‘Here in the Hauf Licht’: To Circumjack Cencrastus

Abstract

When MacDiarmid completed A Drunk Man in 1926, he was already planning a new long poem. Like A Drunk Man it was to express a philosophic vision of reality. But this time it would move beyond paradox and conflict to a higher conception of unity. The desire for such a fundamental unity is not new, nor is it surprising in one who retained deep religious feelings and insights despite his rejection of specific religions. His pre-MacDiarmid lyrics were often concerned with religious perceptions, even explicitly Catholic ones, and his first long poem, ‘A Moment in Eternity’, was a mystical vision of paradise and union with God’s thought. That he made this early and derivative poem a section of To Circumjack Cencrastus attests to its continuing hold on him as well as the religious base of Cencrastus as a whole. Yet the extraordinary images and complexities of experience in the Scots poems had not come from these impulses to transcendence. They achieved, rather, a strange sense of cosmic wholeness through the immediacy of conflict. A Drunk Man focusing on the contradictory thistle, reached at the end the wholeness of silence. Yet the desire to go beyond, to find a reality not based in physical struggle and human complexity has its roots in that poem’s very exhaustion and need to let go.