Marking the Meaning of a Place

The epigraph to Golder’s ‘The Philosophy of Love’ leads to another inscribed stone which recollects another moment in the religious and political history of Scotland. It reads: “’Hail, holy love! thou word that means all bliss…’ Pollok.”¹⁷ Reading these words for the first time was like encountering a fossil, the trace of something which had existed but which appeared to be extinct. I have followed the trace back into the libraries of Scotland where the sedimentary layer of evangelical culture of the early nineteenth century is most fully conserved in the texts, in English, which served as transmitters to me of the world of meaning shared, recuperated and evolved through sermons, essays, histories, scientific texts, novels and poetry. Almost all of these documents were print books, in English; only some of the writing, in novels and poetry, was in lowland Scots, marking a key aspect of the imperial appropriation of mind through language. For Rev Robert Pollok, for example, English was a ‘dead language’ like Latin, but the language in which he had to write if he were to create a poem of more than local significance¹⁸. Golder adopted the same position, publishing some lyrics in Scots (which he clearly spoke all his life) but writing his major poems in English.

The source of the epigraph is Pollok’s Christian epic poem, The Course of Time (1827), which went through more than 45 editions in Britain and North America through the nineteenth century, after which it disappeared. Pollok died shortly after its publication, and his brother published a biography which is the narrative of the formation of a writer who shared with Golder working-class poverty, limited access to literate culture, evangelical religion, and a close identification with traditional Scottish culture and local history, especially that of the covenanters. Their principal difference was Pollok’s university education and subsequent ordination as a minister in the Secession Church.

[Illus 4 Rullion Green memorial]

With this narrative in mind, I stood in a sense with Pollok at the stone, not needing to trace the incised letters with my fingers and assisted in imaginatively constituting the past by John Galt’s novel Ringhan Gilhaize.²⁰ But I could never own the meanings or the resonance of them as Pollok could, as the direct inheritor of that history and an agent of its continuing cultural significance. I was brought up a Presbyterian in New Zealand, but the covenanters were not a living part of my self-knowledge. Nonetheless, that small stone with its eighteenth-century script remains to testify to the fundamental importance of civil and religious liberty, and to the costs of that conviction when challenged by the power of an autocratic state. ⁵