The ploughland has gone to bent
and the pasture to heather;
gin the goodwife stint,
she’ll keep the house together.
Gin the goodwife stint
and the bairns hunger
the Duke can get his rent
one year longer.
The Duke can get his rent
and we can get our ticket
twa pund emigrant
on a C.P.R. packet.364
Emigration of poor farmers from the north of England to Canada is also the theme of the complaint:
And thou! Thou’s idled all the spring,
I doubt thou’s spoiled, my Meg!
But a sheepdog’s faith is aye something.
We’ll hire together in Winnipeg.
Canada’s a cold land.
Thou and I must share
a straw bed and a hind’s wages
and the bitter air.365
‘Crazy Jane’ it isn’t. Bunting knew it was flawed. At a reading in London in 1980 he said that he hadn’t read it:
for a long time, chiefly I suppose because the matters it deals with cleared up long ago. I’d no sooner written the ‘The Complaint of the Morpethshire Farmer’ than it was out of date, for the Forestry Commission came and took all the land and drained it, and then the farmers got rich instead of being extremely poor. But in the 1920s a large part of Northumberland, a great deal of many other counties I suppose, remained in a real mess. The landlords didn’t put in land drains, which would make the ground tolerable for grass, because what they wanted was lots of heather to fill it with grouse, who live on heather, and so be able to get enormous fees from people who wanted to shoot the grouse. It was a bit hard on the farmer, and this was a protest against that.366
More successful were his meditations on art, ‘Nothing’, which was published in Zukofsky’s February 1931 edition of Poetry as ‘The Word’, and ‘Fruit breaking the branches’. In the Poetry version the poem that follows ‘Nothing’ in Collected Poems, ‘Molten pool, incandescent spilth of’ is an appendix, ‘Appendix: Iron’, to ‘The Word’. But the triumph of 1930 was Bunting’s poem to Mina Loy, ‘Now that sea’s over that island’:
Now that sea’s over that island
so that barely on a calm day sun sleeks
a patchwork hatching of combed weed
over stubble and fallow alike
I resent drowned blackthorn hedge, choked ditch,
gates breaking from rusty hinges,
the submerged copse,
Trespassers will be prosecuted.
Sea’s over that island,
weed over furrow and dungheap:
but how I should recognise the place
under the weeds and sand
who was never in it on land I don’t know:
some trick of refraction,
a film of light in the water crumpled and spread
like a luminous frock on a woman walking
alone in her garden.
Oval face, thin eyebrows wide of the eyes,
a premonition in the gait
of this subaqueous persistence
of a particular year –
for you had prepared it for preservation
not vindictively, urged
by the economy of passions.
Nobody said: She is organising
these knicknacks her dislike collects
into a pattern nature will adopt and perpetuate.
Weed over meadowgrass, sea over weed,
no step on the gravel.
Very likely I shall never meet her again
or if I do, fear the latch as before.367
I think that Carolyn Burke is correct in seeing this poem as essentially autobiographical: ‘The intricate network of flea-market finds that filled her apartment found its way into the “knicknacks”, and Cravan’s fate [Loy’s second husband who had drowned] echoed in the subaqueous persistance/of a particular year.’368 David Annwn has shown, however, that a more subtle reading is possible, one which reflects on Loy’s qualities as artist and poet.369
Something missing
The earliest of Bunting’s adaptations and translations to survive were written in 1931. The two-part poem, ‘Vestiges’, is a ‘presumably exact version’ of Genghis Khan’s correspondence with Chang Chun taken from Emil Bretschneider’s Mediaeval Researches from Eastern Asiatic Sources,370 and ‘Yes, it’s slow’ is the first of Bunting’s translations from Horace to survive:
Yes, it’s slow, docked of amours,
docked of the doubtless efficacious
bottled makeshift, gin; but who’d risk being bored stiff
every night listening to father’s silly sarcasms?371
Even casual readers will notice the deliberately introduced anachronisms in this poem (gin for instance). Bunting was following in the tradition established by Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’. He claimed in the appendix on translation that would have appeared in Caveat Emptor in 1935, had it ever found a publisher, that ‘a good translator will employ anachronisms as often as seems needful to avoid the kind of obscurity that gives footnotes an excuse’.372 Harry Gilonis has shown just how expert is another 1931 translation from Horace, ‘Please stop gushing about his pink’, brilliantly employing a device known as ‘hypallage’ that is ‘usually near unachievable in English’.373
The major works of 1931 were, however, the longer poems. ‘Attis: Or, Something Missing’ and ‘Aus Dem Zweiten Reich’. ‘Parodies of Lucretius and Cino da Pistoia can do no damage and intend no disrespect’, he said of the former.374 While pointing at Shelley’s ‘Alastor: Or, The Spirit of Solitude’ ‘Attis’ draws on a legend which seems to have emerged as early as 1200 bce, although it is likely that Bunting picked it up from a poem by Catullus. Attis, a young Phrygian, sails from the mainland and begins a cult, worshipping the Anatolian Mother Goddess, Cybele. Attis castrates himself in a frenzy as a way of preventing his ever loving a woman other than Cybele. The myth (and Catullus’ version of it) deliberately confuse male and female and Bunting’s Attis seems to represent modern man as emasculated and modern society as debased. As Philip Hobsbaum says, ‘Modern man may not be impotent but something is missing from his society and he is presented in anarchically free verse as dishevelled and ineffectual.’375 Of all Bunting’s work ‘Attis: Or, Something Missing’ seems to invoke the spirit of The Waste Land, and perhaps that is why some commentators have assumed that it satirises T. S. Eliot. The first part shifts the scene from Anatolia to the Cheviots in northern England:
Out of puff
noonhot in tweeds and gray felt,
tired of appearance and
disappearance;
warm obese frame limp with satiety;
slavishly circumspect at sixty;
he spreads over the ottoman
scanning the pictures and table trinkets.
(That hand’s dismissed shadow
moves through fastidiously selective consciousness,
rearranges pain.)
There are no colours, words only,
and measured shaking of strings,
and flutes and oboes
enough for dancers.
…. …. …. reluctant ebb:
salt from all beaches:
disrupt Atlantis, days forgotten,
extinct peoples, silted harbours.
He regrets that brackish
train of the huntress
driven into slackening fresh,
expelled when the
estuary resumes
colourless potability;
wreckage that drifted
in drifts out.
‘Longranked larches succeed larches, spokes of a
stroll; hounds trooping around hooves; and the stolid horn’s
sweet breath. Voice: Have you seen the
fox? Which way did he go, he go?
There was soft rain.
I recollect deep mud and leafmould somewhere: and
> in the distance Cheviot’s
heatherbrown flanks and white cap.
Landscape salvaged from
evinced notice of
superabundance, of
since parsimonious
soil …..
Mother of Gods.’
Mother of eunuchs.
Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her
home, workshop, larder, middenpit.
Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by
cities provides us with name and nation.
From her brooks sweat. Hers corn and fruit.
Earthquakes are hers too. Ravenous animals
are sent by her. Praise her and call her
Mother and Mother of Gods and Eunuchs.376
Bunting, to me, in this complicated poem mocks the modern human condition rather than any one exemplar of it. He accepted its obliqueness and celebrated it. He wrote to Harriet Monroe that ‘Ezra says Attis is obscure, from which he deduces that he is getting old. It certainly wouldn’t be easy to write a synopsis, but I think it’s really fairly plain for all that, if the reader doesn’t spend time and energy looking for a nice logical syllogistic development which isnt there.’377
‘Aus Dem Zweiten Reich’ is altogether more straightforward. The poem is ‘a description of the Germany just before Hitler’s time … I got in before the novelists did’,378 a rueful reference to Christopher Isherwood whose novels about Weimar Berlin had by the time of Bunting’s remark been transformed into the phenomenally successful musical Cabaret. Bunting described ‘Aus Dem Zweiten Reich’, many years later, as ‘very obviously a Scarlatti sonata’,379 but for me this pushes the sonata model too far. ‘Aus Dem Zweiten Reich’ is a light, uncomplicated mockery of a Germany he despised, whereas ‘Attis: Or, Something Missing’ is a rich, dark, complex mockery of the world and all it contained.
The clarity comes from the corpse
The year 1931 was productive but 1932 was a watershed in Bunting’s development. He considered ‘Two Photographs’ to be the ‘central work’ in his Collected Poems, a ‘turning point; before that, if it comes off, it’s pretty much almost by accident, you could say. They hit it by chance. But in “Two Photographs”, and in every subsequent poem, I knew what I was doing; the poem does what I want it to do. It’s the first poem I wrote that does exactly what it’s intended to do. And all the rest, after that, do that too.’380
It’s true then that you still overeat, fat friend,
and swell, and never take folk’s advice. They laugh,
you just giggle and pay no attention. Damn!
you don’t care, not you!
But once – that was before time had blunted your
desire for pretty frocks – slender girl – or is
the print cunningly faked? – arm in arm with your
fiancé you stood
and glared into the lens (slightly out of focus)
while that public eye scrutinised your shape,
afraid, the attitude shows, you might somehow
excite its dislike.381
I don’t think that Bunting meant to suggest that this was a great poem but that he had at last found his technique. Technically it is assured and from 1932 on his work is confident and independent, with fewer classical allusions and more direct, one might say more Yeatsian, engagement with the world around him. The other poems of 1932, ‘Mesh cast for mackerel’,382 ‘The Passport Officer’ and his major work of the 1930s, ‘Chomei at Toyama’, have none of the world-weary, stage poet about them.383 That is not to say that they weren’t brilliantly crafted. He said of ‘Chomei at Toyama’ many years later that
not all, but three quarters of it is in quantitative metres. In that case nearly all of them altered Greek metres … and nobody, for all these many, many years, nobody has ever observed that this is … organised by quantity. Perhaps because when it was done the line endings seem to come in odd places and so I changed the line endings, and they come rather where it helps the person to read it instead of where the metre comes.384
Certainly by 1932 Bunting had found his own unique voice and you can hear his frustration about his supposed ‘influences’ in a letter he wrote to Harriet Monroe in November 1932. Eliot, he said, disliked ‘Chomei’ partly because, ‘he says it echoes Pound … But Pound supposes it to contain echoes of Eliot. I’m not aware of echoing anybody. Except Chomei: his book was in prose and four to five times as long as my poem, but I think everything, or nearly everything relevant in Chomei has been got into the poem. The curiously detailed resemblances between mediaeval Kyoto and modern New York are not my invention, and I didn’t feel called on to disguise them.’385
On the other hand he had told James Leippert the previous month that ‘so far as I know my “Chomei” has only two admirers, but they are Pound and Yeats. Eliot is said to have said that it couldn’t be good because I had never been in Japan! Which, if true, is an example of what ten years at the head of a dull “heavy” can do to a man.’386 He eventually came round to Eliot’s view. Many years later Bunting told Gael Turnbull that the reason Eliot rejected ‘Chomei at Toyama’ for the Criterion was that Bunting had never lived in Japan and didn’t know any Japanese, a view with which Bunting had some sympathy.387 In fact ‘Chomei at Toyama’ has always had its admirers. Victoria Forde considers it Bunting’s best long poem after Briggflatts and Lorine Niedecker adored it.388
Bunting was rightly proud of its technique. He told the editor of Agenda, William Cookson, that ‘the day somebody discovers the prosodical basis of ‘Chomei’, if it ever comes, my bones will turn over in the grave and cheer’.389 But he was aware of its flaws and there is something about Eliot’s criticism that rings true. Thirty years or so later a reviewer of Briggflatts pointed out that literature ‘for Bunting is a function of his experience, not a substitute for it’,390 and it is striking how much Bunting’s best poems are based on the poet’s own experiences – ‘Villon’ on prison life, ‘The Spoils’ on war, ‘Briggflatts’ on his entire life – and how comparatively weak are those, such as ‘Chomei at Toyama’, which aren’t. He knew this. He said that Sir Walter Raleigh ‘was a great poet, a pirate, a statesman, and a million other things. You can’t write about anything unless you’ve experienced it: you’re either confused in your subject matter or else you get it wrong.391 The fact that ‘Chomei at Toyama’ doesn’t quite equal ‘Villon’ and ‘Briggflatts’ in its conviction doesn’t, of course, mean that it is not an important poem.
Bunting explained the genesis of ‘Chomei at Toyama’ at a reading at St Andrew’s Presbyterian College in 1976:
Long ago I came across a little volume which included an Italian prose translation of a prose book of essays written by a Japanese who died about the year 1200 and it had notes to it, learned notes. As I read it, it seemed to me that Chomei had so shaped his volume of essays that it was equivalent to an elegiac poem – but, of course, such a thing would have been quite outside any tradition he knew of, and when he wrote it he was, for those ages, an old man, well over sixty and without the energy to invent a new form. I thought ‘oh well now I’ll do what Chomei would have done if he could, and I’ll write a poem of it.’ So I made a poem and altered it a good deal here and there and transferred some of the learned notes into the poem itself.392
‘Chomei at Toyama’ takes as its source a thirteenth-century Japanese essay, Hojoki (‘An Account of a Ten Foot Square Hut’), by Kamo no Chōmei that had been translated into Italian by Marcello Muccioli. Chōmei, having witnessed a series of natural disasters, including the great fire of 1177 in Kyoto, then the capital of Japan, and having been politically disappointed withdrew from the court and built a hut in the Hino mountains. He lived from then on in isolation as a reclusive Buddhist and reflects, in Bunting’s poem, on matters universal and local, from:
Whence comes man at his birth? or where
does death lead him? Whom do you mourn?
Whose steps wake your delight?
Dewy hi
biscus dries: though dew
outlast the petals.
I have been noting events forty years.
to:
On the twentyseventh May eleven hundred
and seventyseven, eight p.m., fire broke out
at the corner of Tomi and Higuchi streets.
In a night
palace, ministries, university, parliament
were destroyed. As the wind veered
flames spread out in the shape of an open fan.
Tongues torn by gusts stretched and leapt.
In the sky clouds of cinders lit red with the blaze.
Some choked, some burned, some barely escaped.
Sixteen great officials lost houses and
very many poor. A third of the city burned;
several thousands died; and of beasts,
limitless numbers.
Men are fools to invest in real estate.
Three years less three days later a wind
starting near the outer boulevard
broke a path a quarter mile across
to Sixth Avenue.
Not a house stood. Some were felled whole,
some in splinters; some had left
great beams upright in the ground
and round about
lay rooves scattered where the wind flung them.393
He told William Carlos Williams that ‘it was much more difficult than you may imagine to keep Chomei clear, and couldnt have been done if I hadnt had the japs own book (italian translation) in front of me and kept as closely to it as the condensation of verse would permit. In short it’s a collaboration between me and a corpse of sixty-five, and the clarity, such as it is, comes from the corpse.’394
‘Chomei at Toyama’ is an important poem, and Bunting’s serious intent in it is unquestionable. Pound admired its discipline with good reason, but reading the correspondence between Bunting and Pound in the early 1930s can be a challenging exercise. For the most part the subjects are extremely abstruse, the finest possible points of, for instance, classical Japanese scholarship, banking theory and Elizabethan metre. It is easy to assume that not much fun was had at the Ezuversity at times. But it wasn’t all hard theory. Among Gael Turnbull’s papers are two poems that Bunting wrote in Rapallo ‘to amuse Pound’. Neither has been published before. The first is titled ‘Dialogue: Non-Platonic’:
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