A summer in Skye, Volume 1 (of 2) — Edition Insights

Simile as Structural Device

Smith's similes are not decorative but structural. The opening paragraph alone contains three: summer as tiger, east wind as sarcasm, the boy marching 'in the fringe of the ambulating shower-bath.' Later, the narrator's departure is triple-similed—'like an arrow from a Tartar's bow, like a bird from its cage, like a lover to his mistress'—each image accelerating the sense of release. These comparisons often yoke the natural to the human: the east wind's effect is 'detested of every organism,' as if the city itself were a sentient body. The cumulative effect is a prose that feels both urgent and considered, as though Smith is testing each metaphor for its exact emotional weight.

The Islesman's Calendar

Smith contrasts urban time—'parliamentary session and recess, college terms'—with the shepherd's year, which 'rises into interest when the hills... are pathetic with newly-yeaned lambs.' The word 'pathetic' here carries its older sense of evoking pity, aligning the lambing season with an emotional rather than mechanical rhythm. The shepherd's knowledge is intimate: he 'recognises the voices of the torrents as if they were children of his own' and can 'unknit their intricate melody.' This passage reveals Smith's method: he treats rural life not as picturesque backdrop but as a system of knowledge, one that the traveler can observe but never fully possess. The shepherd's expertise—knowing each wether's 'countenance'—is presented with quiet admiration.

Milking as Choreographed Chaos

The milking scene is the book's most kinetic set piece. Smith builds it in stages: the 'green oasis' at sunset, cows 'lowing in picturesque groups,' then the eruption of 'wild-looking calves' and 'wilder-looking urchins.' The prose becomes almost cinematic, tracking an 'ardent calf' that breaks through the cordon, tumbles a boy into the stream, and reaches its dam. The calf's tail 'shaking with delight' and the cow's 'fond maternal tongue' are rendered with a specificity that avoids sentimentality. Smith's eye for physical detail—the 'swollen udder,' the 'branch-bearing' urchins—grounds the scene in observed reality. The Gaelic exclamation ('much Gaelic exclamation') is noted but not translated, preserving the foreignness of the moment.

Diction and the Poet's Register

Smith, author of the verse drama A Life Drama, brings a poet's vocabulary to travel writing. He uses 'usquebaugh' (whisky) and 'peat-reek' alongside 'æsthetic sense' and 'phenomena of storm and calm.' His sentences often balance Latinate abstraction with concrete nouns: 'the higher and more affecting element of animal life, with its passions and instincts, its gladness and suffering.' The effect is a register that can shift from the colloquial ('fagged with work') to the Miltonic ('with wreathed horns superb'). This range suggests a writer self-consciously performing the role of the literary traveler, one who sees the Highlands through both Romantic and empirical lenses.

Smith's A Summer in Skye rewards readers who attend to its verbal texture. The similes, the shepherd's calendar, the milking choreography—each reveals a mind that treats landscape as both fact and figure. The excerpts suggest a work that is as much about the act of seeing as about Skye itself. Readers may wish to track how Smith's diction shifts between Edinburgh's heat and the island's cool, and whether the poet's eye ever falters into mere decoration.

There’s a particular ache in reading about a place you’ll never see as it was—Smith’s Skye, with its shepherd fires and slow milking hours, feels like a half-remembered dream. That same quiet longing surfaced again in Flint's Letters from America, 1818-1820 — A Reader’s Guide, where every landscape is held up to the light just long enough to vanish. I wonder if we read old travels mostly to mourn what’s already gone.