sea, the Desert, the City: Environment and Language in W. S. Graham, Hamish Henderson, and Tom Leonard

Abstract

I wish to consider three Scottish poets whose work has been strongly marked by a specific environment, each environment being topographically identifiable and describable, but at the same time being the occasion for great extensions of meaning. W. S. Graham (1918-86) was born and brought up in Greenock, on the Firth of Clyde, but then moved south and lived for the rest of his life on the coast of Cornwall. In both environments he was on the edge of the sea, and the sea dominates his poetry, as both a literal and a metaphorical presence. Hamish Henderson (b. 1919) served as an officer with the Highland Division in North Africa during the Second World War, and his poetry starts out by dealing with the actual conditions of desert warfare but also opens much more widely into thoughts and feelings about 'the desert' as such. Tom Leonard (b. 1944), born and brought up in Glasgow, has committed himself to developing a Glasgow poetry which will not only recreate a range of social experience within that city but will frequently use the language(s) of Glasgow speech; all this within a broader recognition of the meaning and importance of 'the city'. The three environments, although two are natural and one is man-made, hold tensions and oppositions which make them attractive to poets. The sea is the most alien, the most uninhabitable except briefly (in boats) or under special conditions (on oil-rigs); yet a source and image of both life (fishing; biological evolution) and death (drowning). The desert, dangerous and precarious to live in, a challenge to resourcefulness and survival, baffling in its dune-shifting and mirages, can yet be magnetic to certain temperaments for its colours, its silences, its starry skies, its strange extremes of heat and cold, its buried or half-buried relics of ancient cultures. And the city, which for some may be as dangerous and precarious as the desert, is also a wonderfully varied and vigorous arena for every sort of human relationship and action and voice; alienating to some, and to others as natural as the sea is to fish.