The Mountain by Iain MacDonald

The Mountain

How many years since I scaled the mountain
And felt as if I was king of the word?

My thoughts went awry in the rarefied air,
So they straitjacketed, stretchered me down.

After years stumbling amid the foothills,
Shielding my eyes from that difficult peak,

I’m ready now to retrace the climb,
This time retaining my reason and rhyme.

IAIN MACDONALD

…………………………………………………

This is a brief, deceptively simple poem about writer’s block – or, perhaps more accurately, poet’s block, since the writer’s difficulty emerges in the ‘rarefied air’ of poetry. Poets for whom poems are, in Thomas Hardy’s phrase, ‘moments of vision’ face the challenge of reconciling the visionary self with the everyday self that must make its way in the world.

The poem enacts its own prediction: after a period of mental anguish and the subsequent fear of mental anguish, the poet declares himself ‘ready now’ to write again, and here is the proof. And while the poem may appear to proceed by means of plain statement, there’s a verbal dexterity at work. The wordplay of ‘king of the word’ (where ‘king of the world’ is expected) signals immediately that mountain climbing is functioning as a metaphor for creative writing; ‘rarefied air’ nicely extends the metaphor, denoting the thinness of air at high altitudes while connoting, disparagingly, the aloofness of ‘being a poet’ – perhaps more as self-criticism (the inflation of feeling king-like) than a dismissal of poetry itself. One might picture the poet struggling for breath in a mountainous landscape painted by Caspar David Friedrich. Those are dizzily impressive heights to stay sane in. Mountain-climbers aren’t literally ‘straitjacketed’ when strapped to a stretcher, but the use of the word makes the theme of mental torment even more explicit.

Perhaps there is an echo here of one of the despairing sonnets of the 19th-century poet-priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins:

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall
Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed.

It wouldn’t be a surprise: Hopkins is a central figure for MacDonald, whose poems show an affinity also with the work of Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, as well as the Americans, Robert Frost and Hart Crane; at times they display an angry outspokenness like that of another poet from Dumfries and Galloway, Hugh MacDiarmid.

Speaking of anger, who are the ‘they’ that ‘straitjacketed’ the poet? One suspects it is the conventionalising forces of society that are the (vague) targets here. The words of a different sort of poet, the singer-songwriter Van Morrison, come to mind:

What happened to a sense of wonder
On yonder hillside getting dim?
Why didn’t they leave us alone?
Why couldn’t we just be ourselves?

But the next lines suggest that this accusation is, at least partly, a projection; MacDonald acknowledges that during his barren spell he was limiting himself by ‘Shielding [his] eyes from that difficult peak’. The journey is a spiritual one that starts with a statement of difficulty, moves to the projection of blame then an acceptance of responsibility and finally a determination to do better.

That determination isn’t to start again somewhere else, but to ‘retrace the climb’: so, he was on the right track all along. It’s not the journey that matters so much as the means of journeying: how we live affects how, and if, we write.

The poem is bracketed by two time periods: the first line’s looking back (‘How many years’), and the last line’s looking forwards (‘This time’, which are the words in the line to be read with the most emphasis). A subtle wordplay is in evidence again, in ‘retaining my reason and rhyme’, which inverts the order of the two nouns normally encountered together as ‘without rhyme or reason’. An expression that conveys meaninglessness is turned on its head to express the longing to live meaningfully.

‘The Mountain’ feels like a poem of the second half of life, a self-directed call to live more authentically – not sedately, but in a creative tension between reason and vision, rationality and poetry, with poetry (‘rhyme’) having the last word.