NOCTURNE
George Square, Glasgow, 2 A.M.
The City's clamour now has ebb'd away,
And silence settles o'er the dusky Square,
Save for a cough, sepulchral, here and there,
From shivering forms, that wait the coming day;
Hunger and Houselessness, without one ray
Of hope to chase the shadow of Despair,
Keep weary vigil in the wintry air,
Each heart to dread Despondency a prey.
Proudly the Civic Palace, over all,
Looms through the night, and, with a sculptur'd frown,
Meets the dull gaze of Want's lack-lustre eye:
Till slowly, like some vast funereal pall,
The chill, dense curtain of the mist creeps down,
Shrouding the splendour, and - the Misery!
---------
The recent photograph of the first The Big Issue in Scotland being sold outside Glasgow City Chambers, can be cause to commemorate a forgotten Scottish poet who eighty years ago thought the opulence of this same building was in shameful contrast to the poverty of those like himself to be found sitting on the benches opposite in George Square through many a cold winter's night.
The poet was Roger Quin, who was born in Dumfries in 1850. His Irish namesake father had come to Scotland illiterate and worked as a navvy; but had taught himself to read and write, loved Burns poetry, and issued a book of his own poems in Scots in 1857, writing that the Lowland Scots themselves did not appreciate sufficiently the poetic strength of their own dialect. The father ended his days as manager of a travelling library: his son Roger - one of a family of twelve - he managed to place in Dumfries Academy. The boy left in due course to spend his life as a clerk in Dumfries, in Galashiels, and for some years in a railway office in Glasgow.
But around the turn of the century Quin left his Glasgow job and took to the road, busking for his keep with a flute and a concertina. He gave recitations of his own work, something for which he had been known when a leading light in amateur dramatics in Galashiels. He lived rough, at one time living in Dick Hatterick's Cave at Wigtown, eating off shellfish on the shore. In the winter he would head for Glasgow and came to know the George Square vigils of those who had not gained entrance to the models, or "Rose's Homes" as they were known. He composed a satiric allegory about a butterfly entering Glasgow seeking shelter in a "Rose", which was told to "scarper and git" because it didn't have any money to hand the "Rose" for its shelter. As a preface to the poem, Quin wrote this bitter attack:
The following verses were written in one of those Glasgow "Models" which have within recent years sprung into existence through the exigencies of modern Civilisation. With a fine irony they are called "Homes for Working Men," because, as I presume, they lack every element of comfort which is associated with the word "Home," and because "Working Men" (with singularly few exceptions) give them a wide berth. These huge Caravanseries of Misery, which constitute no mean asset in the Corporation's financial receipts, are so many plague-spots on the boasted fame of Glasgow as a City of Light and Leading - stumbling-blocks which have been deliberately set down in the path of the City's progress.
And yet, although they would not be permitted to exist for a single day in benighted Germany (in Berlin for instance) they are apparently justifying their existence by "flourishing", in a monetary and strictly Glaswegian sense. They will consequently continue to figure proudly in the Financial Returns of the City until some distinguished foreigner stumbles into one of them some night in a fog, on his way to a civic banquet in George Square.
And what of the denizens of these "Homes"? It would take the pen of a Jack London or the brush of a Doré to depict them. Seen through the fetid fumes which serve to make darkness visible, the human shapes which wander listlessly about or stumble against each other through sheer "driftage," resemble nothing so much as a "living picture" of Dante's Inferno. Here are no touches of colour - all is one dread kaleidoscope - one drab nocturne of hopeless, torpid inanity.
There are those in Glasgow to-day (every day, and every night) whose vitality has reached such an appallingly low ebb through hunger and privation - that they are on the borderland of being.
The word "borderland" is important. Quin's first book of poems in which these words appeared was called The Borderland, and other Poems, published when the poet had reached sixty years of age. But the title poem was in praise of the
Borders country where Quin liked to wander and where he had been brought up. So there were two "borderlands" in the book and in Quin's life - the one he loved in the summer in the south of Scotland, and that "borderland of being" which he shared with the Glasgow homeless some winter nights.
Only the persistence of admirers brought Quin's work into print in the first place. He himself never wrote his poems down, except in occasional letters to friends. One such friend decided to send "The Borderland" to TP's Magazine, and this caused enough interest for the Glasgow Herald to receive and publish his "To a Skylark Singing over Barnhill Poorhouse", in 1907. This caused a bigger stir, with letters of interest. But when Quin was finally persuaded to publish a collection a few years later, he apologised in his preface for the delay in publication, and the volume's lack of chronological sequence: "I am solely to blame in both cases... I have never written a line with a view to immediate or ultimate publication. When the idea of a Book was first entertained I had not a scrap of manuscript in my possession. I had consequently to rake the cells of my memory, and furnish my publishers piecemeal (as it were) and at irregular intervals, with such scraps of verse as I could remember."
He was turned down for the job of doorman at both the Mitchell Library and at Glasgow University, on the basis that neither institution trusted him to stay in the job once summer came. The president of the Glasgow Ballad Club, George Eyre-Todd, recalled how Quin once told him he was starving. After buying him a meal, Eyre Todd invited Quin to the Ballad Club meeting at the Grosvenor Restaurant. But as they went through "the well-lit portals" of the meeting place, Quin asked to keep his overcoat on inside, as "He had no coat or jacket underneath".
A cottage with furniture supplied by friends was made available for Quin at Yair between Galashiels and Selkirk. Here he was able to stay, at least in winter. When his health finally failed, he died a year or so after admission to a charity old-folks' home in Dumfries. He had published a second collection by this time, Midnight at Yarrow, of 1918. The title-poem in fact brought together his love of the Nature he felt close to in the Borders country, his love of Scottish Literature, and his rejection of the comfortable literary lifestyle of such as the Glasgow Ballad Club. The poem recalled a night spent sleeping in the open at Yarrow near James Hogg's monument. It can be taken as the song of a homeless man whose home was the planet Earth.
What makes he here - this homeless tramp?
No tripper's sleek content is his,
Whose furrowed features bear the stamp
Of pleasure's sad antithesis.
No tourist this, with feelings blent,
Who - inly glad - here fain would grieve;
Trying a fresh experiment:-
The luxury of make-believe;
Nor poet of the facile pen,
Word spinning in a reek divine,
Which floats about his cosy den,
From fumes of after-dinner wine;
But one who, far from fashion's train,
Follows the call that lures him on,
In Nature's arms to soothe his pain;
In Yarrow's sadness lose his own.
Child of the old Earth Mother, he
Has wandered far from street and mart;
And here - in her own sanctuary -
Creeps closer to the mother's heart.