Beside our Literature case is a 'wall of words', consisting of quotations from some of the writers it contains. Here, for National Poetry Day, is that wall. I'll put an edited version with the sources in a comment below.
Auld Scotland has a raucle tongue,
She's just a devil wi' a rung;
An' if she promise auld or young
To tak their part,
Tho' by the neck she should be strung,
She'll no desert.
To speak in the poetical language of my country,
the seat of the Celtic Muse
is in the mist of the secret and solitary hill,
and her voice in the murmur
of the mountain stream.
A pale green light poured down from the wintry sky,
as though this earth were lit by chance rays
from some other world.
'He canny help his feet. At least
he's no' a wee Glasgow bauchle like you.'
'Aye, all right, I'd rather be
A Glasgow bauchle than a drip like him.'
What they had was not love.
But it had beauty, and it served.
And there was the bridal bed, pulled out from the wall,
all in white it was, with sheet and blanket turned back,
the window curtains were drawn, and in the moment
they stood breathing from their climb of the stairs
Chris heard the sound of the snow that stroked the window,
with quiet, soft fingers, as though writing it there.
Oh my luve is like a red red rose
That's newly sprung in June
They gazed with blanched faces
at the House with the Green Shutters,
sitting dark there and terrible,
beneath the radiant arch of the dawn.
Thus were we all throng'd in so strait a cage,
I chang'd my looks and hair, before my age,
Dreaming on liberty (by strong desire
My soul made apt to hope) and did admire
Those gallant mindes, enslav'd to such a woe,
(My heart within my brest dissolv'd like snow
Before the Sunne) as one would side-wayes cast
His eye on pictures, which his feet hath past.
They won't let ye
dae it. They won't
let ye dae it,
because it's seen
as ah sign ay thir ain failure.
The fact that ye jist
simply choose tae reject
whit they huv to offer.
Choose us.
Choose life.
and there is that transient brightness of a minute blossom
almost invisible in the undergrowth,
uniquely recognisable by such as persist in the quest, but
unlisted in any index or encyclopaedia of the possible.
Fra that I saw that God was gane,
And I in languor left allane,
And sair tormentit to:
Sum time I sicht quhill I was sad,
Sum tyme I musit and maist gane mad,
I wist not quhat to do:
Sum tyme I ravid half in a rage,
As ane into dispaire:
To be opprest with sic ane page
Lord gif my heart was faire:
Like Dido, Cupido,
I widill and I warye:
Quha reft me, and left me
In sik a feire-farye.
I love to muse upon the skill that gangs
To mak' the simplest thing that Earth displays.
The eident life that ilka atom thrangs,
And uses it in the appointit ways,
And a' the endless brain that nocht escapes
That myriad moves them to inimitable shapes.
Yes today we're in love aren't we?
with the whole splintering city
its big quick river wintry bridges
its brazen black Victorian heart.
So what if every other tenement
wears its hearth on its gable end
all I want
is my glad eye to catch
a glint in your flinty Northern face
again
just once.
Cha chiumhne leam do bhriathran,
eadhon ni a thubhairt thu,
ach abhainn Arois an àileadh iadhshlait
is àileadh roid air Suidhisnis.
I do not remember your words, even a thing you said,
but Aros Burn in the smell of honey-suckle
and the smell of bog-myrtle on Suishnish.
