Keep Scotland

You can keep Scotland,
Aye! That’s no light bequeathment,
I ken. For I give you the Eagle Owl, the stag,
I give you the Bens, even.
As God gave them.

But that God is a hard God,
His palm the stiff rod that
Spanks the wayward bairn.
I cannot bend that way.

No! I’ll stay a Shropshire lad
And you can keep Scotland, just
leave me the Shire.
For my God is the soft Hand – blessed sacrament –
that cradles the new-hatched Tawny,
That clutches the buttock, the heart.



Grayson Ellis (c) 1963
Reprinted, with permission, from ‘Pikey’



When I’m invited to give lectures on Grayson’s oeuvre, or if I’m leading student discussion groups, I often start with Keep Scotland.

It is an early poem and, while Grayson’s styles and preoccupations varied widely over the following decades, Keep Scotland hints at many of the themes that resonate throughout his later, more mature work. Nature obviously, but more importantly the complex questions about the relationship between the religious and the corporeal that have occupied Grayson throughout his life, and the answers to which he seems only to glimpse in his beloved Shropshire. If there can be any ‘answers’, that is!

It is a great shame that in the late 1990s the English Independence Party adopted the opening line of the poem as a slogan in their campaign for a separate English Parliament. Grayson himself has shunned organised politics throughout his life and is certainly not anti-Scottish. Indeed, his admiration for the landscape and wildlife of that great, ancient country is obvious for all to see.