'...these are products of the imagination of Scotland's greatest modern poet. In "Bramble Spray in Autumn Woods" he shows his ability to enlist nature to his cause: "Do I wish my poetry to be / Like a star, a mountain, a mighty tree?" he asks himself, and replies, "No! I am content to have it show / As a few bramble leaves in thinned woodlands do". The vision introduced by this unpromising beginning is compellingly beautiful: "glowing lines of the vines / Canary, scarlet, crimson, claret". One is reminded of a similar epiphany in In Memoriam James Joyce, where MacDiarmid compares his own wilful inconsistency to the many colours of the hawthorn, "purple-maroon, rose-madder and straw". It is the image rather than the bumptious rhetoric that remains in the mind.