Walter Scott...

..has haunted my footsteps today. I have been past the monument three times and his house in the new town twice. Tonight I found myself walking through Waverley Station , where the excelllent walkway illustrations quote his poems , novels and sayings.

Every time I think of him I also think of another poet, Iain Crichton Smith , whose poem "At the Scott Exhbition , Edinburgh Festival " echoes precisely my feelings about Scott now and when younger , my clear recollections of that wonderful exhibiton in 1972 and also the profound effect on me of my first visit to Abbotsford.

It took me a while to find it, but here it is:

(I)

He will outlast us, churning out his books,
Advocate and historian, his prose
Earning him Abbotsford with its borrowed gates
It's cheap momentoes from the land he made.
Walking the room together in this merciless
Galaxy of manuscripts and notes
I am exhausted by such energy.
I hold your hand for guidance. Over your brow
The green light falls from tall and narrow windows.
His style is ignorant of such tenderness,
The vulnerable angle of your body
Below the Raeburn with its steady gaze.

(II)

It was all in his life, not in his books
"Oh I am dying, take me home to Scotland
Where I can breath though that breath were my last".
He limped through an Edinburgh being made anew
He worked his way through debts, past a dead wife
My dear, we love each other in our weakness
As he with white grave face diminishing through
Stroke after stroke down to the unpaid room
We know what we are but not what we will be.
I tremble in this factory of books
What love he must have lost to write so much.