Bracken Hills in Autumn

Here's a favourite Hugh MacDiarmid verse, appropriate for this time of year ...

... and I would very highly recommend Alan Bold's pictured 1988 biography of the poet:


Bracken Hills in Autumn

These beds of bracken, climax of the summer's growth,
Are elemental as the sky or sea.
In still and sunny weather they give back
The sun's glare with a fixed intensity
As of steel or glass
No other foliage has.

There is menace in their indifference to man
As in tropical abundance. On gloomy days
They redouble the sombre heaviness of the sky
And nurse the thunder. Their dense growth shuts the narrow ways
Between the hills and draws
Closer the wide valleys' jaws.

This flinty verdure's vast effusion is the more
Remarkable for the shortness of its stay.
From November to May a brown stain on the slopes
Downbeaten by frost and rain, then in quick array
The silvery crooks appear
And the whole host is here.

Unless they may seem to men and go unused, but cast
Cartloads of them into a pool where the trout are few
And soon the swarming animalcula upon them
Will proportionately increase the fishes too.
Miracles are never far away
Save bringing new thought to play.

In summer islanded in these grey-green seas where the wind plucks
The pale underside of the fronds on gusty days
As a land breeze stirs the white caps in a roadstead
Glimpses of shy bog gardens surprises the gaze
Or rough stuff keeping a ring
Round a struggling water-spring.

Look closely. Even now bog asphodel spikes, still alight at the tips,
Sundew lifting white buds like those of the whitlow grass
On walls in spring over its little round leaves
Sparkling with gummy red hairs, and many a soft mass
Of the curious moss that can clean
A wound or poison a river, are seen.

Ah! well I know my tumultuous days now at their prime
Will be brief as the bracken too in their stay
Yet in them as the flowers of the hills 'mid the bracken
All that I treasure is needs hidden away
And will also be dead
When its rude cover is shed.

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Hugh MacDiarmid (1892 – 1978)

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