On his return to Skye in the autumn of 1934, Sorley MacLean went to Portree High School to teach English. He remarked that by the time he started teaching in Portree, he had an interest in old songs and new poetry, especially in the poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid. He lodged first of all in Carndarach in Wentworth Street, but by the end of the school session 1934-35, he had moved into the Elgin Hostel (a residential house for boys from the islands) to assist with supervision. In 1934, he composed the poem ‘An Soitheach’,

which was published under the pseudonym ‘Ruari Mac-Ailein’, but the poet increasingly found the pressures of supervision in Elgin Hostel every second night made it difficult for him to get the necessary concentration for his poetry. During July and early August of 1935, Sorley MacLean paid a visit to the island of Whalsay at the invitation of Hugh MacDiarmid.

During the period 1936 to 1939, a number of events combined to put the poet under great tension, which found expression in his poetry, and he himself stated that from 1936 to 1939 he became, if a poet, a very different one from what his pre-1936 writings indicated. In the essay ‘My Relationship with the Muse’, he listed the circumstances as his mother’s long illness in 1936, its recurrence in 1938, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, the progressive decline of his father’s business in the Thirties, his meeting with an Irish girl in 1937, his rash leaving of Skye for Mull late in 1937, and Munich in 1938, and always the steady unbearable decline of Gaelic, made those years for him years of difficult choice, and he affirmed that the tensions of these years confirmed his self-expression in poetry not in action. The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 was an important and dramatic turning point in Sorley MacLean’s life. From 1933 onwards, he had been much affected by what he considered the likely victory of the forces of Fascism in Europe.

With the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he became convinced that the most immediate and essential action was the defeat of Fascism in Spain. His colleague at Portree Secondary School, Jack Stuart, whom he much admired, asked Sorley MacLean to accompany him to Spain to fight with the International Brigade, but although he longed to do so, his own family circumstances made it impossible for him.

Sorley MacLean remained in Portree until 1937, and in that year Hugh MacDiarmid made a reciprocal visit to him while on a visit to the Western Isles in the company of W. D. MacColl, the Gaelic enthusiast and nationalist. They spent a night on Raasay with the MacLean family, and then they came to Portree to spend the weekend with Sorley MacLean before going on to Barra. Later that year, Sorley MacLean took a teaching post at Tobermory Secondary School on the island of Mull, where he taught from January to December 1938. He spent a year there but it was not a particularly happy time for him, and he himself described it as a ‘traumatic experience’. Mull he found to be beautiful but the historical associations of the clearances that had been widespread on the island in the 19th century made it a ‘heart-breaking place’ for a man who bore the name of MacLean (the best known of all Mull names). Yet for all the island’s melancholy associations, Sorley MacLean’s stay on Mull was fruitful for his poetry, and a number of poems were written during his time on Mull, among them ‘Ban-Ghàidheal’. The poet later explained: ‘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.’  His teaching circumstances on Mull were less onerous than they had been in Portree, and he was able to write more and to carry on an active correspondence with Hugh MacDiarmid. Christopher Whyte has pointed to the similarities between the two poets’ modernist sense of dissatisfaction with what they considered the decadent and unambitious traditions of poetry.

In January 1939, Sorley MacLean moved from Mull to Edinburgh, where he took up a post teaching English at Boroughmuir High School. He lived in lodgings in Polwarth in close proximity to the school, and while in Edinburgh he renewed his friendship with Robert Garioch, who invited him along to the weekly gathering of poets in the Abbotsford Bar in Rose Street. Robert Garioch had his own hand press and from it there appeared a slim pamphlet by Sorley MacLean and Robert Garioch, 17 Poems for 6d, with the imprint date 1940. Seventeen Poems for Sixpence, a second issue, with corrections, was published a few weeks later.

It was also in 1939 that Sorley MacLean began work on a major poem ‘An Cuilithionn’. The idea of the poem had been conceived earlier in Mull in 1938 when, as he described it, he had begun to think of writing a very long poem, 10,000 words or so, on the human condition, radiating from the history of Skye to the West Highlands to Europe and what he knew of the rest of the world. Although begun in Edinburgh in 1939, when about 3,000 lines were composed, the writing of the poem ceased abruptly in December 1939.

In October 1939, Sorley MacLean went to Hawick to teach evacuees, and he remained there until at least June 1940. It was during this period that the majority of the renowned ‘Dàin do Eimhir’10 poems were written. During the period from December 1939 and August 1941, Sorley MacLean was affected by a deep emotional experience, which he described as one that nearly drove him mad.

His enraged feelings about Fascism, and a love affair of passionate intensity, combined to produce the ‘Dàin do Eimhir’, a series of love poems of great beauty. In the poems, the poet’s own intense personal experience is juxtaposed with his feelings about the struggles in Spain and the wider struggle of humanity and the fate of the world. The most detailed account of the history of the composition of the ‘Dàin do Eimhir’ cycle can be found in Christopher Whyte’s edition of the Gaelic poems, with English translations, published in 2002.

In September 1940, Sorley MacLean entered the Signal Corps, and from May 1941 until December 1941, he was based at Catterick Camp in Yorkshire awaiting embarkation orders. In December 1941, he was sent to Egypt, and he spent the period from December 1941 to March 1943 on active service with the Royal Horse Artillery.

Before he was sent abroad, he had left his poems with Douglas Young (later lecturer in Greek at St Andrews University), who had volunteered to find a publisher for them, and John Macdonald of the Department of Celtic in the University of Aberdeen.  When Douglas Young went to prison in 1942 rather than recognize the authority of the British state to conscript, the task of overseeing the publication fell to the Rev. John Mackechnie.

Sorley MacLean’s regard and deep feelings for humanity can be seen, as elsewhere, in his war poetry, which includes his finest war poem ‘Glaic a’ Bhàis’. Despite this, he seems to have turned against his own poetry at this time, and in February 1942, he wrote to Hugh MacDiarmid that ‘if I am ever to write any more verse, it will be very different from what I have written, that it must be less subjective, more thoughtful, less content with its own music’.  He was wounded three times while on active service in North Africa: at one point it was even rumoured that he was missing in action. He had, in fact, been badly wounded at the Battle of El Alamein on 2 November 1942 when a land mine exploded near him, and he had been taken to hospital. He spent the next nine months hospitalised in Burgel Arab, Cantara, Suez, Baragwanath, Netley in England and Raigmore, Inverness. He was finally discharged from Raigmore Hospital in Inverness, and invalided out of the army in August 1943.

In March 1943 when Sorley MacLean arrived back in England to complete his convalescence, his poems were already in proof, and he was able to read them in hospital in Southampton and return them to the publisher in Glasgow, William MacLellan. In early November that year, Dàin do Eimhir agus Dàin Eile, appeared with an introductory note by Douglas Young and illustrations by the Scottish artist William Crosbie. In his introduction to Nua-Bhàrdachd Ghàidhlig, Dàin do Eimhir’s importance is summed up succinctly by Professor Donald MacAulay when he states: ‘After the publication of this book Gaelic poetry could never be the same again’.

The same year saw the publication of Douglas Young’s Auntran Blads, a volume of poetry dedicated to Sorley MacLean and George Campbell Hay, with his translations of the work of both poets.