Edwin Morgan is a man for whom nothing is truly alien

Maura Smyth

“Outer Spaces and Extralinguistic Places:

The Poetry of Edwin Morgan”

Presentation given on Undergraduate Research and Creative Achievement Day, 30 April 2003, and at the 17^th National Conference on Undergraduate Research, 13-15 March, 2003. Reproduced with the permission of Maura Smyth. May not be cited or reproduced without permission of the author; contact mjsmyth@indiana.edu. This is a shorter version of Maura's senior thesis, submitted in Spring 2003.

The Scottish poet laureate Edwin Morgan, born in 1920, is a man for whom nothing is truly alien. He is known today as a Scottish nationalist, professor, translator, literary critic, science buff, and musical collaborator. Yet, it is perhaps as a poet that Morgan’s openness to and sympathy with things and people outside the mainstream of society emerges most clearly. Any attempt to ground Morgan, to fit him neatly into a category or tradition, is quietly but quickly thwarted by his multi-faceted work. Even his poetic stance defies convention, undermining both Modernist and Post-Modernist sensibilities. Fellow poet James Fenton recently suggested that “we live in an age in which the pressure is all toward self-definition, self-description of some kind.”[1] In such a world, everyone is contained within language; we align ourselves with uniformly acknowledged and commonly accepted understandings of the various ways we can behave, and we describe ourselves accordingly. Within these boundaries, language becomes not only a way to express what is socially acceptable, but also a reinforcement of these limits and a punishment for those residing outside of them. In his poetry, Morgan examines and subverts these boundaries.

A glimpse at two of Morgan’s poems illustrates how Morgan re-invents poetry as a forum for social critique, as well as, more indirectly, a way of defining himself. Like many of the characters in his poems, Morgan, as a homosexual who could not legally express himself as such in Scotland until the Criminal Justice Act of 1980,[2] knows what it means to be an outsider. As a poet, he both depends on and mistrusts language, an ambivalence which infiltrates his poems and inevitably affects the individuals within them. Ultimately, Morgan’s poetry reveals individuals – and an author – whose intangible, triumphant fullness as human beings cannot be grasped by words.

The poem “In the Snack-bar,” published in 1968, begins with an old blind man clumsily clattering to a stand. “A few heads [in the bar] turn” in his direction, and the poem moves toward him, centering on his pitiful figure. The old man’s face remains hidden:

The dismal hump

looming over him forces his head down.

He stands in his stained beltless gabardine

like a monstrous animal caught in a tent

in some story. He sways slightly,

the face not seen[3]

With no face visible to express and affirm his humanity, the speaker-observer at first looks at the old man as if he were a monster from a scary story. However, seeing the old man’s need, the speaker quickly relinquishes his role as strict observer and moves to help him. Line 24: “I take his arm. ‘Give me – your arm – it’s better,’ he says.” The old man accepts the stranger’s help only as long as he can direct it, which leaves their respective individualities intact while allowing their experiences and perspectives to join. And, as both their lives are concentrated into the focal point of the poem, the old man and the speaker are released from the labels that society would impose. Morgan negotiates this release by allowing his handle on the identities of the two men to slip. As they walk the dangerous path to the bathroom, the two men merge into each other, only to reemerge and then merge again:

The faltering, unfaltering steps

take him at last to the door

across that endless, yet not endless waste of floor.

They walk as one, with both faltering and unfaltering steps. Morgan’s own marginal place in society is echoed in these individuals and the shifting perspectives assigned to them. Both the old man and Morgan declare their inappropriate selves, but must do so in appropriate terms.

In this journey across the snack-bar floor, during which the two men are liberated from their normal positions in society, the ideological constructs usually governing them are likewise broken. The normal poles of beauty and ugliness exist in a constant exchange; the old man, who at the start is considered monstrous, does, by the end, take on a profound beauty. He “climbs with many pauses but with that one/ persisting patience of the undefeated/ which is the nature of man when all is said.” In this, Morgan invokes the power of language – but also its inadequacy. “When all is said,” there is still something that has not been touched: the indestructible endurance and even optimism of the individual human spirit. The old blind man exists in the space words strive to describe but ultimately must leave untouched. In inhabiting this gap, the old man’s presence displaces the power of a language that would label him. The poem ends with the words “Dear Christ, to be born for this!,” words which now take on new meaning. They simultaneously convey the speaker’s pity for the old man’s plight and yet also exultant wonder at the reality of the old man himself.

Ten years after “In the Snack-bar,” in 1980, the same year that homosexuality in Scotland was decriminalized, Morgan wrote “At Central Station,” which he once suggested should be read as a companion piece to “In the Snack-bar.”[4] Significantly shorter, the poem depicts a nondescript woman who stops in the middle of a busy street in the middle of the day to urinate on the sidewalk. She is the “skeleton at the feast;” like the old blind man, she is the one who immediately, from the moment she is introduced, does not fit. Yet, the poem does not focus on her, but rather on the reactions of those passers-by who stare at the spectacle she makes.

In this poem, Morgan directly mentions himself:

The Glasgow crowd hurries past,

hardly looks, or hardly dares to look,

or looks hard, bold as brass, as

the poet looks, not bold as brass

but hard, swift, slowing his walk

a little, accursed recorder, his feelings

as confused as the November leaves.

The poet, or Morgan, is one of the crowd; he is one of the “normal” ones. And, at first, his reaction seems generic, just like everyone else’s. However, in fact everyone looks at the woman in a different way: some “hurry past,” some “hardly look,” others “hardly dare to look,” still others “look hard, bold as brass.” Morgan is willing to express the uniqueness of his own response only up to a certain point; he still uses these generic words to describe his supposedly opposite reaction, detaching himself from the crowd only by admitting that the colloquial phrase “bold as brass” does NOT apply to him.

Yet, no one speaks – no one uses language to discuss what they see, to discuss their differences, their separateness. Instead, silence reins because there is no vocabulary to really discuss such radical otherness. There are only words to ridicule it as the two men at the end of the poem do: “Two men frankly stop,/ grin broadly, throw a gibe at her.” In this poem, Morgan the poet occupies a safe, anonymous position in which no one looks at him as strange and in which he is free to stare at an other who is actively flaunting her difference. Yet, this is a momentary safety for Morgan as his position is not so much one of strict observation but one of understanding and empathy. The implicit silence in the poem speaks volumes, echoing Morgan’s own silence about his difference. Ultimately, there are no words to really describe the situation, nor the woman herself. And so, no one speaks – no one, that is, except the poet, who struggles to find the words, fails to do so, but records this inability anyway; he expresses what he can with words that are simply not enough. However, his awareness of his failure is in fact the victory of the poem. He both acknowledges and battles the reductive nature of language and so asserts his power over it. And in so doing, Morgan is able to restore “the indignity/ the dignity” – the fullness – that comprises humanity and his own humanity as well. The woman in this poem would continue to be a freak and the old man a monster if not for the speakers’ attempts, however ineffective, to describe them

In his poetry, Edwin Morgan examines language and finds it inadequate. And so, he stands apart from language in a space it cannot reach and, from there, directs its meaning. And yet, Morgan does not dismiss language or view its inherent deficiency as something necessarily negative. Instead, language becomes a vehicle for demonstrating the fullness of each individual, an opportunity for him to recognize his own power, and assert – even embrace – his own otherness. Through his poetry, Morgan offers every individual the power to see himself as different and imagine a world and a humanity not contained entirely within, or limited by, the poet’s words.