A memory rarely stands by itself. There is the memory, and then there are the associations that it triggers. In this poem, an olfactory memory reminds me of a particular part of Scotland and of a time, a matter of a couple of weeks, I spent there—again a long time ago. But any discussion of memory may itself remind us of Proust, whose theories of memory are, remarkably, being proven by contemporary neuroscience. In this poem, the image of machair appears again. It haunts me in its beauty. It is the landscape that I would expect to find in heaven, if heaven were ever to exist. Forget the fountains and clouds of other notions of heaven—make it Scottish machair, with the sound of the waves breaking on the shore and the cry of seabirds on the wind.

taste and memory

For Proust it was the madeleine cake

Dipped into tea; an unexpected key

To a flood of memories; for any of us

A taste, a smell, may evoke moments

We had not dwelt on very much

But that were always there, half hidden

In the lumber room of our minds,

Reproachful of our forgetfulness

But generous in their rewards,

Restoring place and emotion,

Love, friendship, the small exchanges

That go with being who we are

And where, and in what ways,

We have lived our ordinary lives,

Reassuring us that we have not

Lost what we thought we had.

For me it is the smell of gorse,

The flowers of which briefly in summer

Are redolent of coconut; small patches

Of yellow in the dark green foliage,

They scent the air, cling to the breeze,

Surprise the walkers or the lovers,

Make them stop, interrogate

The evening air, then put away

That unexpected memory of coconut

Amidst memories of islands

And quiet glens, the secret places

Of this country on the edge of

A continent, an afterthought of land.

On a Hebridean island in my twentieth year

I passed a place where gorse had colonised

A fold of land near a stretch of machair—

The lovely name by which some shores

Are known—grass and broken shells

And tiny flowers, close to the green sea;

But it is the gorse that I remember,

And its floral smell, touched with notes

Of seaweed, of sea salt, of iodine,

Those things that one can smell—and taste—

On the breath of the Scottish islands.

I was happy then and wished

Those around me, and one friend in particular,

The happiness I felt; now it is gorse

That reminds me of that time,

Not noisily, or with insistence,

But quietly, discreetly, as the wind

May whisper gently in our ear.

One friend in particular: anybody may do for that. All that we need is somebody on whom we can focus our feelings of gratitude. The real test of love, or friendship, is whether we are grateful that the other exists. Auden captured that in his lines about how love requires an object, but almost anything will do—even, in his case, when he was a boy, a pumping engine that was “every bit as beautiful as you.”