MacCaig and his little boat

 Norman MacCaig loved the bleak, wild country of Assynt. He was a teacher, and he liked to spend vacations in the Highlands with his family.

He liked fishing from a rowboat. One day when he was in the boat, something odd happened, and he wrote two poems — years apart — that mention the incident.

“Basking shark,” written in 1967, tells the story:

            To stub an oar on a rock where none should be

            To hear it rise with a slounge out of the sea

            Is a thing that happened once (too often) to me.

Good poems find something surprising in the telling, and it’s a surprise when we meet a huge shark on “a sea tin-tacked with rain.”

Astonishment yields to reflection. The poet wonders what kind of monster nature had created. Then he thinks of man.

In “Praise of a boat,” written in 1974, he considers the boat itself,  and concedes it’s clumsy.

"It butts the running tide with a bull’s head … In crossrips it’s awkward as a piano.”

While it’s a good boat — a slayer of haddock, salmon and mackerel —its courage is questionable.

            Though it once met a basking shark with a bump

            And sailed for awhile looking over its shoulder.

• Source: Norman MacCaig, The Poems of Norman MacCaig; Edinburgh: Polygon, 2005.