Sorley MacLean

From 1936 to 1939 I became, if a poet, a very different one from what my pre-1936 writings indicated. My mother's long illness in 1936, its recurrence in 1938, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the progressive decline of my father's business in the thirties, my meeting with an Irish girl in 1937, my rash leaving of Skye for Mull late in 1937, and Munich in 1938, and always the steady unbearable decline of Gaelic, made those years for me of difficult choice, and the tensions of these years I confirmed my self-expression in poetry, not in action.

Clearly MacGill-Eain has a lot to contend with. To complicate matters further he has what he often refers to obliquely as a ‘traumatic personal experience' which was to preoccupy him from 1939 to 1944. This period could be called Somhairle MacGillEain's 'war years'. The ‘trauma' was in fact caused by his declaration of love to another woman in late December 1939, whereupon the woman told him she was incapable of having full sexual relations as a result of an operation. This was to have a prolific effect on MacGill-Eain's poetry; by March 1940 he had written Dàin do Eimhir numbers XXXVII - LV. A year later from late June to early July 1941 he wrote LVI - LX. These poems form the bulk of the series called ‘An Tràigh Thathaich’ (‘the Haunted Ebb') when included in later collections of MacGill-Eain's work.

In late July 1941, MacGill-Eain was informed that the woman in question had in fact been lying. The knowledge of this deception was to confound MacGill-Eain at first; later he became angry at his own foolishness, and this led to crises of confidence regarding his own poetry, and, indeed, poetry as a whole. Reflecting on this period of his life, MacGill-Eain wrote, with a hint of ironic humour, that he could not decide ‘whether the situation was really tragical or a farce'. Dàin do Eimhir (DE) suggests that, in MacGill-Eain's art at least, the tragic aspect predominates.