Loch Thom by WS Graham

Written in the poet’s mid 50s, often a time of reckoning when more of life is behind you than ahead, Loch Thom is a great Scottish landscape poem but one which defies expectation of “Scottish landscape” – this is not the Highlands or islands, but a bleak reservoir in the central belt.

In plain language, but beautifully ordered lines, it brings together memory, loss and acceptance, delivered by the landscape of his youth. It is restrained and very moving.

By his 56th year, Graham had long left his native Greenock and was living in Cornwall, often in poverty. This return visit to a boyhood haunt, the loch in the hills above town, reawakens fond memories (“Recovering” is his word. In what sense? To find again or to heal?). The memories (the jammy scones) are not nostalgic but factual. Factual also is the statement that his parents are dead now, and that the loch is “a colder body of water than I remember”. The poem sounds unemotional and is all the more moving because of that.

WS Graham wrote in English, in England but somehow he managed to retain his Scots accent in his work. The syntax is Scots – see that second stanza. It’s almost conversational. As for the tone, Graham uses the word “sad” but it’s more than sad.

There is a grave profundity, a poignancy articulated through the curlews’ cries, and the grouse and the cold water. Go back, say the grouse, but we can’t turn back time. Life hustles us on. “Farewell Loch Thom” he says, perhaps forever.

Somewhat neglected in his lifetime, since Graham died in 1986 his reputation has grown steadily, and deservedly, within Scotland and beyond.

I.

Just for the sake of recovering

I walked backward from fifty-six Quick years of age wanting to see, And managed not to trip or stumble To find Loch Thom and turned round To see the stretch of my childhood Before me. Here is the loch. The same Long-beaked cry curls across

The heather-edges of the water held Between the hills a boyhood’s walk Up from Greenock. It is the morning.

And I am here with my mammy’s Bramble jam scones in my pocket. The Firth is miles and I have come Back to find Loch Thom maybe In this light does not recognise me.

This is a lonely freshwater loch. No farms on the edge. Only

Heath grouse-moor stretching Down to Greenock and One Hope Street or stretching away across

Into the blue moors of Ayrshire.

2.

And almost I am back again Wading in the heather down to the edge To sit. The minnows go by in shoals Like iron-filings in the shallows.

My mother is dead. My father is dead And all the trout I used to know Leaping from their sad rings are dead. 3.

I drop my crumbs into the shallow Weed for the minnows and pinheads. You see that I will have to rise

And turn round and get back where My running age will slow for a moment To let me on. It is a colder

Stretch of water than I remember.

The curlew’s cry travelling still

Kills me fairly. In front of me

The grouse flurry and settle. GOBACK GOBACK GOBACK FAREWELL LOCH THOM.