SORLEY MacLean (Somhairle MacGill-Eain) is widely considered the greatest Gaelic poet of the modern era. He reinvigorated the language, bringing it a new audience.

It informed his politics, as did his strict Presbyterian upbringing and sore sensitivity to the Clearances, all combining to make a socialist back when socialism was for people who identified as working class and not, as today, who identify as hatstands.

MacLean’s most famous poem, Hallaig, is a supernatural evocation of a cleared village haunting the imagination, rendering the past present, with ghosts in the trees.

Sorley MacLean became present on October 26, 1911, born in Òsgaig on the island of Raasay, off the coast of Skye. Malcolm and Christina MacLean had a small croft and a tailoring business.

Malcolm had been raised on Raasay, but his family was originally from North Uist. Raised near Portree, Christina belonged to the Nicolsons of Skye, although her family’s origins lay in Lochalsh. 
Both sides in their family histories suffered during the Clearances. Both boasted gifted scholars, poets and preservers of traditional culture.

Gaelic was Sorley’s first language and, before attending school, he spoke little English. 

His home was steeped in the ancient culture, most notably song, though he himself couldn’t sing, a fact that made him a writer of sonorous words, or so he mused.

MacLean was raised in the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which thought the Free Church too lenient. Its brand of “Calvinist fundamentalism” (Sorley’s words) taught that God would save only a select, predetermined few, with everyone else doomed to eternal torment in yonder Hell.

Like today’s woke, Free Presbyterians were censorious, dogmatic, judgmental and repressive. 
On the plus side, they excelled at unaccompanied psalm singing, and prohibited any amusement or commerce on the Sabbath, an idea perhaps worth revisiting in today’s 24/7 society.

Unhappy chappy
Sorley was educated at Raasay Primary School and Portree Secondary (now High) School. Aged 12, he “took to the gospel of Socialism”, rejecting the cruel damnation hypothesis, which only fomented his eternal support for “the unhappy, the unsuccessful, the oppressed”.

However, he retained “a puritanical contempt for mere worldly riches and power”, and defended the Free Presbyterian Church against critics who knew little of it, even describing its elders as “saintly men”.  He admired the sophisticated vocabulary of its Gaelic sermons and occasionally altered his poetry to avoid offending family members.

In 1929, he left home to attend Embra Yoonie to study, er, English. The city broadened his horizons, now taking in urban poverty, slums, and overcrowding.

Like many cultural and intellectual figures of the 1930s, MacLean was pro-Soviet and pretty much a “fellow traveller”, while never a party member. 

In 1941, he said “Lenin, Stalin and Dimitrov now mean more to me than Prometheus and Shelley did in my teens”.

On the poetry front, he admired Federico García Lorca, killed by  Franco’s regime during the Spanish Civil War, but he disdained popular left-wing poets like W. H. Auden, who made him wonder if poetry was a useless aesthetic hobby.  

It’s arguable, I suppose.

As for Communism, it shot itself in the foot (and others elsewhere) with its post-war occupation of Poland. That did for Stalinism as far as Sorley was concerned. Later, he joined Scottish Labour.
After graduating in 1933, MacLean completed teacher training in  Edinburgh, before returning to Portree to teach English. 

In 1938, he took a teaching position at Tobermory on Mull, lasting a year in a place he found “traumatic”, his ancestors having been cleared there.

Rose to greatness
IN January 1939, MacLean began teaching at Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh, on whose salubrious Rose Street he drank with other poets. In October that year, he taught evacuees in Hawick. During this period, the majority of the renowned Dàin do Eimhir was written.

Upon war with Germany, he was drafted in 1940 and sent to North Africa, where he managed to get wounded three times, the last and most serious at El Alamein in 1942, when a land mine threw him 30 feet through the air. He spent the next nine months hospitalised variously in North Africa and England, before fetching up at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness, from which he was discharged in August 1943. 

Released from the army the following month, he resumed teaching at Boroughmuir but, more importantly, his collection Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile (Poems to Eimhir and Other Poems) was published.

Including the long narrative An Cuilithionn (The Cuillin), the work deploys Skye’s famous mountain range to contemplate a Europe torn apart by fascism. 

Dàin do Eimhir posits the competing claims of love and war, between devotion to Eimhir and duty to the republican cause in the Spanish Civil War.

From Gaoir na h-Eòrpa (The Cry of Europe): A nighean a’ chùil bhuidhe, throm-bhuidh, òr-bhuidh/fonn do bheòil-sa ’s gaoir na h-Eòrpa (“Girl of the yellow, heavy-yellow, gold-yellow hair/the song of your mouth and Europe’s shivering cry”).

Professor Donald MacAulay said Gaelic poetry “could never be the same again”. 

Still, man cannot live by poesy alone and, in 1956, MacLean became headmaster of Plockton High School in Wester Ross, where he and his family made their home until he retired in 1972 to his great-grandmother’s house at Peinnachorrain.

It took until the 1970s and 1980s for MacLean’s work to become accessible in English translation, with various collections published. 

He took the opportunity to make changes, such as expunging from An Cuilithionn a desire for the Red Army to invade Scotland.

Stricken weirdness
IN later years, he published little, favouring “quality and authenticity over quantity”. Meanwhile, demand grew internationally but for readings. On hearing him, Seamus Heaney noted a “bardic weirdness that sounded both stricken and enraptured”.

MacLean was writer in residence at Edinburgh University from 1973 to 1975, and filidh at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Gaelic college on Skye, from 1975 to 1976.

He died of natural causes on November 24, 1996, aged 85, at Raigmore Hospital, Inverness. A stone at Makars’ Court, Edinburgh, commemorates his life. 

Here, we recall his words from Hallaig:
‘Tha tìm, am fiadh, an coille Hallaig’/Tha bùird is tàirnean air an uinneig/trom faca mi an Àird an Iar/’s tha mo ghaol aig Allt Hallaig/’na craoibh bheithe, ’s bha i riamh.

“‘Time, the deer, is in the wood of Hallaig’/ The window is nailed and boarded/through which I saw the West/and my love is at the Burn of Hallaig/a birch tree, and she has always been.”