2-6 & 29 IX – 3 X 1773
7 VIII 2013
7 VIII 2013
SLEAT
Back on Skye, we worked our way up from Ostaig.
At Armadale we enquired after the great ash trees that grew around the old manse – we were offered a variety of possible locations, roughly as many as the number of people we asked – and wandered in the lovely gardens of Clan MacDonald.
We visited geodisic Sabhal Mor and wondered, is it the turn of the Western Isles to instruct the urban regions?
We snoozed and read Highet, of Glasgow, on the Latin poets, lolling on the strand of Knock Bay. There was charm in his claim of Catullus as an Italian Celt. Some of the words that his poetry brought into Latin may even be of Celtic origin, including kiss, basia. Highet characterized the poet’s “desperate passion”, and “unreasonable, almost suicidal fervour” as typically Celtic. What would Johnson have made of that?
Reading Highet’s ‘Ovid’ on Baigh a’ Chnuic
(I)
he’d the charm of saying
wicked things
in words that shone
like the sun
(II)
though the broad strand
is golden
still, stuck between your toes
the dirt shows
(III)
Ovid read
with his feet
thought
with his cock
(for Harry Gilonis)
Ovid’s learnedness became mythic because, Highet tells us, he could read with his feet – a misunderstanding that arose from the statue in his home town, Sulmo, where he was posed standing upon a book.
Bibliography
Highet, Gilbert, Poets in a Landscape (1957)
Hutchinson, Roger, A Waxing Moon: The Modern Gaelic Revival (2005)
Back on Skye, we worked our way up from Ostaig.
At Armadale we enquired after the great ash trees that grew around the old manse – we were offered a variety of possible locations, roughly as many as the number of people we asked – and wandered in the lovely gardens of Clan MacDonald.
We visited geodisic Sabhal Mor and wondered, is it the turn of the Western Isles to instruct the urban regions?
We snoozed and read Highet, of Glasgow, on the Latin poets, lolling on the strand of Knock Bay. There was charm in his claim of Catullus as an Italian Celt. Some of the words that his poetry brought into Latin may even be of Celtic origin, including kiss, basia. Highet characterized the poet’s “desperate passion”, and “unreasonable, almost suicidal fervour” as typically Celtic. What would Johnson have made of that?
Reading Highet’s ‘Ovid’ on Baigh a’ Chnuic
(I)
he’d the charm of saying
wicked things
in words that shone
like the sun
(II)
though the broad strand
is golden
still, stuck between your toes
the dirt shows
(III)
Ovid read
with his feet
thought
with his cock
(for Harry Gilonis)
Ovid’s learnedness became mythic because, Highet tells us, he could read with his feet – a misunderstanding that arose from the statue in his home town, Sulmo, where he was posed standing upon a book.
Bibliography
Highet, Gilbert, Poets in a Landscape (1957)
Hutchinson, Roger, A Waxing Moon: The Modern Gaelic Revival (2005)