The Rose of the Rock

By Margaret Chalmers
Researcher: Penny Fielding
Writer: Raman Mundair

‘The Rose of the Rock’ is by the Shetland poet Margaret Chalmers and was published in her only volume of poems in 1813. The poem describes a party of women who travel from Lerwick for a day’s outing to the island of Noss.

Penny Fielding:7 Aug 2013

One starting point might be the visual aspects of the poem, which kick in pretty much at the start. Should we chat a bit about how Chalmers handles the landscape in the first two sections of the poem? What I really like is how confident she is. She throws around place names like Vaalifield, Saxaford and Foula, which must have sounded quite strange to her non-Shetlandic readers—almost like a magical incantation.

To me, she gives the impression of standing literally on the top of the world (as you would on a globe) with Shetland (or Bressay, where the people in the poem are) a vantage point for a vast panorama. Fair Isle is the Far South—so it’s like a taking global perspective. It’s such a confident way of putting seemingly-peripheral Shetland at the top of the known world. It’s also a physical thing for Margaret (a ‘heart-dilating view’), as if the huge scale of the landscape expands her experience of being in the world– (this was what they called the ‘Sublime’ at the time). She’s really great at describing this sense of how we experience things spatially—I also like the way these lines work:

Then circling still the penetrating gaze,
Lo! Fitful lifts on high his aged head.

It’s a kind of dizzying effect as if you can’t tell whether Margaret’s gaze is circling Fitful Head or (weirdly) the other way round, with the scenery spinning round her as she stands on the top of the world. One of the things I love about that is that she must have known she wasn’t going to become a great literary celebrity and that Shetland wasn’t a well-known literary scene, but in this poem she doesn’t care and she makes such a bold statement about her experience of living there.

Raman Mundair:13 Aug 2013
Thank you for your email and the wonderful poem. My first impressions of the poem echo some of the points you have raised: how confidently Margaret Chalmers names and claims the landscape around her. How she creates a poetic incantation with the Shetland places names – this is of particular interest to me as I feel that the island place names and Shetland dialect in general, have a real music to them which are a delight to give voice to. This is something I found myself doing in my poem ‘Hairst Mön Hamefir’, and I wonder if Margaret, like myself, was dwelling in the natural magic that the isles seem to resonate, that create a sense of uplift, a soaring, no matter what the weather or season? I wonder in this naming and claiming: who she is claiming this landscape for? Herself? Womankind? A child? Humanity? The future? And if she is claiming something for herself – is it a moment, a legacy, a hope, a desire?
The Thomas Gray quote at the start of the poem is intriguing – ‘a flower born to blush unseen’ – and seems to be a metaphor for Chalmers herself: she has all but disappeared from our literary radar. Her talent and voice swallowed and hidden from view for all these years. This ‘disappearing’ of women writers I know is not uncommon but I wonder what happened specifically to Margaret – can you tell me more? The idea of ‘disappearing’ is something that interests me and is a theme I have previously visited in my poem ‘Stories fae da Shoormal’, which was inspired by the collection of photographs in the Shetland Museum and Archives of unidentified people. A writer writes to be read and it is heart breaking when your work fails to find a place in the world and I wonder how it was for Margaret. Can you tell me anything about Margaret’s writing life and what happened to her collection of poems? When did her work disappear from view?

Penny Fielding: 15 Nov 2013

It is a pity that Margaret felt she couldn’t write in Shetlandic. She obviously had the ability to do it—she can write in Scots in her imitations of Burns, which are really good. But I think you’re right that unlike Lowland Scots, which has a long literary tradition, Shetland dialect wasn’t seen as a poetic language until much later in the century. Dorothea Campbell, her younger contemporary, has characters who use Shetlandic in Harley Radington, but in a novel that would be more accepted.

I agree with that sense of Margaret wanting to be both a new, Shetlandic voice and part of a wider British literary tradition. There’s an example of that in the section with the birds: She quotes a line from James Thomson’s The Seasons, one of the most widely-read and influential poems of the eighteen-century (not so much now, unfortunately). Thomson is really interested in birds, but from a more natural-history point of view—their different species and the way they behave socially. Margaret does this too (the ‘branding’ you mentioned to connect her with poetic tradition) but changes this into something more personal: the birds are still birds (they build nest out of sedge) but they are also ‘parents’. Then she uses the same word to link the birds to the landscape where the ‘parent island’ has given birth to a sea stack. It’s at this point that, to me, the poem get wonderfully (and mysteriously) metaphorical as things start to move away from the main land in all sorts of ways.

What do you think about the central image of the rose? It must have something to do with female identity. Margaret knows that the little girl would love to see it, but decides it’s too dangerous—not only because of the physical danger but also because the rose is perhaps a symbol of female desire or adult sexuality. The poem leaves this an open question. I like the poem ends in the way it began, using the Shetland place names to give a sense of vast perspectives. But this time the final voice we here is the little girl’s as she says she would cross the whole archipelago of Shetland to see the rose. I wonder if this fits in with your idea of Margaret giving a voice to lives unlived? She was unmarried, but the little girl has a bold, confident voice to talk about her desires and attractions.

Raman Mundair: 5 Dec 2013

Whenever I read the poem I can’t help but return to Margaret’s rose and read it as a significant symbol and metaphor. It’s easy to see how Margaret would be attracted to this rose, how apt she would have found it and how well it spoke to her. I consider her rose a third eye, a conduit to Margaret’s inner life that offers perception beyond the ordinary. The rose brings many things to mind: Margaret’s isolation from the mainstream of contemporary literature and her personal isolation as a creative, a woman feeling alone, on a wild, remote island.

Margaret’s rose would have been a wild rose/dog rose (rosa cannina). The petals white flushed with pink suggesting youth, and of being young, being a ‘budding rose’, and, of course the transience of youth; its fragility.

You mention how the rose represents desire, sexuality and say that ‘Margaret knows that the little girl would love to see it, but decides it’s too dangerous’ – I agree that though the ‘danger’ is ostensibly physical as the symbol of the rose is explored further the underlying danger of desire/sexuality is clear. I think that there is something in the poem that suggests both overt and latent desire and sexuality – a sense of female vitality and chasteness that is conjured by Margaret’s rose.

Perhaps Margaret would like the little girl in the poem, who would be a ‘rose bud’, to prolong her youth, her innocence: the older, knowing female voice in the poem is disillusioned by experience and the loss of innocence, while the girl is filled with youthful innocence and confidence – something that too soon will be lost. Does Margaret, judging from her own experience, want to prolong the girl’s innocence as long as possible? This could be an echo here of Blake perhaps?

There is a looking away and returning fascination in Margaret’s gaze, a to-and-fro; she is arrested by the rose, overwhelmed by all that it means and all the meaning it offers her and at the same time, the awakening, the self-realisation, is unsettling. I would suggest that confronting the rose and all it suggests is the true danger – the danger of knowing.

I agree that the final voice of the poem, the little girl, is bold and confidant and I wonder if in her saying that she would go to great lengths to see the rose is actually Margaret asserting her desire, her want, her vitality and her knowing – an acknowledgement of self-awareness, no matter its personal cost.

I like to think also of another aspect of the rose which may have been apparent to Margaret and appealed to her in her own set of circumstances. The rose is tenacious and unfaltering. Unheeding of its bleak situation, it flourishes. Despite its unlikely situation, its isolation, its separation from its own kind, its struggle to survive exposed to the elements as it is, it persists. The rose is a symbol of life – the persistence of life against the odds; here quite literally, as the rose has managed to thrive in an exposed, inhospitable spot – much like Margaret, perhaps.

This also suggests the rose as a symbol of hope: it grows and flowers without concern about its environment; its chances of fertilisation; its future. It is whole within itself. Where it is due to a set of causes and conditions over which it has no control it just deals with those circumstances to the best of its ability. It is ‘natural’ as opposed to the vain hopes, fears and strivings of human beings. It is being true to its nature. I imagine Margaret recognised herself in that endeavour. That the rose, like herself, is just doing what it has to do.

For Margaret the rose’s life, despite being infrequently appreciated, is valuable. She finds solace in this. She draws strength from this. She takes refuge in the rose.

Finally, I also wonder if on the periphery of Margaret’s consciousness there is the thought of her own mortality and legacy. That her she may never have a child but as a writer she could make a piece of work that will stand the test of time. I recognise that thought. I think if we’re being honest as writers, artists and makers, we would agree that we make work in the hope that it will leave a mark, take flight and find a life of its own.

Penny Fielding: 2 Feb 2014

This really extends my sense of all the things that the rose might stand for. I like the idea that ‘knowledge’ isn’t just adult, sexual knowledge, but the idea of living in isolation and perhaps also the vulnerability of her own writing. It’s such a suggestive poem that it’s hard to tie it down. That point at which Margaret is ‘Lingering, absorp’t, irresolute’ really struck me too and you put it so well when you say that ‘There is a looking away and returning fascination in Margaret’s gaze’. That’s the way I feel about the poem itself—each time I think I have got the measure of it, something new about it makes itself felt. As an academic, I don’t always think much about the lives of the authors I study and what they may have felt, but I do like the fact that we are doing something to give Margaret the legacy she couldn’t have in her own day. Thank you so much for this discussion. It has been a real revelation to discuss this wonderful poem with you.