Happy Birthday, Christopher/Hugh/a Ùisdeain

Today in 1892 Christopher Murray Grieve was born in Langholm, Scotland. He's far better known as Hugh McDiarmid - or, in the Gaelic, Ùisdean MacDhiarmaid. He helped found the National Party of Scotland, and was also a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. These didn't mix well - in fact, he was kicked out of both parties for belonging to the other. He was one of the leaders of the Scottish Renaissance of the early 20th century. He wrote in English and in Scots. "A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle" is probably his best-known work.

Hear him reading his works here.

And here's a poem, The Wind-bags

Rain-beaten stones: great tussocks of dead grass
And stagnant waters throwing leaden lights
To leaden skies: a rough-maned wind that bites
With aimless violence at the clouds that pass,
Roaring, black-joweled, and bull-like in the void,
And I, in wild and boundless consciousness,
A brooding chaos, feel within me press
The corpse of Time, aborted, cold, negroid.

Aimless lightnings play intermittently,
Diffuse, vacant, dully, athwart the stones,
Involuntary thunder slips from me
And growl, inconsequently, hither, thither,
--And now converse, see-saws of sighs and groans,
Oblivion and Eternity together!