They’ll still be waiting for spring,

  Not that they complain:

  Spring will come, they say,

  Even if only after summer has begun.

  Spring inspires new starts;

  The sweeping away of things

  That have cluttered the house too long;

  The polishing of floors and banisters,

  The abandonment of sluggish ideas

  And notions that the light of day

  Makes look so unattractive, so last-year.

  And prompts some searching questions:

  Should I wear a different tie?

  Should I abandon workday shoes

  For something racier?

  Should I find new friends

  And think new thoughts?

  These the questions

  Raised by spring, but rarely answered.

  summer

  Rewarded now with summer calm,

  Two lovers lie upon a Scottish hill

  Beneath a sky that deepest blue

  Bereft of limit to its end;

  Oh, listen now, my dearest one

  To all the things I’d wish for you:

  A hundred lovely days like this,

  A sun that lingers, hardly sets

  And evenings that are barely dark,

  The briefest pause before the dawn.

  Behind them as he speaks these words,

  The slow currents of the Sound of Mull

  Move past the island’s shores;

  There is so much to love in this country,

  When it is like this, and is at peace,

  When its crouching hills

  Are the guardians of these hidden glens

  Where heather and Scots pines

  Remind us of evenings past

  When the world was less a place of wrong,

  When love, not distrust, was the key

  In which the nations sang their song.

  May soft winds blow about your head,

  May sun caress your tender cheeks,

  May tears of gentle rain then wash

  The marks of fretful care away;

  May you remember from this day

  Good resolutions and great plans,

  Our promises once made believed,

  The sharing of our private hopes,

  In letters that are signed with love,

  With secret names, with pencilled signs.

  autumn

  Look, the migrating birds

  Are leaving us, small souls

  That brave three thousand miles

  To Africa, to warmth;

  They populate the sky,

  They take the last

  Attributes of summer;

  They are gone, and now

  The winds will have them,

  Their journey starts

  In the knowledge that this,

  Like the seasons, has to be.

  Autumn is a time of reflection;

  Of the making of lists,

  Of books to be read now

  That the nights are drawing in;

  Of letters to be written,

  Friends to be remembered,

  The things they said

  To be thought about further.

  Perhaps, in short, to think

  About what it is that makes

  This life so precious

  Of what it is that breaks the heart.

  winter

  That there should be winter, that this hard light

  Should fall over a December Scotland,

  Should make the sea grey, like steel, and the land itself

  A rock rising from metalled water;

  That there should be empty skies,

  Free of protecting cloud, too cold

  Even for that; that there should be

  A vapour trail of some great jet heading west

  To the colder shores of Greenland, Labrador,

  Northern neighbours to us, distant cousins

  In our marginality and our pursuit of fish;

  That all this should be in a land that in summer

  Is so soft and wet with drifting veils of rain

  And filled with deer and clouds of midges

  And the rich fecundity of ploughed fields

  That will yield gold barley and whisky

  Beyond the barley—

  Scotland is a country of attenuated light,

  And temperate-to-inhospitable seasons;

  Freshness and cold skies lie behind

  All our signs, our ways of being;

  I sometimes wish, I confess, for a life spent

  In the scent of wild thyme and olive trees,

  For evenings when one might stroll

  Slowly about a square and watch pigeons

  Launch themselves into Italian air

  From some tower dreamed up

  By some High Renaissance imagination;

  That, though, is not where we are from

  Or where we are destined to be;

  Our place is north, our natural gravity

  That of a land that is an afterthought

  To Europe, a land that comes late

  To so many of the parties it’s been invited to,

  But which we love with all our heart,

  With all our heart.

  Winter doesn’t make us better, then, or worse,

  But enables us to find ourselves again,

  Because it forces us to be quiet, obliges us

  To listen to the coursing of our own blood;

  Winter reminds us that warmth

  Is not something we find naturally,

  Some gift of munificent nature, but must be made;

  That we should make in Scotland

  A small place of warmth, a small country

  Of kindness to others, of brotherhood,

  Is what our poets have been striving to say

  Since they first gave voice to song.

  That we might find this, in winter,

  In a troubled world, is a local miracle,

  To warm the heart, to warm the heart.

  Interlude: Seven Sonnets

  The sonnet, a formal verse form, is still capable of commenting on contemporary life.

  Its favoured subjects, of course, don’t change: life, love, introspection, constancy and inconstancy, and age…

  i. sixty talks to eighteen

  Unfearless, at eighteen, of gravity and time,

  Of mirrors, of insurance, and the cold

  Facts of economics, they show that old

  Indifference of the young to the actuarial

  Warnings of the strong chance that passion

  In its firm and quite inevitable fashion

  Will falter and will fade, as arterial

  Silting slows the blood, and the human colt

  Becomes the drayhorse; why should they

  Pause to think of what others say

  They should do? It’s not their fault

  The world is as it is, our self-created mess.

  We’ve one thing, though, that they’ve not got:

  We can with ease reflect on what is not.

  ii. eighteen replies to sixty

  Please forgive me if I did not see

  You standing there, there comes a stage

  When visibility is quite lost by age;

  Noticed by others, although not by me,

  You fade into a background

  Of things that while they may be there

  Are not in any true sense in the here

  And now; I wonder, have you found

  Your invisibility a blessing in truth,

  As freed from the onerous need to bother

  What you look like, you think of other

  Ways of recapturing lost youth?

  I understand that you should feel bereft

  Now there is so little time that’s left.

  iii. forty intervenes, remembers horace

  Not half bad, friends, is this sensation

  Of having got this far along

  Without getting it too badly wrong,

  And finding now that one’s situation

  Is reasonably comfortable, not bad,

  Married to one who’ll plainly do,

  Looked after, smiled at, there are few

  Who’ll not proclaim that husband, dad,

  Are roles that bring a certain joy

  At this particular stage of life,

  No stomach is needed for the strife

  You haven’t experienced since a boy.

  Remember, then, the poet Horace,

  Whose simple life, with wine, brought solace.

  Horace, of course, would be an advocate of staying put. If he were to contemplate our modern life he might say: why are you so keen to travel?

  iv. adventure and uncertainty

  Embarking on a journey without maps

  Against the currents or on a troubled sea

  Reminds us, if we need it, to be free

  Involves that tricky word that is perhaps;

  Perhaps it’s better to remain just where

  You started from, yes, an undistinguished place,

  But going nowhere, after all, is no disgrace;

  You know, at least, just who and what is there.

  Few people like the view that they’re too small

  To lead the hero’s life: that lengthy trail

  Odysseus bravely followed cannot fail

  To inspire those who’ve never lived at all.

  But courting danger, we might all agree,

  Is not the only way of being free.

  The Horatian philosophy might also stress humility—a virtue that seems to be becoming rare in our age of self-aggrandisement and self-celebration. Look at your achievements—remember, they are not just yours. We achieve what we achieve on the shoulders of others.

  v. it takes a village to raise a child

  Mozart thought—or should have—if he did not,

  The music was always there, all he had to do

  Was write it down; I imagine few

  Of those who think great thoughts, a lot

  Of us, after all, no false modesty,

  Should tell us not to claim the praise

  For what we do; there are many ways

  Of diffidence, yet it seems to me

  The words “I’ve done this all” are rarely true

  The things that we achieve, or most

  Of them are that, and no more than a boast

  Of what we once believed that we could do.

  Remember, then, that without others’ aid

  No art, nor any urbs was ever made.

  And finally, love—the subject that sustained one of the greatest collections of verse of any age—Shakespeare’s sonnets. King James VI of Scotland (King James I of England) suffered in his early life under a stern tutor, George Buchanan. Then suddenly light and colour came into his life, and the boy king fell in love with his male cousin, Esmé Stuart, who came to Scotland from France. When Esmé was sent back to France, James was bereft.

  vi. king james vi of scotland reflects on the loss of his only friend when young

  Cousin, you came into my life too late

  To be the one to teach me how to see

  How strange it is to be a slave of Fate,

  Even though men should subjects be to me.

  But what you taught me—that I’ll always hold

  More precious than the gifts of high estate,

  Those are base metal, while your words are gold

  Displayed in letters large at Heaven’s gate;

  A gentle look, a secret touch, a smile,

  Given free and by outsider’s hand unbidden,

  Will count for more than any trick or wile

  Or words in which a heart of ice is hidden.

  Now you are gone, you have put out the light

  That bathed my days in sun, that banished night.

  But at least he had experienced love. And that is a consolation in circumstances where love is locked out, or lost, or unreciprocated. The conclusion in the final two lines of the following poem is that we will never get another to love us by revealing to the one we love that we are miserable without him or her. That never works. Even trees prefer to have two doves than one.

  vii. love unforgotten

  When I felt lonely I would go around

  Lost in a crowd of those I did not know,

  Hoping to hear the once familiar sound,

  The voice of one who claimed to love me so;

  But listened in vain just as I listen still,

  For you to utter, to evoke my name,

  Knowing the ear’s a trickster and often will

  Contrive to make other people sound the same;

  You needed do no more than write to me,

  You needed do no more than make a call;

  Writing costs nothing, email’s almost free,

  My sorrow, though, I think counts not at all.

  An injured heart does not engender love,

  No sheltering tree will want a single dove.

  Of the Animals

  primate cousins

  Like us, they walk upon two legs,

  And use their hands for tasks

  That we perform, too,

  In ways that are not different;

  Like us, they favour fruit as well

  And peel it in those ways

  We use to separate

  Inner food from outer cover;

  Like us, they are sensitive to gesture,

  And live in company,

  Governed by their customs,

  Have their leaders and arguments;

  Like us, they need food and shelter,

  Are vulnerable in sleep,

  Play games with their offspring,

  And hope for better times ahead;

  Like us, they have their memories,

  And a sense of a past,

  May gently groom and preen,

  In friendships that will last a primate life.

  the gentleness of whales

  For the whales move slowly,

  Larger than any other life,

  Announced in the waters

  With their plumes of spray,

  Exhalations from lungs

  Large beyond imagination;

  As gentle as the touch

  Of early morning sun;

  For there are none like them,

  None who have their dignity.

  Above them green waters

  Enfold and embrace

  These creatures of another time;

  When the space of the world

  Was sufficient for Behemoth;

  For there are none like them,

  None who are as gentle.

  Listen to their calls, songs

  Of one to another, of things

  That of each the other

  Would wish to know;

  Of the green depths and the waters

  Where kin meets kin

  Across the empty miles;

  They flourish above wide forests

  Of waving kelp, in caverns

  Of liquid blue beyond

  Our human envisioning;

  For there are none like them

  In the waters of this earth;

  None who can replace them.

  elephants

  They are grey shapes in the trees,

  They are like moving rocks,

  They are the wide-legged ones,

  The bearers of ivory, the small-eyed,

  The trumpeters, with ears like sails,

  The heavy-footed.

  They are the ones who reproach us

  For what we have done, for taking

  Their world away from them;

  They are the ones in whom the dignity of great forms

  Is most resolutely and finally expressed.

  You cannot understand our words,

  Although your brains have memories, like ours,

  And you mourn your dead, as we do;

  So when we ask of you your forgiveness

  For our history of wanton slaughter

  Of elephant kind, our words are lost,

  Indecipherable, lost to your loyal heart,

  Lost in the silence of your shrinking forests,

  Your dwindling home.

  kangaroos

  You occupy a land of reds and browns,

  Of flame and water, and hard rock;

  You move through eucalyptus scrub

  And tinder grass, across a land so thirsty

  That it aches; and yet you yourself are grey

  And red and soft, and take your tiny young

  Into the warm comfort of a maternal pouch,

  Bound and leap across a landscape

  Bathed in birdsong; the kookaburra,

  The pink galah your minstrels;

  Under these stars, dipping and wheeling

  Through their southern night, you sleep on dust,

  Part of our dreams, part of our symbolism

  You cross small segments of the sky.

  the dung beetle

  Onerous your task,

  You tiny Sisyphus,

  Condemned, like him,

  To move your boulder

  Without cease;