3 - Lauder as Poet

Summary

In this chapter the focus is on the literary and linguistic context of Lauder's poetry, the nature and inspiration of his first efforts in verse, his poetic technique, the themes and manner of the poems of his middle and later periods, and on the qualities, characteristics and development of his art.

SCOTS AND ENGLISH

Three languages (Latin, Gaelic and Older Scots) were used for literary purposes in early modern Scotland. The second of these is of no relevance to Lauder, and there are in his poetry no allusions to anything Celtic. By contrast, both as school-pupil and undergraduate, Lauder would have been steeped in Latin literature. Nonetheless, he wrote very little in that language, even though in his day such competence was commonly expected of anyone who had enjoyed a university education. His only known output in Latin verse extends to no more than ten lines of elegiac couplets (Hvnc cineri RIVETE tuo LAVDERVS honorem), in which he paid tribute to the theologian Andre Rivet.1 As for Older Scots, Lauder chose not to write in the current form of what had been the traditional vernacular of Lowland Scotland. He left Scotland as a young man, and lived for four decades in the Netherlands, where he doubtless spoke English with most British expatriates and all Dutch anglophiles, but where he presumably employed Scots when addressing the soldiers under his command. His correspondence with Dutch notables was conducted in French, and he would normally have spoken that language in contacts with most other non-British members of high social and intellectual circles – for example, with the scholars in and around the Breda Schola Illustris, such as the Huguenot Andre Rivet and his niece, Marie du Moulin. The literary and linguistic context of Lauder's poetry is unusual, and calls for elucidation.

Lauder was a Scottish poet of the new fashion, and in his youth he must have taken the principled decision to write in English, which not long before had become a prestige language – next to Latin – in his country. Lauder was not the first Scottish author to take this course, and in so doing he was aligning himself with numerous like-minded early modern contemporaries, of whom William Drummond of Hawthornden is today the best known.