Like Edwin Morgan’s work and life, the national poet’s funeral -- held yesterday in the Bute Hall at the university where he studied and worked -- contained humour and solemnity, wisdom and wit, and a myriad voices and sounds, from jazz and Burns to The Beatles and experimental Russian poetry.
In the hour-long service, friends and colleagues of Morgan, who died last week aged 90, read several of the Makar’s poems, while saxophonist Tommy Smith improvised a jazz lament to Morgan’s poem Wolf.
A choir led the way for Is There For Honest Poverty and two songs by The Beatles, the poet’s favourite band, were played: Here, There and Everywhere sung by Christina Whyte, and finally, as the coffin left the hall, Strawberry Fields Forever.
Hundreds of mourners, friends, peers and dignitaries filled the hall as well as some of the country’s greatest writers including James Kelman, James Robertson, Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, Jackie Kay, Bernard MacLaverty and Janice Galloway. First Minister Alex Salmond, Culture Minister Fiona Hyslop, former first minister Jack McConnell, and Bob Winter, the Lord Provost of Glasgow, were also in attendance.
Over the coffin hung a large sepia-tinted photograph of Morgan, pictured in his distinctive spectacles and laughing, while sunlight streamed into the hall through stained glass windows depicting figures from literary history whose work Morgan knew well: Plato, Spinoza, Hegel and Thomas Aquinas.
Delivering the eulogy, Dr George Reid, former presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament, said Morgan “expanded the frontiers of Scottish poetry”.
He said: “We honour a world-class poet who was one of our own. A master of versatility and variety in verse.
“A poet of this parish who was universal in his outreach. A writer who could start in a tenement close and take this city and country off on an intergalactic voyage.”
Dr Reid touched on the time Morgan spent as an academic at Glasgow University, where he was “extremely popular” with students and “liberated lives”.
He also described how Morgan publicly announced he was gay “as a 70th birthday present to himself” and approached life with vigour through his 80s, producing books including A Book of Lives in 2007 and Dreams And Other Nightmares this year, despite being diagnosed with cancer 10 years ago.
He said the poet was always interested in the future, particularly in spacecraft, and was one of the first people to put his name down for a journey to the moon.
Dr Reid concluded: “Eddie Morgan has opened the doors for a whole generation of Scots, he has expanded the frontiers of Scottish poetry. He has expanded the frontiers of Scotland itself.
“Eddie has now gone through what he called the bead curtain of his life. He didn’t want candles. He wanted it bright, the whole thing switched on. He wanted to go into George Square with floodlights.”
Jackie Kay read Morgan’s love poem, From a City Balcony, and David Kinloch, the poet and academic, read perhaps one of Morgan’s most well known poems, Strawberries.
Reverend Stuart MacQuarrie, the university chaplain, said: “Eddie was a national figure in Scottish life and indeed in international life.
“His words reached out to many people and touched many hearts. He was not just ours, he was not just Scotland’s, he belonged to the wider world.”
Morgan was born in Glasgow’s west end on April 27, 1920, and went to school in Rutherglen.
He was awarded an OBE in 1982, was appointed Glasgow’s inaugural poet laureate in 1999 and was winner of the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 2000, being made the Makar, or national poet, in 2004.
Speaking during the service, Robyn Marsack, director of the Scottish Poetry Library, said: “Glasgow was his parish but not his universe. He could take his poems from Glasgow to Saturn.”
