It’s Never Over

Scientist Julian Huxley’s poem on the Scottish spirit

Holyrood by Julian S. Huxley

I spent some time, in and after reading it, wondering what this poem was. It was a Scottish poem, of course. A poem on Scottish themes. On the flowering and subsuming and fall of a great kingdom. The extinction, and more than once the failed revival, of a royal line.

And about the time that has passed over the old Edinburgh stones, and the hope that never dies, and the uses the living have for the dead, just as all trees in nature — even the stunted ones, even the unpretty ones, even the ones whose wood is of no use to man — have some manner of evolutionary function.

Julian Huxley, of course, was a scientist. He believed, perhaps, that all historical dynasties, all historical kingdoms, had a purpose. Because nature abhors a vacuum, and those now gone once filled one. They must have done so for a reason.

What does Huxley discuss in his poem? The flower of Scotland, the flowering of Scotland’s best. Great king David, for instance: a man who must have been led by the hand by the gods themselves. Later in life, after this poem had appeared during his youth, Huxley was an evolutionary biologist of an atheistic trend. Although he seemed also, it must be conceded, to believe in what one might call para-physical phenomena. Did something supernatural possess Scotland’s kings and its doomed queens? Did something beyond mankind whisper in their ear? Huxley’s own researches indicates not; his poetry suggests, at least in places, precisely the opposite.

But let us go back to the court of good king David. What do we see? A time of hardship, of course, a time of fearful odds.

And a time, perhaps therefore, of abbeys. They grew all over the kingdom — these fortresses of stone and of paper. These fortresses of prayer.

It was in the abbeys, Huxley says, where the manuscripts were written — where all knowledge was preserved and kept. And from which what mattered of the country, what mattered in the country, flowed out and spread.

And it was one of those abbeys, named for it, that the palace of the Holy Rood was built. It was this abbey that held the apartments of kings and queens. It was from this place that history did unfold.

We spent much time in this poem, or rather Huxley does, talking of a long-gone world. The world of the medieval Scots. A hard world, a world without much mercy save from the divine, and tarrying. A world of failure, or bitterness, of brutal overturnings, of losses that many a nation, it’s implied, could never bear.

But it was a land where, as in the nostalgic English Victorian writings of the Olden Time, happiness and contentment flowed through the settlements like wine. And everyone knew their place. And everyone knew also that they had but one objective shared between all of them. A time not of plenty, not of full food buckets, but full hearts.

The potency of this image must vary. Some people find it cosy and heartfelt and true. They want to go back. They most desperately want to go back.

But others — and I confess it here, I’m among them — think this very idea absurd, unlikely, even ahistorical.

At least in matters of history.

But this is poetry. It’s poetry, after all. And it’s still poetry when Huxley laments the death of David. And it’s poetry when he summons an image of Mary, Queen of Scots — young and fresh with a heart filled not with bitterness but with hope. A heart blackened by the death, just as her hands were stained by the blood, of David Rizzio, her private secretary who was murdered most foully, as all readers of the story must recall.

What follows is yet another round of bitterness. Another round of failure. More needless waste and want and privation. Scotland without primacy, without import. A plaything of a stronger neighbour, a small, unimportant land even when Scotch kings sat in St James’s.

And so the story goes on. Skipping the English civil war — or whatever we are meant to call it this year — skipping all of that.

Until something new and different emerges, a little time after the Restoration. Not the first pretender, following on the heels of exiled James II.

No, not the old pretender, but the young. The young man, drunk as Huxley has it on the wine of victory, rallied the men who had not stopped believing in their country. Whose hope, unlike their bodies, would never die.

And laughing, Prince Charlie brought them south to die. To fall, the flower of Scotland’s youth. While he yet fled into another land, another exile.

Huxley’s poem is not despairing. Of course it is not. This is a prize-poem. And prize-poems are not apt to be bitter and low. Who would vote for something that holds out no hope, no hope at all?

And so this poem that depicts the failure of the old idea of Scotland, the absorbing of one country into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, suggests that through those places like Holyrood, even for atheists, ghosts walk. And what was lost may yet return. And the spirit of the land may be exultant. And that it’s not over, it’s never over, while there are men to fight for the land or to memorialise its long-gone dead in some manner of song.