Raasay
The poet Sorley MacLean was born in Osgaig, a small crofting community on the west coast of the island; perhaps his most famous poem is about "Hallaig", an abandoned community on the east coast. MacLean's writings often combine an ancient traditional awareness, with a modernist political outlook, in which Raasay, and the areas adjacent to it are frequently referenced. But while MacLean's work dwells on the brutality of war, of the Highland Clearances and modern exploitation, he also writes about nature. Thus, although the Clearances leave an empty landscape populated only by the ghosts of those evicted or forced to emigrate, "Time, the deer, is in the Wood of Hallaig".
Dàin do Eimhir
Because of his socialist convictions, Sorley MacLean wanted to fight in the Spanish Civil War, but was prevented by family circumstances. In 1937, MacLean, then working as an English teacher at Portree High School, met and fell in love with Nessa O’Shea, an Irish woman whom he believed to be romantically involved with a friend; MacLean did not approach her and she later married someone else. She inspired the poem "An Roghainn" (Dàin do Eimhir XXII) in which the narrator chooses between a love interest and going to fight in Spain. Later, he went to teach on Mull, where the devastation from nineteenth-century clearances—in which many MacLeans had been evicted—had a profound effect on him. MacLean later said that "I believe Mull had much to do with my poetry: its physical beauty, so different from Skye’s, with the terrible imprint of the clearances on it, made it almost intolerable for a Gael." This period of his life has been described as "an immensely creative anguish", because it led to the writing of the Eimhir cycle and "An Cuilthionn". He wrote most of the poetry that would become "Dàin do Eimhir" while teaching at Boroughmuir High School in Edinburgh, and in Hawick between 1939 and 1941.