SLATE
This poem, like ‘Hyena’ and ‘Winter’, deals with nature, or the natural environment.
Getting in Before you read the poem, think about these questions:
1. If someone from another country asked you when Scottish history began, what would
you say?
2. What do you think are the three most significant events in Scottish history?
3. How do you feel about being Scottish OR, if you do not think of yourself as a Scot, how
do you feel about living in Scotland?
Meeting the text You are about to read the poem. You’ll need paper copy in front of you to work
with. As you read it for the first time, do these things:
1. Count how many syllables there are in each line of the poem.
2. Annotate the poem to show the rhyme scheme. Label the first rhyming sound as A, and
use the same letter at the end of any line where that sound recurs. Label the second
rhyming sound as B and use the same letter at the end of any line where that sound
recurs. Keep going like this. HINT you shouldn’t go beyond the letter G!
SLATE
There is no beginning. We saw Lewis
laid down, when there was not much but thunder
and volcanic fires; watched long seas plunder
faults; laughed as Staffa cooled. Drumlins blue as
bruises were grated off like nutmeg; bens
and a great glen, gave a rough back we like
to think the ages must streak, surely strike,
seldom stroke, but raised and shaken, with tens
of thousands of rains, blizzards, sea-poundings
shouldered off into night and memory.
Memory of men! That was to come. Great
in their empty hunger these surroundings
threw walls to the sky, the sorry glory
of a rainbow. Their heels kicked flint, chalk, slate.
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Thinking through Share your answers to the ‘Meeting the text’ questions you were given at the
start of the poem.
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Some context for ‘Slate’
Before we start to look at Morgan’s ideas, and at the techniques he uses to put them across, it’s
useful to think about two things, the form of poetry he is using here, and the historical context in
which he wrote it.
The sonnet form
‘Slate’ is a sonnet, a particular form of poem with certain rules. A sonnet should have 14 lines, and
these lines are usually 10 syllables long. Most sonnets rhyme. One rhyme scheme goes like this:
ABAB CDCD EFEF GG
This is called the Shakespearian sonnet, because he wrote so many of them. Here’s one, his
sonnet number 12:
When I do count the clock that tells the time,
And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;
When I behold the violet past prime,
And sable curls, all silver'd o'er with white;
When lofty trees I see barren of leaves,
Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,
And summer's green all girded up in sheaves,
Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard;
Then of thy beauty do I question make,
That thou among the wastes of time must go,
Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake,
And die as fast as they see others grow;
And nothing 'gainst Time's scythe can make defence
Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.
In this kind of sonnet, there is usually a ‘turn’ or called the ‘volta’ between the eighth and ninth
lines of the sonnet. This is where there is a change of mood, or tone, or a move to a different part
of the argument or idea of the poem. Can you see the volta in the sonnet above?
There are other rhyme schemes too. The Petrarchan sonnet form goes
ABBA ABBA CD CD CD
and you may also find sonnets rhyming
AABB CCDD EEFF GG
or
ABBA CDDC EFFE GG
In fact the sonnet form can be very flexible. This next one was written by Percy Bysshe Shelley in
1817:
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Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: ‘Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away’.
What is the rhyme scheme of Shelley’s sonnet?
You should have noticed that Edwin Morgan’s ‘Slate’ keeps some of the usual sonnet rules, but
not all of them:

Every line has exactly 10 syllables

There is a rhyme scheme: ABBA CDDC EFG EFG

The poem doesn’t have a volta: line 8 doesn’t even finish with the end of a thought or
sentence but carries right on into line 9 as the narrator describes how Scotland’s weather
and geology interacted.
‘Slate’ is the first of a series of 51 poems published together in 1984 as a collection called Sonnets
From Scotland. At the start of the book there is an epigraph – a short quotation that is meant to
suggest the theme of the book. The epigraph is in German, and when translated means: ‘O
changing times! Hope of the people!’ This leads us on to look at when and why Morgan wrote the
sonnets.
The 1979 independence referendum
If you are a school pupil studying ‘Slate’ for your National 5 exam then you were born in or after
1998. The Scotland you grew up in has always had some measure of political power because
Scotland has had its own government since 1999. Although some powers were still controlled by
the United Kingdom government in London after 1999, Scotland has been able to make many of
its own distinctive political decisions since then.
The situation before 1999 was quite different. Scottish politics, and therefore Scottish life, was
under far more control from London. But there were nationalist voices in public life, and a
nationalist movement.
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In 1979 Scottish voters were offered a referendum on whether Scotland should have its own
Assembly. (When Scottish voters were asked this again in 1997, they voted yes, leading eventually
to the political situation we have here now.) The majority of voters in 1979, 51.62%, did support
an Assembly, but Scotland did not get one. Why not? Because of the ‘40% rule’.
This was a special condition attached to the result of the vote. The 40% rule said that it would not
be enough just to get a majority of those who voted supporting an Assembly. This rule added an
extra condition: that 40% of the electorate – in other words a number equal to 40% of all Scottish
people aged 18 or over – had to opt for an Assembly. So, although the vote showed support for
an Assembly, Scotland did not get one.
Edwin Morgan was a nationalist. (When he died in 2010 he left over £900, 000 to the SNP.) He
had a strong response to the 1979 Referendum result. This is what he said about the writing of his
sonnet series:
‘[Sonnets from Scotland] began with the idea of writing one or two, I think as a kind of
reaction, probably, to the failure of the Referendum to give Scotland political devolution
and any idea of a Scottish Assembly. (…) It's a kind of comeback, an attempt to show that
Scotland was there, was alive and kicking (…) and that one mustn't write it off just because
the Assembly had not come into being.’
He also said the sonnet sequence:
‘represents both a determination to go on living in Scotland and a hope that there might be
some political change . . . I feel the present moment of Scottish history very strongly and I
want to acknowledge it.’
Morgan wasn’t the only writer responding to this political situation. The 1980s was a vibrant
period in Scottish writing, with many new and important voices emerging. At a time when the
Referendum result might perhaps have made Scotland feel like a limited country, its writers
showed unlimited imagination.
We can join up the idea of the sonnet form, and what we know now about the context Morgan
was writing in. Perhaps he uses a very proper form like the sonnet to say that, even without a
government or an assembly, Scotland is still a proper country, a true nation.
LET’S GET TO WORK As we study this poem we’ll think look especially at how Morgan gives
Scotland a sense of life, vigour, movement and energy.
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ACTIVE LEARNING You’ve read the poem at least once already, but you’ve also had to read
through quite a lot of material about sonnets, and politics. Read the poem again with a partner
and see if you can work out:
1. What is happening?
2. Who is speaking?
3. Are there any words you need an explanation for?
Share your answers with the class.
The opening, and the message
Usually when we study a poem, we spend time examining it line-by-line, looking at the writer’s
techniques and the effects of these. This prepares us in the end to decide what the poem is really
about, what its theme or message is, and what the writer is trying to say through it.
We’re going to work the other way round on ‘Slate’. Now that you’ve learned a bit about the
sonnet form, and the political context, we’re going to agree on a meaning for the poem. Then, as
we look at Morgan’s techniques, we’ll be able to keep assessing how these support his message,
and how they help him to put it across.
You and your partner should have worked out that the poem seems to describe the actual
creation of Scotland, the moment that the country came into being as a great big chunk of
geology.
Bearing this in mind, the opening line is a bit odd, because it says:
‘There is no beginning’
which seems to be about the beginning of Scotland.
These first four words also stand out from the rest of the poem in another way. They are in
present tense while everything else is in past tense. The use of past tense makes sense, because
the narrators are describing what they saw as Scotland was formed all those millions of years ago,
but why the use of present tense to start with?
Morgan uses present tense to make Scotland seem eternal. Writing at a time when politics made
Scotland seem limited, not even important enough to get an Assembly let alone an independent
government, he makes Scotland seem mighty and powerful. Morgan is able to depict his country
as almost supernatural, something without a start and therefore perhaps something that will
never come to an end. By using present tense he gives Scotland a sense of huge grandeur and
importance.
That’s his message: how much Scotland matters. In the rest of your work on this poem you should
be able to see how Morgan’s various techniques support that idea.
The narrator
The speaking voice in the poem says, ‘We saw Lewis/ laid down, when there was not much but
thunder’. Morgan makes an unusual choice here, using a first person plural narrator, a voice that
speaks on behalf of a group and says ‘we’, not just the much more common ‘I’.
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So who is speaking? Whoever the narrator is, he or she and his companions were around millions
of years ago. ‘Memory of men?’ asks the narrator in line 11. ‘That was to come.’
So we’ve got a boiling, changing, exploding, pre-human world seen by observers who watched for
millions of years, while all this geological change happened, and long before humans came along.
This speaking voice is outside history, looking in.
Most critics who’ve studied this poem would say that the narrator and his companions are
witnesses from another world, aliens. This is one of the ways Morgan makes Scotland seem
important: Scotland matters so much that massively advanced beings travel across the universe to
see our country being born and bear witness to this when there are no humans to do so.
Personification
As we’ve seen already, this poem is set far too long ago for there to be any human characters, and
the alien characters are only here to narrate, not to involve themselves in what they see.
That doesn’t mean there is no life in the poem. Morgan personifies Scotland itself, giving it
human actions. He also embodies Scotland, giving it a living body, so that it is not just a chunk of
geology.
ACTIVE LEARNING Skim read the poem again and find:
1. Two body parts named in the poem
2. Three things Scotland did
Scotland is embodied. There’s a ‘rough back’ in line 6 and the poundings of the sea are
‘shouldered off’ in line 10. Scotland has a stomach because it can feel ‘empty hunger’ in line 12
and it has ‘heels’ to kick with in the final line.
Scotland is personified, given human actions. Its seas ‘plunder’ geological faults in line 3 the way
Vikings plunder a defenceless village. ‘Drumlins blue as/ bruises were grated off like nutmeg’ in
lines 4 and 5. (A drumlin is a sort of elongated oval hill made of deposits left by retreating glaciers
– imagine a hard-boiled egg cut in half from its pointy end to its fat end, with one of the halves laid
down on its flat side, if you want to picture the shape.)
This simile, with its mention of ‘bruises’, suggests that the creation of Scotland involved some
pain, and the word choice of ‘plunder’ also implies conflict. Morgan is saying that you cannot
make a country without going through pain and difficulty, so he’s addressing the political situation
of the 1980s, as well as the geological one of millions of years ago.
All this use of embodiment and personification supports Morgan’s overall theme. He is saying
that even without people, Scotland is alive and vibrant, full of energy and purpose.
Sound effects
Morgan uses many sound effect techniques in ‘Slate’.
He uses alliteration, the technique where two or more words near each other begin with the
same sound. For example we see the words ‘streak,’ ‘strike’ and ‘stroke’ used in lines 7 and 8.
He uses assonance, the technique where words near each other contain the same vowel sound.
For example we see the words ‘much,’ and ‘thunder’ used in line 2.
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He uses rhyme. For example we see the words ‘thunder’ and ‘plunder,’ used in at the end of lines
3 and 4.
ACTIVE LEARNING Find as many more examples as you can of Morgan using each of the three
techniques mentioned above. HINT some of the rhymes he uses are internal, which means you
will find words rhyming within the same line of the poem rather than finding rhyming words at the
ends of nearby lines.
All these sound effects draw our attention, and also give us a sensory experience: we don’t just
read the poem with our eyes but also almost hear it. This has the effect of making us feel more
involved in the poem. The sound effects support Morgan’s overall message about the vital
importance of Scotland by making it feel lively, vibrant and noisy, and by making Scotland feel like
something we just have to pay attention to.
ACTIVE LEARNING Line 4 mentions Staffa, a small island off the Scottish west coast. Staffa is
famous for Fingal’s Cave, which is a product of the kind of wildly active geology Morgan depicts in
‘Slate’. The cave is formed completely of hexagonal columns – imagine a bunch of pencils being
held upright together. The cave’s size and its arched roof create eerie echoes as waves crash into
it. If you want to add another sensory experience to your study of the poem, you could download
and listen to Fingal’s Cave by the classical composer Felix Mendelssohn, which is his response in
sound to visiting the cave.
Scottish dialect
ACTIVE LEARNING Morgan uses two particularly Scottish geographical terms in this poem. Find
them.
These two words are in fact the only Scottish dialect words in the poem. Morgan uses them as a
way of saying that English is not a powerful enough language to define or explain what Scotland is.
They support his argument because if he is saying the English language cannot fully explain
Scotland, he can also suggest that England as a nation should not be able to define and explain
Scotland’s political future.
Wildness and energy
We already saw suggestions of violence in Morgan’s use of words like ‘bruises’ and ‘plunder’.
There are other examples of the writer using wild and energetic word choice.
ACTIVE LEARNING Find these:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
a word in line 2 that suggests wild weather
a word in line 3 that suggests extreme geology
a word in line 7 that means to leave a mark on
a word in line 7 that means to hit
a phrase in line 8 that accepts things will not happen gently
a word in line 8 that suggests rough movement
a word in line 9 that suggests wild weather
a word in line 10 that suggests physically rejecting something
a word in line 13 that suggests energetic creativity
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The narrators ‘like/ to think’ this is how a country comes into being (lines 6 and 7) and they
‘laughed as Staffa cooled’ (line 4). So, by using all this wild and energetic word choice and having
the speaker’s voice approve of what the alien observers saw, Morgan is again supporting his
overall idea. When a country matters as much as Scotland, we should accept that making it will
not be easy or painless, as the result of the 1979 Referendum showed.
This might also be why his sonnet has no volta, no turning point after line 8. Making a nation,
either geologically or politically, isn’t simple. There won’t be one clear moment when everything
changes; it’s a long, slow, and sometimes difficult, process.
The end, and the future
This poem starts, and ends, a long time ago, with humanity still ‘to come’. But the end does
consider that human future. Here are lines 11 to 14 again:
Memory of men! That was to come. Great
in their empty hunger these surroundings
threw walls to the sky, the sorry glory
of a rainbow. Their heels kicked flint, chalk, slate.
Morgan packs lots of ideas into these four lines, and again what he says keeps adding support to
his message about the value and importance of Scotland and about Scottish politics:
Quotation
How this supports his message
‘empty hunger’
The newly created Scotland is empty and
hungry without us. A nation isn’t really made
by geology, a nation is made by its people and
by what they do.
‘the sorry glory/ of a rainbow’
A rainbow is a glorious and hopeful thing, but a
sorry one too because you only get a rainbow
with rain. Morgan uses the metaphor of the
rainbow to admit that the hope of a more
independent future for Scotland comes after
the failed referendum
‘Their heels kicked flint, chalk, slate.’
The expression to kick your heels means to be
waiting, perhaps impatiently. Scotland is still
waiting for a better future.
‘slate’
Although this is the title of the poem it only
appears in the actual text as the final word.
Sometimes things only come together at the
last minute; it may take a long time for
Scotland’s destiny to be fulfilled.
Throughout ‘Slate’, everything fits together to achieve the same purpose. Whatever Morgan
writes reminds us again and again of how valuable he thinks Scotland is. It is because he values
Scotland so highly that he believes the country deserves political independence.
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You might totally disagree with him. You might be passionately against Scottish independence.
You might love Scotland so much that you want to protect it from trying to strike out alone in the
big bad world. That doesn’t matter. You don’t need to support Scottish independence after
reading ‘Slate’, any more than you need to become an avid Christian after reading ‘Good Friday’.
All you need to do, as you should after studying any poem, is to understand what the writer is
saying, and how he says it.
So, this is a good moment to take stock of your work on this poem.
Technique revision
Now that you’ve worked your way through the material about ‘Slate’ you should know the poem,
and its techniques, very well.
Take a large piece of paper and mark it up into a grid. For every technique, fill in a quotation from
the poem, and explain the effect it has on the reader. For a grid about ‘Slate’ you need to work
with the following techniques:
deal separately with the connotations of each of these expressions: plunder, bruises, empty
hunger
sonnet form
opening line
present tense
1st person plural narration
witnesses from another world
decision not to have a volta
word choice suggesting wild energy
alliteration
assonance
personification
embodiment
Scottish words
metaphor
(internal) rhyme
simile
well-chosen final word
ACTIVE LEARNING
To prove that you understand what we’ve been learning, write an essay in answer to this question:
What is Edwin Morgan saying in his poem ‘Slate’, and how does he say it?
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THE SCOTTISH TEXT QUESTIONS
If you have studied all three of the poems about the natural world, ‘Hyena’, ‘Slate’ and ‘Winter’,
you can also now try the Scottish set text questions about this poem.
First, re-read ‘Slate’ and answer these questions:
1. Show how any two of the poet’s uses of word choice effectively contribute to the main
ideas or concerns of the poem.
4
2. Show how any two of the poet’s uses of sound effect techniques effectively contribute to
the main ideas or concerns of the poem.
4
3. How effective do you find any two aspects of the last four lines as a conclusion to the
poem? Your answer may deal with ideas and/ or language.
4
The last question is worth 8 marks and needs a much bigger answer. If you want to get 5 marks or
more for the 8-mark final question, you MUST compare this poem to two others poems – probably
‘Hyena’ and ‘Winter’.
You can, if you wish, tackle this as a kind of mini essay. It’s also possible to approach this question
by giving a set of bullet pointed answers that all fit together to form a complete response.
Here’s the question:
4. With close textual reference, show how the ideas and/ or language of this poem are similar
to another poem or poems by Morgan that you have read.
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When you have written your answers, give them to your teacher to mark.
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