On Lachie’s Croft (Scottish Highers English): Revision Notes
On Lachie's Croft
Overview
Norman MacCaig's personal poem explores the narrator's sense of inadequacy and loss of identity through a rural Scottish setting. The poem centres on an aging, weakened cockerel as a means of examining masculinity and power. MacCaig addresses three interconnected themes: identity and isolation, memory and loss, and masculinity and power.
Context
The poet
Norman MacCaig was born in Edinburgh in 1910. Throughout his life, he maintained strong connections to the North West of Scotland, drawn to the landscape and Gaelic culture through his mother's heritage. As a lifelong pacifist, MacCaig registered as a conscientious objector during World War II and served time in prison for refusing military service. This anti-war stance adds depth to the military imagery that appears throughout this poem.
MacCaig wrote this poem at the age of 76. The later period of his career saw him produce increasingly reflective work about death and the loss of family and friends.
Understanding crofts
A croft is a small land holding unique to Scotland, particularly important in Highland and Island communities. Crofters work these small areas to produce food crops, often sharing common grazing areas for livestock with neighbouring crofts. This communal aspect forms part of the cultural fabric of crofting life, where cooperation and shared labour are expected.
Form and structure
The poem is written in free verse without a regular metre. MacCaig employs enjambment in some places whilst using more statement-like lines elsewhere. This creates a conversational tone, as though the speaker is confessing private thoughts following a visit to the croft. The four stanzas vary in length, reinforcing the impression that these are spontaneous, natural reflections, though they are often direct and concise.
Structural Progression
The poem progresses through four movements:
- Stanza one: Description of the bedraggled rooster
- Stanza two: The speaker compares himself to the bird and acknowledges his own loss of direction
- Stanza three: The rooster attempts to crow but manages only a croak
- Stanza four: The speaker fully inhabits the rooster's identity, acknowledging loss and powerlessness
Stanza one
The opening presents a weathered cockerel sheltering under a wheelbarrow. This low, hidden position immediately undermines the proud, masculine image typically associated with roosters. The alternate term "cock" in line one hints at this traditional masculine symbolism. The informal question "What's wrong?" establishes uncertainty from the outset. The speaker cannot identify exactly what is amiss, yet recognises that something is not right. This ambivalence introduces the speaker's conflicted feelings about his own state.
The word "bedraggled" carries associations of weariness and shabbiness, suggesting the bird has allowed itself to fall into neglect. This description is immediately contrasted with expected images of powerful, proud masculinity. The speaker asks: "Where are his military elegance, / his gauleiter manners, his insufferable conceit?"
The phrase "military elegance" could suggest a positive image of a young, upright officer in colourful uniform, but the surrounding descriptions are clearly negative. The German word "gauleiter" extends the military imagery. Gauleiters were Nazi officials holding the third-highest rank in the party, governing districts with arrogant fascist power and authoritarian discipline. However, MacCaig frames this as a question about where these characteristics have gone, reminding us that even figures of great power can fall, just as this rooster has.
The phrase "insufferable conceit" reveals the speaker's harsh judgement of typical cockerel behaviour. This could reflect MacCaig's opinion on younger males, whether birds, men, or perhaps his own younger self.
Stanza two
The second stanza opens with a confessional statement in which the speaker directly compares himself to the rooster: "I, too, feel bedraggled and haphazard". The repetition of "bedraggled" emphasises this parallel between the two figures.
Analysing Key Metaphors
The speaker continues: "something / has filched my compass, I'm breathing black air". The metaphor "something/has filched my compass" reveals that he has lost direction in life. "Filched" suggests this has been stolen from him, implying that he once possessed the rooster's pride and strength but cannot understand why these qualities have disappeared.
"I'm breathing black air" is a metaphor introduced here and revisited in stanza four. It evokes struggle and suffocation. Whilst this could reference the physical effects of aging, "black" suggests depression or despair. The speaker cannot identify the true cause of these feelings, nor can he see any means of escape.
The repetition in "I look at that rooster, I look at me" strengthens the parallel between the two male figures. The speaker makes explicit that he sees himself reflected in the rooster.
Meanwhile, the hens continue their daily activities. Though described as "his", they appear oblivious to the suffering, aging rooster, as though he no longer belongs to their world. Whilst he deteriorates, the hens are described warmly with "motherly sounds" and the comforting, domestic imagery of the asyndeton "so cosy, so fireside". The lack of conjunctions in this phrase creates a sense of ongoing comfort that contrasts sharply with the rooster's isolation.
Stanza three
This short stanza contains one piece of narrative action. The rooster opens "his gummy eyes" and attempts to crow. This creates a pathetic image of a bird who finds even simple tasks exhausting. Instead of the usual powerful crow, he produces "a barren croak" rather than a "trumpet call".
The military image in "trumpet cry" is undermined by the weakness of "croak", which is further emphasised by the desolate connotations of "barren". This suggests the speaker too finds himself without a voice. The confessions within this poem may represent the first time he has been able to articulate, even uncertainly, what troubles him.
Stanza four
The final stanza shifts narration. Where the speaker previously described the rooster as "he", he now inhabits the bird, using first person "I" to describe its actions and feelings.
The man identifies so strongly with the bird that they have merged into a single figure. The stifling "black air" returns, reminding us of the weariness and physical decline. The phrases "rumpled feathers" and "can't stand on tiptoe" emphasise deterioration. Instead of preening himself and maintaining a proud appearance, he can now only "poke at" his feathers, suggesting his actions achieve nothing. This conveys the decline in both physical and mental state, as though the black air has become all-encompassing and he can no longer separate himself from the rooster.
The speaker uses repetition to emphasise what has been lost: "How I miss my cosy brown hens. / How I miss their motherly clucking". The "cosy brown hens" function as a metaphor for any previous comfort, intimacy, or emotional connection before he found himself in this state. This could suggest relationships with people the aging speaker has lost, or a more general sense of disconnection from women, or from life itself, which continues without him.
The final line twists William Cowper's famous line "I am monarch of all I survey" from The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk, a poem about a man experiencing desperate isolation on a deserted island after losing everything. MacCaig inverts this quotation: "I'm master of nothing I survey". The power implied by "master" is absent. The speaker has lost even the strength to rule over simple chickens. All he can do is observe them continuing with life without him.
Themes
Identity and isolation
The poem explores a man's struggle to accept the loss of his identity. The comparisons make clear that he once viewed himself, like the rooster, as a strong, powerful, masculine figure. Now he questions who he truly is without those qualities. His only conclusion is that he has lost his former self and possesses nothing.
This creates a profound sense of isolation. Both the rooster and the speaker are solitary figures, unlike the hens who form a group and remain unaffected. The pervasive loneliness throughout the poem raises the question of whether these yearnings for lost power actually represent a need for connection and communication.
Memory and loss
The entire poem looks back to something unspecified that has been lost. In the final stanza, the speaker reflects on missing his hens and having nothing. The poem never explicitly states what the speaker has lost or how he arrived at this state, but he appears alone with nothing to show for his life. The implication in his missing the hens and the final line "I am master of nothing I survey" is that he once possessed something—perhaps a family or people who loved him (the repeated reference to "motherly" may offer a clue)—which he no longer has.
Given that MacCaig was 76 when he wrote this poem, it can be read as his reflections on aging and the loss of youth, loved ones, and connection with life that can accompany growing old.
Masculinity and power
The references to masculinity and power in this poem are traditionally conceived, with images such as "military", "conceit", and "trumpet call". The loss of power leaves both the rooster and the man directionless and without identity. This suggests that traditional masculinity may be empty display, serving as a warning that there is more to being a man—or a rooster—than wielding power. The hens continue to peck and scratch, untroubled by any such identity crisis, which reinforces this reading.
Comparisons with other MacCaig poems
Rural settings appear frequently in MacCaig's work, as does contemplation of identity and the wider human experience. Basking Shark asks questions not only about masculinity but about humanity's place in the world ("I saw me, in one fling/Emerging from the slime of everything") and what truly constitutes power ("So who's the monster?").
Recurring Themes Across MacCaig's Work
Isolation pervades urban settings too. In Hotel Room, 12th Floor, the speaker lies alone in bed, listening to "the harsh screaming/ from coldwater flats, the blood/glazed on sidewalks". In Old Highland Woman, the elderly lady "sits all day by the fire".
Memory, particularly memory connected to landscape, proves important in several poems. In this poem, the speaker misses his "cosy brown hens" and their "motherly clucking", which can be interpreted as longing for a time when he had company or power. In Aunt Julia, the speaker still hears her voice with similar wistfulness: "But I hear her still, welcoming me / with a seagull's voice / across a hundred yards / of peatscrapes and lazybeds".
Loss underpins the bleakness when the speaker reveals he misses his hens. Loss features directly in Aunt Julia, where the main character dies, though the poem also addresses maintaining cultural memory that risks being lost without people like her.
Remember!
Key Points to Remember:
- The poem uses an aging cockerel as an extended metaphor for the speaker's own sense of inadequacy and lost identity
- MacCaig employs a conversational free verse structure that creates the impression of spontaneous, intimate confession
- Military imagery throughout the poem is systematically undermined, questioning traditional concepts of masculinity and power
- The repeated metaphor "breathing black air" suggests both physical decline and psychological despair
- The final line inverts William Cowper's famous quotation, transforming "I am monarch of all I survey" into "I'm master of nothing I survey", emphasising complete powerlessness