Slate

To begin…

• 1. If someone from another country asked you when Scottish history began, what would you say? • 2. What do you think are the three most significant events in Scottish

history? • 3. How do you feel about being Scottish OR, if you do not think of

yourself as Scottish, how do you feel about living in Scotland?

First reading

• 1. Count how many syllables there are in each line of the poem. • 2. Annotate the poem to show the rhyme scheme. Label the first

rhyming sound as A, and use the same letter at the end of any line where that sound recurs. Label the second rhyming sound as B and use the same letter at the end of any line where that sound recurs. Keep going like this. • HINT you shouldn’t go beyond the letter G!

Context

• Before we start to look at Morgan’s ideas, and at the techniques he uses to put them across, it’s useful to think about two things, the form of poetry he is using here, and the historical context in which he wrote it. • ‘Slate’ is a sonnet, a particular form of poem with certain rules. A

sonnet should have 14 lines, and these lines are usually 10 syllables long. Most sonnets rhyme.

Shakespearean SonnetsABAB CDCD EFEF GG When I do count the clock that tells the time, And see the brave day sunk in hideous night; When I behold the violet past prime, And sable curls, all silver'd o'er with white; When lofty trees I see barren of leaves, Which erst from heat did canopy the herd, And summer's green all girded up in sheaves, Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard; Then of thy beauty do I question make, That thou among the wastes of time must go, Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake, And die as fast as they see others grow; And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

In this kind of sonnet, there is usually a ‘turn’ or called the ‘volta’ between the eighth and ninth lines of the sonnet. This is where there is a change of mood, or tone, or a move to a different part of the argument or idea of the poem. Can you see the volta in the sonnet above?

Other sonnets• There are other rhyme schemes too. The Petrarchan sonnet form goes: ABBA ABBA CD CD CD and you may also find sonnets rhyming AABB CCDD EEFF GG or ABBA CDDC EFFE GG I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed. And on the pedestal these words appear: `My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!' Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away’.

What is the rhyme scheme of this sonnet?

Slate

• You should have noticed that Edwin Morgan’s ‘Slate’ keeps some of the usual sonnet rules, but not all of them: • Every line has exactly 10 syllables • There is a rhyme scheme: ABBA CDDC EFG EFG • The poem doesn’t have a volta: line 8 doesn’t even finish with the end

of a thought or sentence but carries right on into line 9 as the narrator describes how Scotland’s weather and geology interacted.

Context

• ‘Slate’ is the first of a series of 51 poems published together in 1984 as a collection called Sonnets From Scotland. At the start of the book there is an epigraph – a short quotation that is meant to suggest the theme of the book. The epigraph is in German, and when translated means: ‘O changing times! Hope of the people!’ This leads us on to look at when and why Morgan wrote the sonnets.

Scottish History

• The Scotland you grew up in has always had some measure of political power because Scotland has had its own government since 1999. Although some powers were still controlled by the United Kingdom government in London after 1999, Scotland has been able to make many of its own distinctive political decisions since then. • The situation before 1999 was quite different. Scottish politics, and

therefore Scottish life, was under far more control from London. But there were nationalist voices in public life, and a nationalist movement.

• In 1979 Scottish voters were offered a referendum on whether Scotland should have its own Assembly. (When Scottish voters were asked this again in 1997, they voted yes, leading eventually to the political situation we have here now.) The majority of voters in 1979, 51.62%, did support an Assembly, but Scotland did not get one. Why not? Because of the ‘40% rule’. • This was a special condition attached to the result of the vote. The 40%

rule said that it would not be enough just to get a majority of those who voted supporting an Assembly. This rule added an extra condition: that 40% of the electorate – in other words a number equal to 40% of all Scottish people aged 18 or over – had to opt for an Assembly. So, although the vote showed support for an Assembly, Scotland did not get one.

• Edwin Morgan was a nationalist. (When he died in 2010 he left over £900, 000 to the SNP.) He had a strong response to the 1979 Referendum result. This is what he said about the writing of his sonnet series: • ‘[Sonnets from Scotland] began with the idea of writing one or two, I

think as a kind of reaction, probably, to the failure of the Referendum to give Scotland political devolution and any idea of a Scottish Assembly. (…) It's a kind of comeback, an attempt to show that Scotland was there, was alive and kicking (…) and that one mustn't write it off just because the Assembly had not come into being.’ • He also said the sonnet sequence: • ‘represents both a determination to go on living in Scotland and a

hope that there might be some political change . . . I feel the present moment of Scottish history very strongly and I want to acknowledge it.’

Read again

You’ve read the poem at least once already, but you’ve also learned quite a lot of material about sonnets, and politics. Read the poem again and see if you can work out: 1. What is happening? 2. Who is speaking? 3. Are there any words you need an explanation for?

Slate

The opening line is a bit odd, because it says: ‘There is no beginning’ which seems to be about the beginning of Scotland. • Why do these first 4 words stand out in comparison to the rest of the

poem?

Why present tense?

• Morgan uses present tense to make Scotland seem eternal. Writing at a time when politics made Scotland seem limited, not even important enough to get an Assembly let alone an independent government, he makes Scotland seem mighty and powerful. Morgan is able to depict his country as almost supernatural, something without a start and therefore perhaps something that will never come to an end. By using present tense he gives Scotland a sense of huge grandeur and importance.

Message

• Usually we work through the poem before discussing the message at the end. However we are going to work backwards with ‘Slate’ because we are going to be assessing how Morgan’s techniques support his message.• Message: how much Scotland matters.

The narrators

• The speaking voice in the poem says, ‘We saw Lewis/ laid down, when there was not much but thunder’. Morgan makes an unusual choice here, using a first person plural narrator, a voice that speaks on behalf of a group and says ‘we’, not just the much more common ‘I’.

So who are they?Whoever the narrator is, he or she and his companions were around millions of years ago. ‘Memory of men?’ asks the narrator in line 11. ‘That was to come.’

The narrators

• So we’ve got a pre-human world seen by observers who watched for millions of years, while all this geological change happened, and long before humans came along. • Most critics who’ve studied this poem would say that the narrator

and his companions are witnesses from another world, aliens. This is one of the ways Morgan makes Scotland seem important: Scotland matters so much that massively advanced beings travel across the universe to see our country being born and bear witness to this when there are no humans to do so.

Personification

• As we’ve seen already, this poem is set far too long ago for there to be any human characters, and the alien characters are only here to narrate, not to involve themselves in what they see. • That doesn’t mean there is no life in the poem. Morgan personifies

Scotland itself, giving it human actions. He also embodies Scotland, giving it a living body, so that it is not just a chunk of rock.

Your turn

Skim the poem and find:1. Two body parts named in the poem 2. Three things Scotland did

Embodied

• Scotland is embodied. There’s a ‘rough back’ in line 6 and the poundings of the sea are ‘shouldered off’ in line 10. Scotland has a stomach because it can feel ‘empty hunger’ in line 12 and it has ‘heels’ to kick with in the final line.

Personified

• Scotland is personified, given human actions. Its seas ‘plunder’ geological faults in line 3 the way Vikings plunder a defenceless village. ‘Drumlins blue as/ bruises were grated off like nutmeg’ in lines 4 and 5. • (A drumlin is a sort of elongated oval hill made of deposits left by

retreating glaciers – imagine a hard-boiled egg cut in half from its pointy end to its fat end, with one of the halves laid down on its flat side, if you want to picture the shape.)

Simile & word choice

• The simile, with its mention of ‘bruises’, suggests that the creation of Scotland involved some pain.• Word choice of ‘plunder’ also implies conflict. Morgan is saying that

you cannot make a country without going through pain and difficulty, so he’s addressing the political situation of the 1980s, as well as the geological one of millions of years ago. • All this use of embodiment and personification supports Morgan’s

overall theme. He is saying that even without people, Scotland is alive and vibrant, full of energy and purpose.

Sound Effects

• Morgan uses many sound effect techniques in ‘Slate’. • He uses alliteration, the technique where two or more words near

each other begin with the same sound. For example we see the words ‘streak,’ ‘strike’ and ‘stroke’ used in lines 7 and 8. • He uses assonance, the technique where words near each other

contain the same vowel sound. For example we see the words ‘much,’ and ‘thunder’ used in line 2. • He uses rhyme. For example we see the words ‘thunder’ and

‘plunder,’ used in at the end of lines 3 and 4.

Your turn

• Find as many more examples as you can of Morgan using each of the three techniques mentioned above. • HINT - some of the rhymes he uses are internal, which means you will

find words rhyming within the same line of the poem rather than finding rhyming words at the ends of nearby lines.

Sound effects and the message

• All these sound effects draw our attention, and also give us a sensory experience: we don’t just read the poem with our eyes but also almost hear it. This has the effect of making us feel more involved in the poem. The sound effects support Morgan’s overall message about the vital importance of Scotland by making it feel lively, vibrant and noisy, and by making Scotland feel like something we just have to pay attention to.

Your turn – Scottish dialect

• Morgan uses two particularly Scottish geographical terms in this poem. Find them.

These two words are in fact the only Scottish dialect words in the poem. Morgan uses them as a way of saying that English is not a powerful enough language to define or explain what Scotland is. They support his argument because if he is saying the English language cannot fully explain Scotland, he can also suggest that England as a nation should not be able to define and explain Scotland’s political future.

Wildness and energyWe already saw suggestions of violence in Morgan’s use of words like ‘bruises’ and ‘plunder’. There are other examples of the writer using wild and energetic word choice. Find:1. a word in line 2 that suggests wild weather 2. a word in line 3 that suggests extreme geology 3. a word in line 7 that means to leave a mark on 4. a word in line 7 that means to hit 5. a phrase in line 8 that accepts things will not happen gently 6. a word in line 8 that suggests rough movement 7. a word in line 9 that suggests wild weather 8. a word in line 10 that suggests physically rejecting something 9. a word in line 13 that suggests energetic creativity

Message and volta

• The narrators ‘like/ to think’ this is how a country comes into being (lines 6 and 7) and they ‘laughed as Staffa cooled’ (line 4). So, by using all this wild and energetic word choice and having the speaker’s voice approve of what the alien observers saw, Morgan is again supporting his overall idea. When a country matters as much as Scotland, we should accept that making it will not be easy or painless, as the result of the 1979 Referendum showed. • This might also be why his sonnet has no volta, no turning point after

line 8. Making a nation, either geologically or politically, isn’t simple. There won’t be one clear moment when everything changes; it’s a long, slow, and sometimes difficult, process.

The end, and the future

This poem starts, and ends, a long time ago, with humanity still ‘to come’. But the end does consider that human future. Here are lines 11 to 14 again: Memory of men! That was to come. Great in their empty hunger these surroundings threw walls to the sky, the sorry glory of a rainbow. Their heels kicked flint, chalk, slate. • Morgan packs lots of ideas into these four lines, and again what he says

keeps adding support to his message about the value and importance of Scotland and about Scottish politics.

The end, and the message

• ‘empty hunger’ - The newly created Scotland is empty and hungry without us. A nation isn’t really made by geology, a nation is made by its people and by what they do. • ‘the sorry glory/ of a rainbow’ -A rainbow is a glorious and hopeful thing, but a

sorry one too because you only get a rainbow with rain. Morgan uses the metaphor of the rainbow to admit that the hope of a more independent future for Scotland comes after the failed referendum • ‘Their heels kicked flint, chalk, slate.’ -The expression to kick your heels means to

be waiting, perhaps impatiently. Scotland is still waiting for a better future. • ‘slate’- Although this is the title of the poem it only appears in the actual text as

the final word. Sometimes things only come together at the last minute; it may take a long time for Scotland’s destiny to be fulfilled.

Independence

• Throughout ‘Slate’, everything fits together to achieve the same purpose. Whatever Morgan writes reminds us again and again of how valuable he thinks Scotland is. It is because he values Scotland so highly that he believes the country deserves political independence. • You might totally disagree with him. You might be passionately against

Scottish independence. You might love Scotland so much that you want to protect it from trying to strike out alone in the big bad world. That doesn’t matter. You don’t need to support Scottish independence after reading ‘Slate’, any more than you need to become an avid Christian after reading ‘Good Friday’. All you need to do, as you should after studying any poem, is to understand what the writer is saying, and how he says it.

Homework

• What is Edwin Morgan’s message in ‘Slate’, and how does he portray it?

Write a critical essay answering the above question. Remember to use the TAGT and PEAR structures taught in class. You should attempt to do this in less than an hour – that’s how much time you will have in your exam.

Take two pages in your jotter and mark it up into a grid. For every technique, fill in a quotation from the poem, and explain the effect it has on the reader. For a grid about ‘Slate’ you need to work with the following techniques:

• deal separately with the connotations of each of these expressions: plunder, bruises, empty hunger • sonnet form • opening line • 1st person plural narration• Volta • word choice suggesting wild energy • alliteration • Assonance • personification embodiment simile • Scottish words metaphor

Scottish Context QuestionsFirst, re-read ‘Slate’ and answer these questions: 1. Show how any two of the poet’s uses of word choice effectively contribute to the main ideas or concerns of the poem. 4 2. Show how any two of the poet’s uses of sound effect techniques effectively contribute to the main ideas or concerns of the poem. 4 3. How effective do you find any two aspects of the last four lines as a conclusion to the poem? Your answer may deal with ideas and/ or language. 4 4. With close textual reference, show how the ideas and/ or language of this poem are similar to another poem or poems by Morgan that you have read. 8