...writes Kirsten MacQuarrie.
As the author of eleven full poetry collections and four volumes of autobiography, (in addition to two children’s books and numerous paradigm-shifting academic texts on Blake, Coleridge, Yeats, and other fellow great poets – although she would have been too modest to count herself amongst their number) – I consider Dr Kathleen Raine to be one of the greatest, most underrated poets of the twentieth century.
Inspired by the luminosity of the natural world, Raine’s poetry was intricately connected to her Scottish heritage. Collections like Arts Council Poetry Prize-winning, The Year One, The Hollow Hill, The Lost Country, and On a Deserted Shore (an epic poetic sequence of life, love and loss), draw deeply on the physical and psychological landscapes that she discovered, or rather re-discovered, since so much of her work was informed by a sense of perpetually renewed spiritual tradition north of the border.
Yet, while admirable efforts have been made to honour Raine in Great Bavington, the Northumbrian hamlet where she was raised during the First World War, and in Ullswater, the Lake District sanctuary where she sought shelter with her own children during WWII, I believe that Scotland can and must do more to cherish, celebrate, and champion Raine’s creative legacy.
For the relatively rare Scots who have encountered Raine’s name, it is all-too-often as a footnote in the life of author-naturalist Gavin Maxwell, with whom she shared an extraordinary if torturously volatile twenty-year Platonic partnership. Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water became a world-famous book and later film. It was outsold in its year of publication only by Churchill’s memoirs and the Bible, yet how many readers realise that Ring took its title from one of Raine’s poems?
The Marriage of Psyche
He has married me with a ring, a ring of bright water
Whose ripples travel from the heart of the sea,
He has married me with a ring of light, the glitter
Broadcast on the swift river…
Deploying the narrative framework of the ‘curse’ of a ‘poetess’, ostensibly cast as the rowan tree outside the Highland cottage they had shared, Maxwell’s final book Raven Seek Thy Brother blamed Raine for an inventive range of misfortunes: from a failed marriage and childlessness to bankruptcy, otter bites, a car crash, and a libel suit, plus in postscript a devastating house fire that occurred when Raine was some 600 miles away.
By the following decade, a posthumous documentary film about Maxwell would refuse even to state Raine’s name, crediting the actress who played her only as ‘the rowan tree woman’.
My debut novel Remember the Rowan seeks to tackle the reductive, misogynistic injustice that has seen Raine written out of her own story in Scotland. In a creative re-imagining of how some of her most iconic mid-century work came into being, I want to amplify Raine’s voice for a new generation and play my part in shining a light on the woman whose poetry and passion have been hidden for too long behind Ring of Bright Water.
Remember her name! Kathleen Raine.
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