William Soutar

William Soutar was born in Perth on 28 April 1898, the only child of John Soutar, a joiner, and his wife, Margaret Gow Smith. The boy was educated in Perth and he was a pupil at Perth Academy in 1916 when the Military Service Act came into operation. Young Soutar went straight from school into the Navy and it was during his service that he first showed symptoms of the illness that was to strike him down. On his demobilisation early in 1919, however, he matriculated at Edinburgh University, and after a false start in medicine transferred to the Faculty of Arts in October of that year to study for Honours in English. Before his graduation in 1923 his first book of poems, Gleanings by an Undergraduate, had been published anonymously.

In 1924 Soutar's illness was diagnosed as 'a form of spondylitis'. It crippled him increasingly, and in May 1930 lie underwent an operation that was unsuccessful. For more than thirteen years, until his death on 15 October 1943, he was confined to the house in Wilson Street, Perth, to which the family had moved in 1924.

In the Diaries of a Dying Man there is a laconic entry for 3 November 1933: 'Three Years.' Turn back to the same November day in 1930: it was the last day on which Soutar got out of bed. And November after November in his diaries Soutar noted the passage of the years from that day in 1930, the day of his 'abortive resurrection'.

Soutar endured his long illness with heroic fortitude, living out the definition of heroism he had jotted down as a young man in the Navy: What we call heroism, the great deed of the moment, is the synthesis of a life and character; and character is what you have been doing and thinking all your life.

There was no self-pity in his attitude nor morbidity in his outlook. If there is perhaps a hint of his pilgrim's progress in the titles of his ensuing books of poetry in English: Conflict (l93l) and The Solitary Way (1934), with its two sections 'Search' and 'Solitariness', if he was, inevitably, a detached observer, in his own words 'set aside from the thoroughfare of life', he was none the less always alert in his interest and active in his sympathy. Although his room was his world, he re-mained 'involved in Mankind'.

Into the quiet of a room
Words from the clamorous world come:
The shadows of the gesturing year
Quicken upon tlie stillness there.

The wandering waters do not mock
The pool within its wall of rock
But turn their healing tides and come
Even as the day into a room.

The 'element of aloofness' that Soutar found in his own nature reinforced his symbolic identification of himself with the unicorn, the device which appeared on the front cover of five of the books of poetry he published in his lifetime.

I cannot date when the unicorn began to impress itself upon me-but it was no doubt deepening by my early thirties when I was definitely turning to Scots and when I was experiencing a more limited physical life. . . .
Why do I associate myself with the unicorn-is it not because I would make claim in some measure to the attributes of that fabulous beast: even including its negative attributes; its solitariness and its self-will.

Soutar's bedroom was no ordinary room. His father, the master-joiner, lengthened it and enlarged the window, so that the bedridden poet could see the changing seasons in the garden and the natural world he loved. The birds, the little animals, the insects, the flowers, trees, clouds and stars that fill so large a part of his poetry are no mere conventional literary decoration; they are all exactly and sympathetically observed.

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