The Poetry of
Basil Bunting
by Ian Brinton
English Association Bookmarks
No. 61
English Association Bookmarks Number 61
The Poetry of Basil Bunting
by
Ian Brinton
Scope of Topic
The aim of this Bookmark is to provide a close critical reading of some of Basil Bunting’s
poetry. It will, I hope, act as an introduction to this significant figure of the twentieth century
whose achievement is still undervalued. There are two extracts from the major Sonata,
‘Briggflatts’ (1965) and the 1964 Ode on the death of his son, Rustam, first published in Los
Angeles in 1985.
BOOKS TO READ
The poems are included in the Complete Poems of Basil Bunting, edited by Richard Caddel
(Bloodaxe Books 2000).
NOTES
‘Suckling poets should be fed on Darwin till they are filled with the elegance of things seen or
heard or touched.’ Bunting to Peter Makin December 1984.
Robert Creeley, speaking of Bunting: ‘He said, too, that the possibilities of poetry for himself
had become most evident when he first realised that the modulation of sounds in a poem
might be agent of emotions as actually as any other.’ Agenda Spring 1978.
‘The achievement of ‘Briggflatts’ derives from the attempt to bring Then into as close a
relation with Now as possible. The aligning of the two comes about by the central device of
imitating ‘the condition of music’. Then and Now are brought to bear upon each other as are
the different voices in a madrigal.’ Charles Tomlinson in Agenda 1966.
‘Amongst philosophers I have most sympathy with Lucretius and his masters, content to
explain the world an atom at a time.’ A Note on Briggflatts edited by Richard Caddel, Durham
1989.
The colourful life of Basil Bunting is attractively related by Keith Alldritt in his biography, The
Poet As Spy, The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting (Aurum Press 1998). Alldritt traces
Bunting’s life through the early love-affair with Peggy Greenbank, the incarceration at the end
of the First World War as a conscientious objector, the following of Ezra Pound to Rapallo, the
work in Iran for the British government during the Second World War and the return home to
years of poverty and neglect in the Northumberland he loved. Between 1952 and 1965, living
with his mother and his second wife, Sima, who was thirty-four years younger than him,
Bunting eked out a living working for the Newcastle Evening Chronicle. Threading this
extraordinary life there is the slim volume of poetry written and re-written between the 1920s
and the flowering outburst in 1965 with the completion of Briggflatts, subtitled ‘An
autobiography for Peggy’. The turning-point in Bunting’s career as a poet was prompted by
the seventeen-year-old Tom Pickard who asked him in 1964 to contribute to a small
magazine. This led to a historic literary friendship. In the summer of 1964 Bunting gave a
reading in the Morden Tower Bookroom in Newcastle upon Tyne to some seventy people and
Pickard later managed to obtain a grant from Newcastle University to enable the Bookroom to
publish The Spoils which had been completed in 1951. This sense of an audience inspired
Bunting to commit himself to the writing of a new long poem, impelled, as he said, ‘by love of
a larger shape, more architectural’. Working on the commuter train between Wylam and
Newcastle, with retirement from the newspaper imminent, Bunting produced Briggflatts. This
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English Association Bookmarks Number 61
twenty-page poem was heralded by Cyril Connolly as ‘the finest long poem to have been
published in English since Four Quartets’ and Hugh Kenner suggested that its opening line
was the strongest since Pound opened the Cantos with ‘And then went down to the ship’ in
1924.
Briggflatts
As an autobiography, Briggflatts is not a record of fact; ‘the truth of the poem is of another
kind’. It is, however, an account of a young man’s turning his back upon the love affair which
had started between Peggy and himself in the small Pennine hamlet of Brigflatts: the poet’s
life is incorporated into a poetic whole. Peggy’s father was a stonemason and for six years
Bunting spent a significant amount of school-holiday time staying with the family who lived
across the road from the seventeenth-century Quaker Meeting House. In a letter to the
American poet and friend, Louis Zukofsky in September 1964, Bunting points to one of the
central aspects of the poem: ‘Peggy Greenbank and her whole ambience, the Rawthey valley,
the fells of Lunedale, the Viking inheritance all spent save the faint smell of it, the ancient
Quaker life accepted without thought and without suspicion that it might seem eccentric: and
what happens when one deliberately thrusts love aside, as I then did—it has its revenge.
That must be a longish poem’. Briggflatts is a poem in five sections. Sections one, two, four
and five follow a seasonal movement from Spring to Winter and the central third section
presents what Bunting called ‘Alexander’s interview with the Angel on the top of the
mountain’, a Persian version of the legend taken from Firdosi’s Shahnameh. From its opening
with the childhood loves of the poet and Peggy the poem takes us on the journey of
experience which is haunted with regret for what has been put aside. As Victoria Forde puts
it: ‘The theme of the mortality of the individual and eventually of all men and women moves
in and out of the foreground as an everpresent human limitation. Finally, ‘uninterrupted night’
‘for love’ is accepted, though not without the simultaneous painful uncertainty of the future.
Even the fact of the cosmos with its own larger continuum, as well as the varied beauty and
cyclical order of nature does not entirely mitigate the pain heard in the final stoic expression
of the sonata. This pain Bunting described to me as ‘the pain…of wrong unrighted or
unrightable’’.
1. The opening of the first section of Briggflatts (1966) in Complete Poems page 61
Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.
Ridiculous and lovely
chase hurdling shadows
morning into noon.
May on the bull’s hide
and through the dale
furrows fill with may,
paving the slowworm’s way.
A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter,
listening while the marble rests,
lays his rule
at a letter’s edge,
fingertips checking,
till the stone spells a name
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naming none,
a man abolished.
Painful lark, labouring to rise!
The solemn mallet says:
In the grave’s slot
he lies. We rot.
Bunting had Scarlatti’s B minor fugato sonata (L.33) in his mind from the outset of the poem
and the eighteenth century composer’s readiness to modulate between the light and shade of
major and minor informs the shift from the spirit of spring which opens the first section and
the more sombre note of death and betrayal which soon follows. The compactness and use of
the single melodic line in Scarlatti are characteristics which Bunting found important. In
conversation with Victoria Forde he said: ‘The most fundamental limitation in the analogy of
poetry and music is that poetry can carry only one line of sound at a time, music many…I
prefer to let the poem be shaped by the fact that only one voice is ever really audible at a
time.’ Further emphasising the interwoven quality of poetry and music, Bunting’s
conversations with Jonathan Williams in Descant on Rawthey’s Madrigal include the mantra
‘Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sound—long sounds and short sounds, heavy
beats and light beats, the tone relations of vowels, the relation of consonants to one another
which are like instrumental colour in music. Poetry lies dead on the page, until some voice
brings it to life…Poetry must be read aloud.’ In the opening to Briggflatts the musical sense of
Spring is not limited to the inclusion of references to ‘tenor’, ‘descant’, ‘madrigal’ and ‘Dance’.
Instead it is there in the cold water of the stream, Rawthey, as it races over pebbles. The
repetition of the sound between ‘pebble’ and ‘part’ gives us the music of the water in this ‘late
spring’ in the fells. The courtship dance of the bull is evoked exactly from Bunting’s own
recollections from his childhood when he heard a bull on a farm near Throckley bellowing ‘in
the most melodious tenor, a beautiful tenor voice. In spring, the bull does in fact, if he’s with
the cows, dance, on the tip of his toes, part of the business of showing off, showing that he’s
protecting them…It is delightful, and it bears such a strong resemblance to the behaviour of
young men in general and…well all creatures.’ The ‘may’ referred to ‘on the bull’s hide’ is the
white blossom of the hawthorn and the feeling of nuptial overflowing is beautifully caught as
the ‘furrows fill with may’. However, even here there is a haunting suggestion of the falling
away from love and youth as the shadows move from ‘morning into noon’ and the richness of
the hawthorn’s flowers lies in the dale.
The second stanza introduces us to the mason who is not only Peggy’s father in Briggflatts
but also an image of the poet as craftsman carving his words. The delicate exactness of the
poet/mason’s art is captured in the consonantal sound of the short lines:
lays his rule
at a letter’s edge,
fingertips checking
The mason’s art ‘spells a name’ and the merging of the conventional rules of spelling with the
magic of conjuration becomes an ideal metaphor for bringing the dead to life. This poem is
‘an autobiography’: it brings to life ‘a man abolished’. In an Agenda article from 1966, Charles
Tomlinson referred to this juxtaposing of past and present, the poem as ‘spell’:
The achievement of the poem—and here one is reducing to abstraction all that is art and
art’s particulars—derives from the attempt to bring Then into as close a relation with Now
as possible. The aligning of the two comes about by the central device of imitating ‘the
condition of music’. Then and Now are brought to bear upon each other as are the
different voices in a madrigal. In a poem this cannot be done simultaneously; but, by
juxtaposition, Now can be played over against Then as Then—summoned up by motif
and left echoing in the mind—stands forth, counterpoised rather than counterpointed,
against the ensuing motif of Now.
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2. The conclusion of the last section of Briggflatts (1966) in Complete Poems page 7980
Light lifts from the water.
Frost has put rowan down,
a russet blotch of bracken
tousled about the trunk.
Bleached sky. Cirrus
reflects sun that has left
nothing to badger eyes.
Young flutes, harps touched by a breeze,
drums and horns escort
Aldebaran, low in the clear east,
beckoning boats to the fishing.
Capella floats from the north
with shields hung on his gunwale.
That is no dinghy’s lantern
occulted by the swell—Betelgeuse,
calling behind him to Rigel.
Starlight is almost flesh.
Great strings next the post of the harp
clang, the horn has majesty,
flutes flicker in the draft and flare.
Orion strides over Farne.
Seals shuffle and bark,
terns shift on their ledges,
watching Capella steer for the zenith,
and Procyon starts his climb.
Furthest, fairest things, stars, free of our humbug,
each his own, the longer known the more alone,
wrapt in emphatic fire roaring out to a black flue.
Each spark trills on a tone beyond chronological compass,
yet in a sextant’s bubble present and firm
places a surveyor’s stone or steadies a tiller.
Then is Now. The star you steer by is gone,
its tremulous thread spun in the hurricane
spider floss on my cheek; light from the zenith
spun when the slowworm lay in her lap
fifty years ago.
The sheets are gathered and bound,
the volume indexed and shelved,
dust on its marbled leaves.
Lofty, an empty combe,
silent but for bees.
Finger tips touched and were still
fifty years ago.
Sirius is too young to remember.
Sirius glows in the wind. Sparks on ripples
mark his line, lures for spent fish.
Fifty years a letter unanswered;
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a visit postponed for fifty years.
She has been with me fifty years.
Starlight quivers. I had day enough.
For love uninterrupted night.
All these images of stars are linked closely with motifs of the sea, referring the reader back to
the journeying made from home so many years ago. ‘As mythological figures, the
constellations share a kind of immortality and a kind of presence in Then and Now.’ As
natural objects, the stars have a stability and constancy so reliable that each ‘places a
surveyor’s stone or steadies a tiller.’ Through the simultaneous permanence and transience of
the light of a star, an essential assertion of the sonata is imaged: ‘Then is Now.’ Bunting’s use
of the stars as images of permanence and transience may owe something to George Oppen’s
volume, The Materials (1962) with which the American broke his twenty-eight year silence:
Fifty years
Sidereal time
Together, and among the others,
The bequeathed pavements, the inherited lit streets:
In 1932 Bunting had written: ‘Simultaneity, interdependence, continuous cross-reference and
absence of simplification are characteristic of all fact, whether physical or mental or
emotional.’ Just as the modern reader must recognise that solid phenomena are unsolid
(atoms are constituted of electrons, moving wave-packages, as vibrating as light), Bunting
presents us with a world where threads, connecting past and present, interweave. The sheets
of the poem may be ‘gathered and bound’, the volume may be ‘indexed and shelved’ but this
is just a moment of seeming stillness as the poet brings ‘Then’ into relation with ‘Now’.
Bunting’s moving sense of loss in the poem is caught in the directness of ‘The star you steer
by is gone,’ and in the world of transience the thread of light from it is ‘spider floss on my
cheek.’ The ‘light from the zenith’ refers to Capella and it was ‘spun’ fifty years ago ‘when the
slowworm lay in her lap’ and we are reminded of the lovers of the first section. The delicacy
of the memory, its fragility, is hauntingly caught with ‘Finger tips touched and were still/fifty
years ago’. The feeling of being caught up with the inevitable movement of time is
heightened by the reference to Sirius: ‘Sirius is too young to remember.’ Bunting’s own note
to this was ‘Sirius is too young to remember because the light we call by his name left its star
only eight years ago; but the light from Capella, now in the zenith, set out 45 years ago—as
near fifty as makes no difference to a poet.’ The personal sense of loss could not be
conveyed more simply and directly:
Fifty years a letter unanswered;
a visit postponed for fifty years.
She has been with me fifty years.
The repetition of fifty, the gap on the page between the lines and the directness of three
statements convey the haunting guilt of the poet who recognises the relationship between
himself and his own past. Charles Tomlinson again put it so clearly in his essay for the
Autumn 1966 edition of Agenda;
Then and Now: that incident of fifty years since and other incidents in Northumbrian
history of a greater starkness…all now the spoils of time, are held over against the
present moment and landscape, the quality of that wet spring night informing this
present moment and demanding all the intricacy of musical form that Bunting brings
to the confrontation.
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3.
A Song for Rustam (published 1985) in Complete Poems page 197
Tears are for what can be mended,
not for a voyage ended
the day the schooner put out.
Short fear and sudden quiet
too deep for a diving thief.
Tears are for easy grief.
My soil is shorn,
forests and corn.
Winter will bare the rock.
What has he left of pride
whose son is dead?
My soil has shaved its head.
The sky withers and stinks.
Star after star sinks
into the west, by you.
Whirling, spokes of the wheel
hoist up a faded day,
its sky wrinkled and grey.
Words slung to the gale
stammer and fail:
‘Unseen is not unknown,
unkissed is not unloved,
unheard is not unsung;’
Words late, lost, dumb.
Truth that shone is dim,
lies cripple every limb.
Where you were, you are not.
Silent, heavy air
stifles the heart’s leap.
Truth is asleep.
In October 1952 Bunting heard the devastating news from America that his fifteen-year-old
son, Rustam, who had been born after Bunting and his first wife Marian had separated, had
died. Bunting had never seen his son and this death, coming hours after polio had been
diagnosed, left him grief-struck for what could never be mended. The elegy was not
published in the poet’s lifetime and first appeared in the American magazine, Sulfur (No. 14
ed. Clayton Eshleman, Los Angeles, 1985) and reproduced in Richard Caddell’s Uncollected
Poems of Bunting, Oxford 1991. The haunting sense of loss, the Hardyesque feeling of
inevitability and division, remained with Bunting and in September 1964 he wrote to Louis
Zukofsky:
Anyway, it’s all for long consideration, I suppose. That ‘long’ is the trouble. I’ve a
feeling that there isn’t so long to write what I want to write. I’ll die or petrify, or my
disgusting drudgery will make me imbecile. Still, better silence than rubbish.
In the grave’s narrow slot
they lie: we rot.
The we doesn’t mean you, whose work for a living is merely dull, not stultifying.
Worms don’t eat you alive.
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The two lines reappear, modified, in the opening section of Briggflatts and the rest of
Bunting’s letter to Zukofsky outlines plans for other poems, one of which is an early sketch
for the autobiography:
Well, that looks like the programme of an old man revisiting the scenes of his youth,
casting up his accounts, as my father did in the few months before he died. I have no
means to carry it out, but I must try.
Much of the deeply moving quality of this elegy centres upon different ways of expressing
loss. The poignant dignity of the inversion ‘What has he left of pride/whose son is dead?’
echoes the early seventeenth-century of Ben Jonson, the death of whose son prompted the
lines:
O, could I loose all father, now. For why
Will man lament the state he should envie?
To have so soone scap’d worlds, and fleshes rage,
And, if no other miserie, yet age?
The knowledge of uncompromising finality in death haunts the man who will now never have
the opportunity to say those words to his unseen son that he may have hoped would have
found place sometime. Now words are ‘slung to the gale’ with its echo of Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure:
Ay, but to die, and go we know not where;
To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod, and the dilated spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprisoned in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world…
The anguish of the loss is shouted by the italicised lines which could almost be thrown in the
teeth of those intruders who might question the depth of the father’s feelings for a son whom
he had not met:
‘Unseen is not unknown,
unkissed is not unloved,
unheard is not unsung;’
The simplicity of loss, ‘Where you were, you are not’, has a directness which conveys all that
absence is and it acts as a clear for-runner to the achieved sonata, Briggflatts, ‘one of the few
great poems of the century’ (Thom Gunn).
Further Reading
The Poetry of Basil Bunting, Victoria Forde, Bloodaxe, 1991
Bunting, The Shaping of his Verse, Peter Makin, Oxford 1992
The Poet as Spy, Keith Alldritt, Aurum Press 1998
Agenda, 4 (Autumn 1966)
Agenda 16,1 (Spring 1978)
Modern Poetry for A/S Coursework, Ian Brinton, Use of English (Summer 2002)
© Ian Brinton and the English Association, October 2002
© English Association and Ian Brinton, 2007
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English Association Bookmarks Number 61
The Poetry of Basil Bunting by Ian Brinton is Number 61 in the Bookmark series, published by
The English Association
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© English Association and Ian Brinton, 2007
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