I HAVE just read dreadful prose by the much acclaimed Irish poet Seamus Heaney. His supposed appreciation of Robert Burns, to my ears, seemed entirely self-laudatory. He was walking on stilts (January 23).
Why does he, and our gaggle of academics - including Patrick Hogg and his acolytes - persist in dissecting poems word by word? In their hands, not a scalpel but a nit-picker. They of course have one thing in common. They, each of them, leave Burns where they found him. In his grave. Not for them that sepulchre of the heart where the lovers of Burns cradle him.
Do they actually believe that to pluck a rose and tear it apart petal by petal will solve the mystery of its beauty and fragrance? Every word in a poem is a petal. The poet is the flower of mankind.
One such flower penned the following stanza:
Most wretched men are cradled into poetry
by wrong, and learn in suffering
What they teach in song.
I quote from memory and the name of the poet escapes me.
Matthew Finlay Nicholson,
136 Main Street, Rutherglen.
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