Everyone, like Samuel Johnson, has an opinion on Macpherson’s Ossian, but few of us ever manage to get a hand on an actual copy of the poetry. Fortunately, Murdo Macdonald does the bibliographic work for us, and details the doggedness of his desultory browsings and subsequent musings which led to the composition of his own versions. (is there ever anything but versions to work through here?) So, this is the big chance to find out what it was about the versions of this poetry that set Europe aflame with romantic passion and melancholy, and, as Napoleon himself put it, ‘Devour Ossian!’
Introduction
Sometimes reading a Japanese poet I seem to be reading Ossian. ‘The summer grasses /Are all that remain to us / Of warrior dreams’; Basho expresses here what Macpherson was to call ‘the joy of grief’,[i] a phrase that encapsulates the sense of cultural loss and struggle that underpins European romanticism. For Macpherson such loss was very real. The Gaelic-speaking Highland culture of which he was part had been under extreme pressure since he was nine years old.[ii] After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, ‘the atrocities began at once’.[iii] In my essay Ruskin’s Triangle, I allowed the melancholy of Ryokan’s ‘Lying in my freezing hut, unable to sleep; / only the quiet roar / Of water pouring over a cliff’[iv] to flow into Macpherson’s ‘The torrent pours down the rock /No hut receives me from the rain / Forlorn on the hill of winds’.[v]
The recasting I offer here of Macpherson’s prose-poetical writing grew out of that. My approach is selective, that is to say I make every effort to pick out short passages that work independently, but little effort to reflect Macpherson’s words in any complete sense. I have updated spellings and adjusted punctuation and capitalisation. While the line breaks are my own, each verse (though not always each poem) is composed of words that are continuous in Macpherson’s text.[vi] My everyday reference has been a 1796 edition of the 1773 text, published in London by Mundell. Its three duodecimo volumes were bound into one small tough book by Islington Libraries sometime in the twentieth century. It came to me after being deaccessioned probably during the great library cull of the early twenty-first century. Published in the year of Macpherson’s death, it has the old typeface for the letter ‘s’. I have used that convenient copy to point me to earlier versions from 1760 onwards, guided, when necessary, by Howard Gaskill’s invaluable critical edition published in 1996.[vii]
The remaking of Macpherson’s prose poems in verse by other authors has a history stretching back to Cesarotti’s Italian translation of Fingal published in 1764.[viii] Michael Denis’s German verses were published in 1768/9.[ix] Notable contributions in English came from Ewen Cameron in 1776,[x] and Edgerton Brydges in 1785.[xi] In 1788 came the Spanish of José Alonso Ortiz.[xii] This list is no more than indicative but another work that bears mention is Mary Potter’s remarkable Poetry of Nature published in 1789. It retains Macpherson’s prose poetry but makes of it something new both by selection and through its almost concrete poetical use of a pioneering cursive typeface designed by Caslon.[xiii] Byron’s version of Ossian’s Address to the Sun was made in 1805[xiv] and his distinctly Ossianic Lachin y Gair was written two years later.[xv]Macpherson’s full Gaelic versification was published with a Latin verse translation in 1807.[xvi] An English verse translation in parallel text with the Gaelic verses was made by the Reverend Archibald Clerk of Kilmallie and published in 1870.[xvii] A twenty-first century approach that prompted my own is that of Kirsten Norrie under her pen and performance name of MacGillivray. In The Last Wolf of Scotland, she interlaces lines of Ossian with her own words.[xviii] Another stimulus was William Blake. In an Oxfam shop in Edinburgh, I found a reference to Visions of the Daughters of Albion pencilled on the flyleaf of a neatly rebound pocket edition of Ossian, published by Oliver and Boyd in 1819.[xix] It had the bookplate of Pamela and Raymond Lister and it led me to consider more deeply the text of Macpherson’s Oithona.[xx]
In my reworking of the French of Massenet’s librettists[xxi] for the Ossian aria of his opera Werther (completed in 1887 and premiered in Vienna in 1892),[xxii] I have been conscious of the durability of Macpherson’s original words in Berrathon transmitted to the French librettists through the German translation of Goethe.[xxiii] Osip Mandelstam’s contribution written in 1914 was unexpected but welcome. In my adaptation of his Russian (a language of which I have no knowledge), the translations of Peter France and R. H. Morrison have guided me, but my intention is freedom not precision.[xxiv]
There have been other translations and transmutations of Macpherson’s work in the background of my thinking. I became aware of Runeberg’s King Fjalar thanks to colleagues in Helsinki. Suard, Turgot and Diderot’s versions were brought alive for me by colleagues in Marseille. Cesarotti, likewise, by colleagues in Padua. An inspiring rethinker of Macpherson and poetical form has been Gauti Kristmannsson in Reykjavik.
Closer to home, Macpherson is an enduring subtext in the poetry and songs of Robert Burns. It is hard to read Oithona without thinking of Burns’s Lament of Mary Queen of Scots[xxv] or his evocation of the dead of Culloden in The Lovely Lass of Inverness. Burns’s allusions to Macpherson in The Vision are well known, but the wider context that Macpherson created for his younger compatriot is less appreciated. Less appreciated still is the way Walter Scott begins Lady of the Lake as a resurrection of the bard whose life is ebbing away in Berrathon.[xxvi] The Aeolian quality of the harps in both Berrathon and Lady of the Lake is of interest, particularly with respect to James Thomson’s note to his poem Ode to Aeolus’s Harp, which mentions his fellow London Scot, the composer and instrument maker James Oswald, who started making Aeolian harps in the mid-eighteenth century. Oswald died in 1769, living long enough to set some of Macpherson’s words to music, including. ‘It is night I am alone, forlorn on the hill of storms’ from The Songs of Selma.[xxvii]
(Vignette from a 1797 edition by an unknown artist/engraver)
Contents
From: Fragments of Ancient Poetry
Evening is grey on the hills
Autumn is dark on the mountains
It is night and I am alone
Rise winds of autumn rise
All night I stood on the shore
Morna thou fairest of women
From: Fingal and other Poems
Turn his dark ships
Lonely dweller of the rock
Joy rises in her face
The night passed away in the song
It came
Thou that rollest above
The wind was abroad in the oaks
The form fell
Hast thou left thy blue course in heaven
Star of the falling night
The moon shows
The tear was on thy cheek
The visions of night arose
I pass away in my youth
A troubled joy
I have searched for the herbs of the mountains
Why did I not pass away in secret
The stream roars down the rock
Night is calm and fair
Bend thy blue course O stream
The smoke of the hall was ceased
The winds begin to rise
My harp hangs on a blasted branch
From: Temora and other Poems
I heard the voice of the bards
We came to the hall of the king
As when the wintry winds have seized the waves of the mountain lake
As when the wintry winds have seized the waves of the mountain lake
As when the wintry winds have seized the waves of the mountain lake
Have seized them in stormy night and clothed them over with ice
White to the hunter’s early eye the billows still seem to roll
He turns his ear to the sound of each unequal ridge but each is silent
Gleaming strewn with boughs and tufts of grass which shake
And whistle to the wind over their grey seats of frost
So silent shone to the morning the ridges of Morven’s host
As each warrior looked up from his helmet towards the hill of the king[lxiv]
Coda: Massenet and Mandelstam
Why do you wake me?
Why do you wake me?
Ah! breath of spring
Why do you wake me?
On my forehead
I sense your caress
And yet the time is near
Of storm and sadness
Why do you wake me
Oh, breath of spring?
Tomorrow in the glen
The traveller will come
Remembering my former glory
His eyes will look for my splendour in vain
Finding nothing but grief and misery
Why should I wake
O breath of spring?
[Freely translated from the Ossian aria in Massenet’s Werther]
I have not heard blind Ossian’s tales
I have not heard blind Ossian’s tales, I have not tasted that old wine, so why do I find myself in my imagination in a forest clearing? Why do I think as I look up that I see Scotland’s blood-red moon? I hear the rooks cawing and the sound of the harp reflected into ominous silence. And I see in my mind’s eye warriors’ tartan fluttering in the breeze, warriors’ shields flashing in the moonlight! But in contrast to this wonderful rambling dream with which my fellow poet has deluged me, the neighborhood looks dull indeed. That’s the thing about poetry: it jumps generations until suddenly some bard like me composes it again as his own.[Freely adapted into prose from English versions of Mandelstam’s words]
[i] The phrase occurs twice in Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Six Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian the Son of Fingal, (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1762), on pages 16 and 194, and once in Temora, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Eight Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1763), on page 132. The version of Basho is my own.
[ii] Murdo Macdonald, ‘Ossian, Kalevala and visual art: a Scottish perspective’, in European Revivals: From Dreams of a Nation to Places of Transnational Exchange, (Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery, 2020), pages 3-22, at pages 3-4.
[iv] Ryokan, One Robe, One Bowl, translated by John Stevens, (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1977), page 72.
[v] Murdo Macdonald, Ruskin’s Triangle, (London: Ma Bibliothèque, 2021), page 94. The words are from the 1773 version of The Songs of Selma, the line breaks are my own.
[vi] Each line is something of a scene direction. I am reminded of Eisenstein’s comments about Milton. On page 52 of the Film Sense he writes: ‘Paradise Lost itself is a first-rate school in which to study montage and audio-visual relationships.’ In his final chapter he takes such thinking further with respect to the battle on the ice from Alexander Nevsky. Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, translated and edited by Jay Leda, (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), pages 52 to 57, and pages 114 to 156. But Macpherson is more like Bergman than Eisenstein: very cinematic, and very northern. You can see the montage, shot by shot.
[vii] James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, edited by Howard Gaskill and introduced by Fiona Stafford, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). The University of Galway project, Ossian Online can also be recommended.
[viii] Melchior Cesarotti, Poesie di Ossian Figlio de Fingal, Antico Poeta Celtico, (Padova: Giuseppe Comino, dated 1763, but published 1764). Note that Cesarotti, in Italian translation, is the first to adopt the title Poems of Ossian. Macpherson doesn’t adopt that title until 1773.
[ix] Michael Denis, Die Gedichte Ossians, eines alten celtischen Dichters, (Vienna: Trattnern, 1869).
[x] Ewen Cameron, The Fingal of Ossian, An Ancient Galic Poem in Six Books Translated from the Galic by J. Macpherson and Rendered into Heroic Verse, (Warrington: William Eyres, 1776).
[xi] S. Edgerton Brydges, Sonnets and Other Poems, with a Versification of the Six Bards of Ossian, (London: Wilkie, 1785).
[xii] Joseph Alonso Ortiz, Obras de Ossian: poeta del siglo tercero en las montañas de Escocia, (Valladolid: Imprenta de la Viuda e Hijos de Santander, 1788).
[xiii] Mary Potter, Poetry of Nature, comprising, a selection of the most sublime and beautiful apostrophes, histories, songs, elegies, &c. from the works of the Caledonian bards. The typographical execution in a style entirely new, and decorated with the superb ornaments, of the celebrated Caslon. (London: J. P. Cooke, 1789).
[xiv] Byron’s version can be found on pages 229 to 231 of the Coleridge / Prothero edition of his complete works, (London: John Murray, 1898). Note that Byron’s Ossianic Oscar of Alva and The Death of Calmar and Orla: An Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian can be found in the 1833 Murray edition, edited by Thomas Moore, as can Lachin y Gair and When I Roved a Young Highlander.
[xv] Verse three of Lachin y Gair begins with a quote, marked as such, clearly intended to evoke the words of Ossian, ‘Shades of the dead! Have I not heard your voices / Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?’ The verse continues, in distinctly Ossianic vein, even down to the use of the word ‘car’ for ‘chariot’: ‘Surely the soul of the hero rejoices, / And rides on the wind o’er his own Highland vale. / Round Loch na Garr while the stormy mist gathers, / Winter presides in his cold icy car: / Clouds there encircle the forms of my fathers; / They dwell in the tempests of dark Loch na Garr.’
[xvi]The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic with a literal translation into Latin, by the late Robert Macfarlane, A.M., together with a dissertation on the authenticity of the poems, by Sir John Sinclair, Bart. and a translation from the Italian of the Abbè Cesarotti’s dissertation on the controversy respecting the authenticity of Ossian, with notes and a supplemental essay, by John M’Arthur, Published under the sanction of the Highland Society of London. (London: Printed by W. Bulmer & Co. [for] G. & W. Nicol, 1807).
[xvii] Archibald Clerk, The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic with a Literal Translation into English, (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1870).
[xviii] MacGillivray, Last Wolf, in particular ‘Riders on the Storm’, ‘Eccho’, ‘Macpherson’, and ‘MacGhillebhragh an Dùin’, and the notes on pages 123 and 124.
[xix] The note reads: ‘p 232 Oithona basis of Visions of the Daughters of Albion cf Wright Life of WB v. 1 p 59’. The reference is to Thomas Wright’s two volume Life of William Blake, (Olney: Wright, 1929). Along with the passage from Wright, see Raymond Lister, William Blake, (London: Bell, 1968), pages 6, 7, 47. It may be the case that Blake’s use of the name ‘Albion’ also has its immediate inspiration in his reading of Macpherson. See Macpherson’s mention of Albion in his note referring to the name Alpin, in Fingal and other Poems, 1762, page 210.
[xx] See Ruskin’s Triangle, page 99.Macpherson’s influence on Blake’s approach to the form of poetical prose is also of note. Both authors show an interest in what one can call the visually dense prose-poetical page (as does Mary Potter). Blake takes that as far as his print-making abilities will allow in Jerusalem.
[xxi] Édouard Blau (1836-1906), Georges Hartmann (1843-1900), and Paul Milliet (1848-1924).
[xxii] For the significance of the aria to the opera as a whole, see Matthew Franke, ‘The Harp, the Lied and Ossianic Narratives in Massenet’s Werther’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 18, 2021, pages 455 to 474.
[xxiii] For an informed view of Goethe’s translations of Ossian, see Howard Gaskill, ‘”Arise, O magnificent effulgence of Ossian’s soul!”: Werther the Translator in English Translation’, Translation and Literature, Autumn 2013, Vol. 22, No. 3, pages 302 to 321; also see Gaskill’s introduction to the same issue, ‘The Translator’s Ossian’, pages 293 to 301.
[xxiv] Peter France, ‘Fingal in Russia’, in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, edited by Howard Gaskill, (London: Thoemmes, 2004), pages 259-73, at page 259; R. H. Morrison, Poems from Mandelstam, (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990), page 72.
[xxv] ‘And, in the narrow house of death, / Let Winter round me rave’.
[xxvi] ‘My harp hangs on a blasted branch. The sound of its strings is mournful. — Does the wind touch thee, O harp, or is it some passing ghost! — It is the hand of Malvina! but bring me the harp, son of Alpin; another song shall rise.’ [Macpherson: Berrathon]. ‘Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung / On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan’s spring / And down the fitful breeze thy numbers flung, / Till envious ivy did around thee cling, / Muffling with verdant ringlet every string,— / O Minstrel Harp, still must thine accents sleep? / Mid rustling leaves and fountains murmuring, / Still must thy sweeter sounds their silence keep, / Nor bid a warrior smile, nor teach a maid to weep?’ [Scott: Lady of the Lake].
[xxvii] Information and recording provided to me by John Purser. See also James Porter, Beyond Fingal’s Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination, (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019), page 19 note 4. Porter points out that the setting appears as song 119 in volume one of James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, published between 1787 and 1803, (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1991).
[xxviii] Full title: Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language, (Edinburgh: Printed for G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1760).
[xxxv] Full title: Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Six Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian the Son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic Language. (London: Printed for T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1762).
[xxxvi] For illumination of the filiations of Macpherson’s repeated phrase, ‘rider(s) of/on the storm’, see MacGillivray, The Last Wolf of Scotland, second edition, (Pasadena CA: Red Hen / Pighog Press, 2016): (i) epigraph; (ii) ‘Riders on the Storm’, page 92; (iii) note on ‘Riders on the Storm’, pages 123-4.
[xxxvii] First two verses from Fingal Book 3, pages 39 and 46; third verse from Fingal Book 4, page 53.
[xxxviii]Fingal and other Poems: Battle of Lora, page 112.
[xxxix]Fingal and other Poems: Battle of Lora, page 119.
[xlii]Fingal and other Poems: Carthon,pages 141-2. The passage recast here is commonly called ‘Ossian’s Address to the Sun’, see, for example, Byron’s version, written in 1805, which concludes: ‘For Age is dark, unlovely, as the light / Shed by the Moon when clouds deform the night, / Glimmering uncertain as they hurry past. / Loud o’er the plain is heard the northern blast, / Mists shroud the hills, and ‘neath the growing gloom, / The weary traveller shrinks and sighs for home.’
[xliii]Fingal and other Poems: Darthula, page 168.
[xliv]Fingal and other Poems: Carric-Thura, page 200; also see MacGillivray, Last Wolf, page 94.
[xlv]Fingal and other Poems: Carric-Thura, page 193.
[xlvi]Fingal and other Poems: Songs of Selma, page 209.
[xlvii]Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, pages 241 and 242.
[xlviii]Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, page 242.
[lii]Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, page 247, both verses.
[liii]Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, first verse page 244, second verse page 245, third verse page 248.
[liv] See MacGillivray, Last Wolf, epigraph. Another variant is ‘Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night: / Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind; / Their songs are of other worlds!’ quoted by Fiona Stafford in her introduction to the 1996 edition of Ossian, page v. It comes from a letter of 29 June 1760 from Thomas Gray to Richard Stonhewer. It is extracted by Gray from work sent to him from Scotland, by Macpherson’s supporter Hugh Blair (see page 471 of the 1996 edition, note 28). This pre-publication work was sent to Gray as verse. It became prose-poetry in due course. Both versions can be found in Malcolm Laing’s edition of Ossian, (Edinburgh: Constable, 1805), volume 2, pages 412 to 442.
[lv]Fingal and other Poems: note to Croma; songs of the five bards, second bard, page 254.
[lvi]Fingal and other Poems: note to Croma; songs of the five bards, fourth bard, page 255.
[lxi] Full title: Temora, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Eight Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1763).
[lxiv]Temora and other Poems, page 137. In his introduction to the Mercat Press edition of Ossian published in 1971,John MacQueen notes that ‘Consciously or unconsciously, Tolkien owes a good deal to Macpherson’.
BIT PARTS by Elke Finkenauer
14th June 2023HOWSON’S INFERNO by GREG THOMAS
9th July 2023Everyone, like Samuel Johnson, has an opinion on Macpherson’s Ossian, but few of us ever manage to get a hand on an actual copy of the poetry. Fortunately, Murdo Macdonald does the bibliographic work for us, and details the doggedness of his desultory browsings and subsequent musings which led to the composition of his own versions. (is there ever anything but versions to work through here?) So, this is the big chance to find out what it was about the versions of this poetry that set Europe aflame with romantic passion and melancholy, and, as Napoleon himself put it, ‘Devour Ossian!’
Introduction
Sometimes reading a Japanese poet I seem to be reading Ossian. ‘The summer grasses /Are all that remain to us / Of warrior dreams’; Basho expresses here what Macpherson was to call ‘the joy of grief’,[i] a phrase that encapsulates the sense of cultural loss and struggle that underpins European romanticism. For Macpherson such loss was very real. The Gaelic-speaking Highland culture of which he was part had been under extreme pressure since he was nine years old.[ii] After the Battle of Culloden in 1746, ‘the atrocities began at once’.[iii] In my essay Ruskin’s Triangle, I allowed the melancholy of Ryokan’s ‘Lying in my freezing hut, unable to sleep; / only the quiet roar / Of water pouring over a cliff’[iv] to flow into Macpherson’s ‘The torrent pours down the rock /No hut receives me from the rain / Forlorn on the hill of winds’.[v]
The recasting I offer here of Macpherson’s prose-poetical writing grew out of that. My approach is selective, that is to say I make every effort to pick out short passages that work independently, but little effort to reflect Macpherson’s words in any complete sense. I have updated spellings and adjusted punctuation and capitalisation. While the line breaks are my own, each verse (though not always each poem) is composed of words that are continuous in Macpherson’s text.[vi] My everyday reference has been a 1796 edition of the 1773 text, published in London by Mundell. Its three duodecimo volumes were bound into one small tough book by Islington Libraries sometime in the twentieth century. It came to me after being deaccessioned probably during the great library cull of the early twenty-first century. Published in the year of Macpherson’s death, it has the old typeface for the letter ‘s’. I have used that convenient copy to point me to earlier versions from 1760 onwards, guided, when necessary, by Howard Gaskill’s invaluable critical edition published in 1996.[vii]
The remaking of Macpherson’s prose poems in verse by other authors has a history stretching back to Cesarotti’s Italian translation of Fingal published in 1764.[viii] Michael Denis’s German verses were published in 1768/9.[ix] Notable contributions in English came from Ewen Cameron in 1776,[x] and Edgerton Brydges in 1785.[xi] In 1788 came the Spanish of José Alonso Ortiz.[xii] This list is no more than indicative but another work that bears mention is Mary Potter’s remarkable Poetry of Nature published in 1789. It retains Macpherson’s prose poetry but makes of it something new both by selection and through its almost concrete poetical use of a pioneering cursive typeface designed by Caslon.[xiii] Byron’s version of Ossian’s Address to the Sun was made in 1805[xiv] and his distinctly Ossianic Lachin y Gair was written two years later.[xv]Macpherson’s full Gaelic versification was published with a Latin verse translation in 1807.[xvi] An English verse translation in parallel text with the Gaelic verses was made by the Reverend Archibald Clerk of Kilmallie and published in 1870.[xvii] A twenty-first century approach that prompted my own is that of Kirsten Norrie under her pen and performance name of MacGillivray. In The Last Wolf of Scotland, she interlaces lines of Ossian with her own words.[xviii] Another stimulus was William Blake. In an Oxfam shop in Edinburgh, I found a reference to Visions of the Daughters of Albion pencilled on the flyleaf of a neatly rebound pocket edition of Ossian, published by Oliver and Boyd in 1819.[xix] It had the bookplate of Pamela and Raymond Lister and it led me to consider more deeply the text of Macpherson’s Oithona.[xx]
In my reworking of the French of Massenet’s librettists[xxi] for the Ossian aria of his opera Werther (completed in 1887 and premiered in Vienna in 1892),[xxii] I have been conscious of the durability of Macpherson’s original words in Berrathon transmitted to the French librettists through the German translation of Goethe.[xxiii] Osip Mandelstam’s contribution written in 1914 was unexpected but welcome. In my adaptation of his Russian (a language of which I have no knowledge), the translations of Peter France and R. H. Morrison have guided me, but my intention is freedom not precision.[xxiv]
There have been other translations and transmutations of Macpherson’s work in the background of my thinking. I became aware of Runeberg’s King Fjalar thanks to colleagues in Helsinki. Suard, Turgot and Diderot’s versions were brought alive for me by colleagues in Marseille. Cesarotti, likewise, by colleagues in Padua. An inspiring rethinker of Macpherson and poetical form has been Gauti Kristmannsson in Reykjavik.
Closer to home, Macpherson is an enduring subtext in the poetry and songs of Robert Burns. It is hard to read Oithona without thinking of Burns’s Lament of Mary Queen of Scots[xxv] or his evocation of the dead of Culloden in The Lovely Lass of Inverness. Burns’s allusions to Macpherson in The Vision are well known, but the wider context that Macpherson created for his younger compatriot is less appreciated. Less appreciated still is the way Walter Scott begins Lady of the Lake as a resurrection of the bard whose life is ebbing away in Berrathon.[xxvi] The Aeolian quality of the harps in both Berrathon and Lady of the Lake is of interest, particularly with respect to James Thomson’s note to his poem Ode to Aeolus’s Harp, which mentions his fellow London Scot, the composer and instrument maker James Oswald, who started making Aeolian harps in the mid-eighteenth century. Oswald died in 1769, living long enough to set some of Macpherson’s words to music, including. ‘It is night I am alone, forlorn on the hill of storms’ from The Songs of Selma.[xxvii]
(Vignette from a 1797 edition by an unknown artist/engraver)
Contents
From: Fragments of Ancient Poetry
From: Fingal and other Poems
From: Temora and other Poems
Coda: Massenet and Mandelstam
From: Fragments of Ancient Poetry, 1760[xxviii]
Evening is grey on the hills
Evening is grey on the hills
The north wind resounds through the woods
White clouds rise on the sky
The trembling snow descends
The river howls afar
Along its winding course[xxix]
Autumn is dark on the mountains
Autumn is dark on the mountains
Grey mist rests on the hills
The whirlwind is heard on the heath
Dark rolls the river through the narrow plain
A tree stands alone on the hill
And marks the grave of Connal
The leaves whirl round with the wind
And strew the grave of the dead[xxx]
It is night and I am alone
It is night and I am alone
Forlorn on the hill of storms
The wind is heard in the mountain
The torrent shrieks down the rock
No hut receives me from the rain
Forlorn on the hill of winds
Rise, moon from behind thy clouds
Stars of the night, appear
Lead me, some light to the place
Where my love rests from the toil of the chase
His bow near him unstrung
His dogs panting around him
But here I must sit alone
By the rock of the mossy stream
The stream and the wind roar
Nor can I hear the voice of my love[xxxi]
Rise winds of autumn rise
Rise winds of autumn rise
Blow upon the dark heath
Streams of the mountains roar
Howl ye tempests in the trees
Walk through broken clouds, O moon
Show by intervals thy pale face
Bring to my mind that sad night
When all my children fell[xxxii]
All night I stood on the shore
All night I stood on the shore
All night I heard her cries
Loud was the wind and the rain beat
Hard on the side of the mountain
Before morning appeared
Her voice was weak
It died away
Like the evening breeze
Among the grass of the rocks
Spent with grief she expired
O lay me soon by her side[xxxiii]
Morna thou fairest of women
Morna thou fairest of women
Daughter of Cormac-Carbre
Why
In the circle of stones
In the cave of the rock
Alone?
The stream murmureth hoarsely
The blast groaneth in the aged tree
The lake is troubled before thee
Dark are the clouds of the sky
But thou art like snow on the heath
Thy hair like a thin cloud of gold
On the top of Cromleach
Thy breasts like two smooth rocks
On the hill which is seen
From the stream of Brannuin
Thy arms as two white pillars
In the hall of Fingal[xxxiv]
From: Fingal and other Poems 1761[xxxv]
Turn his dark ships
Turn his dark ships
From the rock
Thou rider of the storm![xxxvi]
White roll the waters on either side
The strength of ocean sounds
Come thou I said from the roar of ocean
Thou rider of the storm
O ye ghosts of heroes dead!
Ye riders of the storm of Cromla![xxxvii]
Lonely dweller of the rock
Lonely dweller of the rock
Look over that heathy plain
Thou seest green tombs
With their rank whistling grass
With their stones of mossy heads
Thou seest them
Son of the rock
But Ossian’s eyes
Have failed[xxxviii]
Joy rises in her face
Joy rises in her face
But sorrow returns again
Like a thin cloud on the moon
Wilt thou not return my love?[xxxix]
The night passed away in the song
The night passed away in the song
And morning returned in joy
The mountains showed their grey heads
And the blue face of ocean smiled
The white wave is seen tumbling round the distant rock
The grey mist rises slowly from the lake[xl]
It came
It came
In the figure
Of an aged man
Along the silent plain
Its large limbs did not move in steps
For a ghost supported it in mid air
It came towards Selma’s hall
And dissolved in a shower of blood[xli]
O thou that rollest above
O thou that rollest above
Round as the shield of my fathers
Whence are thy beams, O sun!
Thy everlasting light?
Thou comest forth in thy awful beauty
And the stars hide themselves in the sky
The moon, cold and pale
Sinks in the western wave
But thou thyself movest alone
Who can be a companion of thy course!
The oaks of the mountains fall
The mountains themselves decay with years
The ocean shrinks and grows again
The moon herself is lost in heaven
But thou art for ever the same
Rejoicing in the brightness of thy course
When the world is dark with tempests
When thunder rolls, and lightning flies
Thou lookest in thy beauty from the clouds
And laughest at the storm
But to Ossian thou lookest in vain
For he beholds thy beams no more
Whether thy yellow hair flows on the eastern clouds
Or thou tremblest at the gates of the west
But thou art perhaps, like me, for a season
And thy years will have an end
Thou shalt sleep in thy clouds
Careless of the voice of the morning
Exult then, O sun, in the strength of thy youth
Age is dark and unlovely, it is like the glimmering light of the moon
When it shines through broken clouds and the mist is on the hills
The blast of north is on the plain
The traveller shrinks in the midst of his journey[xlii]
The wind was abroad in the oaks
The wind was abroad in the oaks
The spirit of the mountain shrieked
The blast came rustling through the hall
And gently touched my harp
The sound was mournful and low
Like the song of the tomb[xliii]
The form fell
The form fell
Shapeless into air
Like a column of smoke
Which the staff of the boy disturbs
As it rises from the half-extinguished furnace.[xliv]
Hast thou left thy blue course in heaven
Hast thou left thy blue course in heaven
Golden-haired son of the sky
The west has opened its gates
The bed of thy repose is there
The waves come to behold thy beauty
They lift their trembling heads
They see thee lovely in thy sleep
But they shrink away with fear
Rest in thy shadowy cave O sun
And let thy return be in joy
But let a thousand lights arise
To the sound of the harps of Selma[xlv]
Star of the falling night
Star of the falling night
Fair is thy light in the west
Thou liftest thy unshorn head from thy cloud
Thy steps are stately on thy hill
What dost thou behold in the plain?
The stormy winds are laid
The murmur of the torrent comes from afar
Roaring waves climb the distant rock
The flies of evening are on their feeble wings
And the hum of their course is on the field
What dost thou behold, fair light?
But thou dost smile and depart
The waves come with joy around thee
And bathe thy lovely hair
Farewell, thou silent beam
Let the light of Ossian’s soul arise[xlvi]
The moon shows
The moon shows
Half her face
On the hill
The daughter of night
Turns her eyes away for she beholds
The grief that is coming
There is no sound in the hall
No long-streaming beam of light
Comes trembling through the gloom[xlvii]
The tear was on thy cheek
The tear was on thy cheek
At his departure the sigh
Rose in secret in thy breast
But thou dost not come
To meet him with songs
With the lightly trembling
Sound of the harp[xlviii]
The visions of night arose
The visions of night arose
Oithona stood in a dream
Before the eyes of Morni’s son
Her dark hair was loose and disordered
Her lovely eye rolled in tears
Blood stained her snowy arm
The robe half hid the wound of her breast
She stood over the chief, and her voice was heard[xlix]
I pass away in my youth
I pass away in my youth
And my name shall not be heard
Or it will be heard with sorrow
The narrow house is pleasant to me
And the grey stone of the dead[l]
A troubled joy
A troubled joy
Rose on her mind
Like the red path
Of the lightning
On a stormy cloud
Her soul was resolved
And the tear was dried
From her wildly looking eye[li]
I have searched for the herbs of the mountains
I have searched for the herbs of the mountains
I have gathered them on the secret banks of their streams
Sadness shall come
Like night on thy native streams
For thou art fallen in thy youth[lii]
Why did I not pass away in secret
Why did I not pass away in secret
Like the flower of the rock
That lifts its fair head unseen and strews
Its withered leaves on the blast?
My heart is not of that rock
Nor my soul careless as that sea
Which lifts its blue waves to every wind
And rolls beneath the storm
Prepare the narrow tomb
Sleep comes like a cloud
On my soul[liii]
The stream roars down the rock
The stream roars down the rock
He waits for the rising moon
To guide him to his home
Ghosts ride on the storm tonight [liv]
Sweet is their voice between the squalls of wind
Their songs are of other worlds
The rain is past
The dry wind blows
Streams roar and windows flap
Cold drops fall from the roof
I see the starry sky
But the shower gathers again
The west is gloomy and dark
Night is stormy and dismal
Receive me my friends from night.[lv]
Night is calm and fair
Night is calm and fair
Blue, starry, settled is night
The winds, with the clouds, are gone
They sink behind the hill
The moon is up on the mountain
Trees glister, streams shine on the rock
Bright rolls the settled lake
Bright the stream of the vale[lvi]
Bend thy blue course O stream
Bend thy blue course O stream
Round the narrow plain of Lutha
Let the green woods hang over it
From their mountains
And the sun look on it at noon
The thistle is there on its rock
And shakes its beard to the wind
The flower hangs its heavy head
Waving at times to the gale
Why dost thou awake me O gale?
It seems to say
I am covered with the drops of heaven
The time of my fading is near
And the blast that shall scatter my leaves
Tomorrow shall the traveller come
He that saw me in my beauty shall come
His eyes will search the field
But they will not find me
So shall they search in vain
For the voice of Cona
After it has failed in the field
The hunter shall come forth in the morning
And the voice of my harp shall not be heard[lvii]
The smoke of the hall was ceased
The smoke of the hall was ceased
Silence was among the trees of the hill
The voice of the chase was over
I saw the daughters of the bow
I asked about Malvina
But they answered not
They turned their faces away
Thin darkness covered their beauty
They were like stars on a rainy hill by night
Each looking faintly through her mist.[lviii]
The winds begin to rise
The winds begin to rise
The dark wave of the lake
Resounds[lix]
My harp hangs on a blasted branch
My harp hangs on a blasted branch
The sound of its strings is mournful
Does the wind touch thee, O harp
Or is it some passing ghost?[lx]
From: Temora and other Poems 1763[lxi]
I heard the voice of the bards
I heard the voice of the bards
Lessening as they moved along
I leaned forward from my shield
And felt the kindling of my soul
Half-formed, the words of my song
Burst forth upon the wind
So hears a tree on the vale
The voice of spring around
It pours its green leaves to the sun
And shakes its lonely head
The hum of the mountain bee is near it
The hunter sees it with joy
From the blasted heath[lxii]
We came to the hall of the king
We came to the hall of the king
Where it rose in the midst of rocks
Rocks on whose dark sides
Were the marks of streams of old
Broad oaks bend around with their moss
The thick birch waves its green head
Half-hid, in her shady grove
Roscrana raised the song
Her white hands rose on the harp[lxiii]
As when the wintry winds have seized the waves of the mountain lake
As when the wintry winds have seized the waves of the mountain lake
Have seized them in stormy night and clothed them over with ice
White to the hunter’s early eye the billows still seem to roll
He turns his ear to the sound of each unequal ridge but each is silent
Gleaming strewn with boughs and tufts of grass which shake
And whistle to the wind over their grey seats of frost
So silent shone to the morning the ridges of Morven’s host
As each warrior looked up from his helmet towards the hill of the king[lxiv]
Coda: Massenet and Mandelstam
Why do you wake me?
Why do you wake me?
Ah! breath of spring
Why do you wake me?
On my forehead
I sense your caress
And yet the time is near
Of storm and sadness
Why do you wake me
Oh, breath of spring?
Tomorrow in the glen
The traveller will come
Remembering my former glory
His eyes will look for my splendour in vain
Finding nothing but grief and misery
Why should I wake
O breath of spring?
[Freely translated from the Ossian aria in Massenet’s Werther]
I have not heard blind Ossian’s tales
I have not heard blind Ossian’s tales, I have not tasted that old wine, so why do I find myself in my imagination in a forest clearing? Why do I think as I look up that I see Scotland’s blood-red moon? I hear the rooks cawing and the sound of the harp reflected into ominous silence. And I see in my mind’s eye warriors’ tartan fluttering in the breeze, warriors’ shields flashing in the moonlight! But in contrast to this wonderful rambling dream with which my fellow poet has deluged me, the neighborhood looks dull indeed. That’s the thing about poetry: it jumps generations until suddenly some bard like me composes it again as his own.[Freely adapted into prose from English versions of Mandelstam’s words]
[i] The phrase occurs twice in Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Six Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian the Son of Fingal, (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1762), on pages 16 and 194, and once in Temora, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Eight Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1763), on page 132. The version of Basho is my own.
[ii] Murdo Macdonald, ‘Ossian, Kalevala and visual art: a Scottish perspective’, in European Revivals: From Dreams of a Nation to Places of Transnational Exchange, (Helsinki: Finnish National Gallery, 2020), pages 3-22, at pages 3-4.
[iii] Murray Pittock, Culloden, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), page 99.
[iv] Ryokan, One Robe, One Bowl, translated by John Stevens, (New York and Tokyo: Weatherhill, 1977), page 72.
[v] Murdo Macdonald, Ruskin’s Triangle, (London: Ma Bibliothèque, 2021), page 94. The words are from the 1773 version of The Songs of Selma, the line breaks are my own.
[vi] Each line is something of a scene direction. I am reminded of Eisenstein’s comments about Milton. On page 52 of the Film Sense he writes: ‘Paradise Lost itself is a first-rate school in which to study montage and audio-visual relationships.’ In his final chapter he takes such thinking further with respect to the battle on the ice from Alexander Nevsky. Sergei Eisenstein, The Film Sense, translated and edited by Jay Leda, (London: Faber and Faber, 1943), pages 52 to 57, and pages 114 to 156. But Macpherson is more like Bergman than Eisenstein: very cinematic, and very northern. You can see the montage, shot by shot.
[vii] James Macpherson, The Poems of Ossian and Related Works, edited by Howard Gaskill and introduced by Fiona Stafford, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). The University of Galway project, Ossian Online can also be recommended.
[viii] Melchior Cesarotti, Poesie di Ossian Figlio de Fingal, Antico Poeta Celtico, (Padova: Giuseppe Comino, dated 1763, but published 1764). Note that Cesarotti, in Italian translation, is the first to adopt the title Poems of Ossian. Macpherson doesn’t adopt that title until 1773.
[ix] Michael Denis, Die Gedichte Ossians, eines alten celtischen Dichters, (Vienna: Trattnern, 1869).
[x] Ewen Cameron, The Fingal of Ossian, An Ancient Galic Poem in Six Books Translated from the Galic by J. Macpherson and Rendered into Heroic Verse, (Warrington: William Eyres, 1776).
[xi] S. Edgerton Brydges, Sonnets and Other Poems, with a Versification of the Six Bards of Ossian, (London: Wilkie, 1785).
[xii] Joseph Alonso Ortiz, Obras de Ossian: poeta del siglo tercero en las montañas de Escocia, (Valladolid: Imprenta de la Viuda e Hijos de Santander, 1788).
[xiii] Mary Potter, Poetry of Nature, comprising, a selection of the most sublime and beautiful apostrophes, histories, songs, elegies, &c. from the works of the Caledonian bards. The typographical execution in a style entirely new, and decorated with the superb ornaments, of the celebrated Caslon. (London: J. P. Cooke, 1789).
[xiv] Byron’s version can be found on pages 229 to 231 of the Coleridge / Prothero edition of his complete works, (London: John Murray, 1898). Note that Byron’s Ossianic Oscar of Alva and The Death of Calmar and Orla: An Imitation of Macpherson’s Ossian can be found in the 1833 Murray edition, edited by Thomas Moore, as can Lachin y Gair and When I Roved a Young Highlander.
[xv] Verse three of Lachin y Gair begins with a quote, marked as such, clearly intended to evoke the words of Ossian, ‘Shades of the dead! Have I not heard your voices / Rise on the night-rolling breath of the gale?’ The verse continues, in distinctly Ossianic vein, even down to the use of the word ‘car’ for ‘chariot’: ‘Surely the soul of the hero rejoices, / And rides on the wind o’er his own Highland vale. / Round Loch na Garr while the stormy mist gathers, / Winter presides in his cold icy car: / Clouds there encircle the forms of my fathers; / They dwell in the tempests of dark Loch na Garr.’
[xvi] The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic with a literal translation into Latin, by the late Robert Macfarlane, A.M., together with a dissertation on the authenticity of the poems, by Sir John Sinclair, Bart. and a translation from the Italian of the Abbè Cesarotti’s dissertation on the controversy respecting the authenticity of Ossian, with notes and a supplemental essay, by John M’Arthur, Published under the sanction of the Highland Society of London. (London: Printed by W. Bulmer & Co. [for] G. & W. Nicol, 1807).
[xvii] Archibald Clerk, The Poems of Ossian in the Original Gaelic with a Literal Translation into English, (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1870).
[xviii] MacGillivray, Last Wolf, in particular ‘Riders on the Storm’, ‘Eccho’, ‘Macpherson’, and ‘MacGhillebhragh an Dùin’, and the notes on pages 123 and 124.
[xix] The note reads: ‘p 232 Oithona basis of Visions of the Daughters of Albion cf Wright Life of WB v. 1 p 59’. The reference is to Thomas Wright’s two volume Life of William Blake, (Olney: Wright, 1929). Along with the passage from Wright, see Raymond Lister, William Blake, (London: Bell, 1968), pages 6, 7, 47. It may be the case that Blake’s use of the name ‘Albion’ also has its immediate inspiration in his reading of Macpherson. See Macpherson’s mention of Albion in his note referring to the name Alpin, in Fingal and other Poems, 1762, page 210.
[xx] See Ruskin’s Triangle, page 99.Macpherson’s influence on Blake’s approach to the form of poetical prose is also of note. Both authors show an interest in what one can call the visually dense prose-poetical page (as does Mary Potter). Blake takes that as far as his print-making abilities will allow in Jerusalem.
[xxi] Édouard Blau (1836-1906), Georges Hartmann (1843-1900), and Paul Milliet (1848-1924).
[xxii] For the significance of the aria to the opera as a whole, see Matthew Franke, ‘The Harp, the Lied and Ossianic Narratives in Massenet’s Werther’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 18, 2021, pages 455 to 474.
[xxiii] For an informed view of Goethe’s translations of Ossian, see Howard Gaskill, ‘”Arise, O magnificent effulgence of Ossian’s soul!”: Werther the Translator in English Translation’, Translation and Literature, Autumn 2013, Vol. 22, No. 3, pages 302 to 321; also see Gaskill’s introduction to the same issue, ‘The Translator’s Ossian’, pages 293 to 301.
[xxiv] Peter France, ‘Fingal in Russia’, in The Reception of Ossian in Europe, edited by Howard Gaskill, (London: Thoemmes, 2004), pages 259-73, at page 259; R. H. Morrison, Poems from Mandelstam, (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1990), page 72.
[xxv] ‘And, in the narrow house of death, / Let Winter round me rave’.
[xxvi] ‘My harp hangs on a blasted branch. The sound of its strings is mournful. — Does the wind touch thee, O harp, or is it some passing ghost! — It is the hand of Malvina! but bring me the harp, son of Alpin; another song shall rise.’ [Macpherson: Berrathon]. ‘Harp of the North! that mouldering long hast hung / On the witch-elm that shades Saint Fillan’s spring / And down the fitful breeze thy numbers flung, / Till envious ivy did around thee cling, / Muffling with verdant ringlet every string,— / O Minstrel Harp, still must thine accents sleep? / Mid rustling leaves and fountains murmuring, / Still must thy sweeter sounds their silence keep, / Nor bid a warrior smile, nor teach a maid to weep?’ [Scott: Lady of the Lake].
[xxvii] Information and recording provided to me by John Purser. See also James Porter, Beyond Fingal’s Cave: Ossian in the Musical Imagination, (Rochester NY: University of Rochester Press, 2019), page 19 note 4. Porter points out that the setting appears as song 119 in volume one of James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum, published between 1787 and 1803, (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1991).
[xxviii] Full title: Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and Translated from the Galic or Erse Language, (Edinburgh: Printed for G. Hamilton and J. Balfour, 1760).
[xxix] Fragments, page 16.
[xxx] Fragments, page 23.
[xxxi] Fragments, page 46.
[xxxii] Fragments, page 50.
[xxxiii] Fragments, page 53.
[xxxiv] Fragments, page 62.
[xxxv] Full title: Fingal, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Six Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian the Son of Fingal. Translated from the Galic Language. (London: Printed for T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt, 1762).
[xxxvi] For illumination of the filiations of Macpherson’s repeated phrase, ‘rider(s) of/on the storm’, see MacGillivray, The Last Wolf of Scotland, second edition, (Pasadena CA: Red Hen / Pighog Press, 2016): (i) epigraph; (ii) ‘Riders on the Storm’, page 92; (iii) note on ‘Riders on the Storm’, pages 123-4.
[xxxvii] First two verses from Fingal Book 3, pages 39 and 46; third verse from Fingal Book 4, page 53.
[xxxviii] Fingal and other Poems: Battle of Lora, page 112.
[xxxix] Fingal and other Poems: Battle of Lora, page 119.
[xl] Fingal and other Poems: Carthon, page 133.
[xli] Fingal and other Poems: Carthon, page 133.
[xlii] Fingal and other Poems: Carthon,pages 141-2. The passage recast here is commonly called ‘Ossian’s Address to the Sun’, see, for example, Byron’s version, written in 1805, which concludes: ‘For Age is dark, unlovely, as the light / Shed by the Moon when clouds deform the night, / Glimmering uncertain as they hurry past. / Loud o’er the plain is heard the northern blast, / Mists shroud the hills, and ‘neath the growing gloom, / The weary traveller shrinks and sighs for home.’
[xliii] Fingal and other Poems: Darthula, page 168.
[xliv] Fingal and other Poems: Carric-Thura, page 200; also see MacGillivray, Last Wolf, page 94.
[xlv] Fingal and other Poems: Carric-Thura, page 193.
[xlvi] Fingal and other Poems: Songs of Selma, page 209.
[xlvii] Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, pages 241 and 242.
[xlviii] Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, page 242.
[xlix] Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, page 243.
[l] Fingal and Other Poems: Oithona, page 244.
[li] Fingal and Other Poems: Oithona, page 246.
[lii] Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, page 247, both verses.
[liii] Fingal and other Poems: Oithona, first verse page 244, second verse page 245, third verse page 248.
[liv] See MacGillivray, Last Wolf, epigraph. Another variant is ‘Ghosts ride on the tempest to-night: / Sweet is their voice between the gusts of wind; / Their songs are of other worlds!’ quoted by Fiona Stafford in her introduction to the 1996 edition of Ossian, page v. It comes from a letter of 29 June 1760 from Thomas Gray to Richard Stonhewer. It is extracted by Gray from work sent to him from Scotland, by Macpherson’s supporter Hugh Blair (see page 471 of the 1996 edition, note 28). This pre-publication work was sent to Gray as verse. It became prose-poetry in due course. Both versions can be found in Malcolm Laing’s edition of Ossian, (Edinburgh: Constable, 1805), volume 2, pages 412 to 442.
[lv] Fingal and other Poems: note to Croma; songs of the five bards, second bard, page 254.
[lvi] Fingal and other Poems: note to Croma; songs of the five bards, fourth bard, page 255.
[lvii] Fingal and other Poems: Berrathon,page 257.
[lviii] Fingal and other Poems: Berrathon,page 259.
[lix] Fingal and other Poems: Berrathon,page 267.
[lx] Fingal and other Poems: Berrathon,page 267.
[lxi] Full title: Temora, An Ancient Epic Poem, In Eight Books: Together with several other Poems, composed by Ossian, the Son of Fingal, (London: Becket and De Hondt, 1763).
[lxii] Temora and other Poems, page 62.
[lxiii] Temora and other Poems, page 67.
[lxiv] Temora and other Poems, page 137. In his introduction to the Mercat Press edition of Ossian published in 1971,John MacQueen notes that ‘Consciously or unconsciously, Tolkien owes a good deal to Macpherson’.