Alasdair à Gleanna Garadh by Sileas na Ceapaich

For centuries one of the roles of Gaelic poets was to sustain a way of looking at the world.

What was valued or honoured, what was disapproved of, how one understands the relationship between people, the past, and the natural world.

The need for this sustenance would become most acute at moments of crisis, particularly the death of a clan chief. The poet’s job was to make sure this change was for the better: to celebrate the virtues of the dead, to chivvy the living into emulating them.

The elegy by Sìleas na Ceapaich (c1660-c1729) for the Jacobite Alasdair Macdonnell of Glengarry is a stunning example of such symbolic celebratory poems (It is also quite long – for space we could only publish an extract). Alasdair is a stag, a lion, the blackthorn, Ben Nevis; he is not the hated aspen. With his death, though, this “nobility” risks being lost, if his son doesn’t maintain the traditions. The poem presents a world at a turning point. Sìleas – herself of an aristocratic, Jacobite background, the Macdonalds of Keppoch – had a clear sense of the risk to Highland way of life following the failed uprisings of 1715 and 1719, the pressures to assimilate, to fall into (Hanoverian) line. And in elegising Alasdair eloquently, vehemently Sìleas offers a defiant message of political resistance, and a rich celebration of the Gaelic worldview.