The Monarch of the Glen by Compton MacKenzie

Author:Compton MacKenzie [MacKenzie, Compton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473522190
Publisher: Random House
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

I do not lament therefore, but laugh

When down through the stale dead purple

Dances the peaty water

Warm with the sharp sun of the high tops,

Prickt by the sun of the high tops,

The prattling peaty dark-brown water,

The warm dark-brown water of life.”

“Yes, go on,” said Myrtle when the poet stopped and looked at her intensely.

“That’s all. I’m afraid you’ll think it rather old-fashioned. Imagist poetry has not kept its hold upon contemporary expression, but I would justify it by the old-fashioned circumstances in which it was written.”

“But I thought you said you’d written a poem about me?” Myrtle asked in a puzzled voice.

“That poem is about you.”

“Do you mind saying it once again?”

Once more the poet gazed fiercely in front of him from blazing blue eyes and intoned Peaty Water.

“I suppose you’ll think me just a poor sap, Alan, but I can’t see where I come into that poem.”

“You prefer the reverend gentleman’s newspaper paragraph in verse about Myrtle Macdonald?”

“Oh, Alan!”

“What?”

“Why, you’ve said it yourself now. It was Mary Macdonald.”

“I meant Mary,” said the poet with a blush.

“And now you’re blushing.”

He blushed more richly, and scowled.

“You mean to say,” he began in tones which his embarrassment rendered ferocious, “you mean to say you can’t perceive the image in that poem?”

“I can see all sorts of images in it, but I can’t see my own.”

“The warm dark-brown water of life,” he urged, blushing again.

And then she too blushed, their blushes seeming more vivid because they were flaming against those sombre ladders of rain sloping from the leaden sky to the glen below.

“Say the poem again,” she murmured.

And this time he forgot the rigid principles imbibed from the gospel of Willie Yeats and allowed dramatic expression to enter into his recitation of Peaty Water:

“The heather,

The fading heather,

Is spread like the robe of a dead king

Upon my country,

Upon my dying country.

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