WHEN William Symington’s pioneer steamboat sailed on Dalswinton Loch, Dumfriesshire, in 1788, Robert Burns is said to have been a passenger. Now Donald Adamson, in his new collection Glamourie (Indigo Dreams Publishing, £7.99), imagines a dialogue between engineer and poet.
THE INVENTORS
The claret goes round.
Symington: ‘What say you Burns?
Are we not, like you, men of feeling
with these sweet pairings of ours? Did you observe
how the cylinder bids welcome to the piston,
how iron is wedded to steam?
Burns replies, ‘And we bards
grease our conceits, oil our metaphors,
till our verses run as hot
as a maid in her passion.’ They laugh.
Maybe they’ll fish tomorrow.
‘If there be any. We scared them off today.’
He images a poem like a steamboat,
word-rivets shining like constellations,
a craft to navigate the unformed loch
of a new century. He could build it, he thinks,
if the muse is with him
and twelve more years.
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