Alan Riach offers an open address to all the delegates, participants, protesters and media representatives at COP26. This is the poem you need to read and learn by heart and be able to speak out loud to each other with all the honest conviction each one of you possesses, if you can: Hugh MacDiarmid’s “The Bonnie Broukit Bairn”.

LOUISA Gairn, in her book Ecology and Modern Scottish Literature (2008), notes: “MacDiarmid anticipates the idea of ‘ecopoetics’ developed by Jonathan Bate, who suggests that poiesis ‘is language’s most direct path or return to the oikos, the place of dwelling’.”

MacDiarmid (1892-1978) was one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, and his understanding of the Earth as life’s “place of dwelling” begins with the first poem in his first book, Sangschaw (1922). This is one of the finest poems of the last 100 years, written in the language we call Scots.

The Bonnie Broukit Bairn

For Peggy

Mars is braw in crammasy,

Venus in a green silk goun,

The auld mune shak’s her gowden feathers,

Their starry talk’s a wheen o’ blethers,

Nane for thee a thochtie sparin’,

Earth, thou bonnie broukit bairn!

– But greet, an’ in your tears ye’ll droun

The haill clanjamfrie!

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It might be translated into English like this: “Mars is handsome, grand-looking, belligerent and flashy, clothed in crimson (like a young man in a bright red suit looking as though he might bully anyone), / Venus is dressed in a green silk gown (like a sexually alluring woman), / The old moon shakes the golden feathers of her scarf (like a 1920s dowager aristocrat at a party for the very wealthy), / Their high-sounding conversation is nothing but a lot of nonsense, / They spare not the slightest thought or care for you, / Earth, you beautiful, neglected child! / But weep, and in your tears you’ll drown / The whole lot of them.”

The poem brings together two dimensions of vision. It presents us with a picture of the Earth and Moon and the planets Mars and Venus in the night sky, as if they were moving in their orbits circling around each other.

Yet the poem also personalises the planets in terms of the meanings of named gods, Mars the god of war, Venus the goddess of love, the ancient Moon as an old woman flaunting her acquired wealth (or more literally, her reflected light).

And it goes further to suggest a relationship between them and the Earth in terms of class, wealth and poverty. The Earth is the cradle of humanity, the only planet in our constellation where life can flourish.

So the imagery of the poem enacts a focus on two quite different pictures: the planets and the moon in the interstellar cosmos and a series of portraits illustrating the gulf between the rich and poor, and between adult power and powerless children. One picture is almost Dickensian, the other is astronomical.

Remember: this poem was written and published almost a century ago. The distance between rich and poor has not lessened since then, and the crisis of the cradle of life on earth is greater and more widely understood now than the early 1920s – so, what is to be done?

The National: Norman MacCaigNorman MacCaig

As regards the dedication, Peggy was the name of the poet’s wife. At the time, he was working in the east-coast seaside town of Montrose as a newspaper reporter, on a fairly meagre salary. They would have attended some social events as a couple. Perhaps this suggests the poet saw her as a neglected child in a society of

better-off snobs who would look down upon working or lower-middle class people, such as they were.

As regards the poem’s structure, it’s in eight lines, and the metre is irregular, as indicated in the emphases on the words or syllables highlighted below:

Mars is braw in crammasy,

Venus in a green silk goun,

The auld mune shak’s her gowden feathers,

Their starry talk’s a wheen o’ blethers,

Nane for thee a thochtie sparin’,

Earth, thou bonnie broukit bairn!

– But greet, an’ in your tears ye’ll droun

The haill clanjamfrie!

But if the metre is irregular, as in a rhetorical speech, the rhyme follows a strict, but unobtrusive pattern: ABCCDDBA. The last words of the first and last lines rhyme, but distantly, and both end on a falling syllable “-y” and “-ie”. The second and second-last lines rhyme more strongly but do so across the four central lines of the poem, so they are also distant rhymes: “goun” and “droun”.

Lines three and four rhyme, as do lines five and six, both strongly: “feathers” and “blethers” and then “sparin’’ and “bairn” (bairn is pronounced with two syllables, “bare-in”).

Now, the poet Norman MacCaig once pointed this out to me – I don’t think I’d ever have thought of it on my own, so here it is for what it’s worth. If you drew a vertical line for emphasis in the rhyming words, the shape of the ending of each line of the poem would go like this:

I

III

IIIII

IIIII

IIIII

IIIII

III

I

And sketched out like that, you have the shape of a sickle moon in the night sky. MacCaig told me he had no idea if MacDiarmid ever thought of it that way, but sometimes poets just do these things without knowing what they’re doing. Life makes things happen, and sometimes they are for the benefit of our delight.

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The Earth is the child on the sidelines, ignored by these self-confident, self-important lah-di-dahs, swankily showing off the evidence of their fortunes, power and attractiveness, walking around at their own upper-class party and “blethering” to each other, or just for the sound and bray of their own voices, like politicians, royalty and mass media.

But the tears of the Earth are both the tears on the cheeks of the child and the rainstorm falling heavily from the thunder clouds so that the night sky is obscured, and planets and Moon cannot be seen. The tone of the poem is not simply of anger but rather progresses from observation and almost satiric caricature to sympathetic understanding and an exclamation of judgment.

Those two last lines are a promise. There is a sense that the child’s tears are a symbol of redress, an assertion of human value and perhaps a portent of violence to come. The storm is approaching. It portends obliteration. But it also promises a kind of correction. The poem is saying that the sorrows of humanity are always worth more than the pretensions and powers of the empires of the world.

If there is hope for humanity now, it lies in the meaning of this poem.