‘Skye and Raasay as Symbol in the Poetry of Sorley MacLean’

Sorley MacLean’s poetry would be painfully abstract if it were not for his use of landscape as symbol. It is the landscape that gives form and sensuousness to his ideas and that lets him communicate them as emotion. He circles between the abstract and the specific. Skye is recognisably itself and a terrible roller-coaster of self-loathing, exhilaration, tenderness and despair. To separate MacLean’s art from the landscape would be to separate form and content.