A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  In September 1964 he wrote to Zukofsky:

  I owe poems to Rustam – part paid; to Cooper Stephenson, who was killed in the great battle of March 1918, the closest of all friends I’ve had; and to 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. Presumably the effort will breed little poems too. And then I’ll be ready to write a great hymn to death that cleanses the world and puts an end to its stench. 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.373

  Within the next two years of this creative resurgence he wrote eight odes and one of the century’s poetic masterpieces.

  ‘A thrush in the syringa sings’ was written in 1964 and published in Paris Review in 1965.374 It became the first poem in the Second Book of Odes and announces a theme that runs consistently through the twelve poems in that sequence, mortality:

  A thrush in the syringa sings.

  ‘Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,

  lust, familiar things.

  Death thrusts hard. My sons

  by hawk’s beak, by stones,

  trusting weak wings

  by cat and weasel, die.

  Thunder smothers the sky.

  From a shaken bush I

  list familiar things,

  fear, hunger, lust.’

  O gay thrush!375

  ‘Birthday greetings’, also written in 1964, briefly celebrates life at the other end of the continuum:

  Gone to hunt; and my brothers,

  but the hut is clean, said the girl.

  I have curds, besides whey.

  Pomegranates, traveller;

  butter, if you need it,

  in a bundle of cress.

  Soft, so soft, my bed.

  Few come this road.

  I am not married: – yet

  today I am fourteen years old.376

  The ‘yet’ at the end of the penultimate line shifts the girl’s yearning subtly. ‘I am not married:– yet’ sounds like a confident assertion that she soon will be, but in fact the final line shows clearly that she is, if anything, bewildered by the fact that she is not married even though she has turned fourteen.

  If nothing else a new Ezra Pound was teaching condensation to younger poets. Tom Pickard recalls,

  on many lunch hours I would meet Basil at the Rose and Crown, which was close to the news-factory, and over a pint of bass he’d go over some recent effort of mine, saying ‘Well, you’ve almost got it there, Tom … ’ All that was left of two pages was a line.

  ‘What shall I do with it?’

  ‘Oh keep it hanging around … until just the right place for it turns up … ‘

  Only one line out of two pages. I was horrified, and it happened often. Over a period I got small complete poems chiselled out of the slag. He would patiently look at a typed page for a while, a cigarette in his mouth … blow the smoke with great force out of his nostrils, and take a pencil faintly round a few chosen lines.

  ‘Try that. It’s not what you wanted to say, but it makes a poem,’ or ‘Take this line from here and try it at the end … ‘

  ‘But what I wanted to say was …’

  And he kindly: ‘Oh well, what the hell. It’s not important to the poem.’377

  It was around this time that Tom Pickard introduced Bunting to Hugh MacDiarmid. ‘I’d gone to North Yorkshire to give my first public poetry reading and MacDiarmid was there,’ Pickard told me.

  We got on very well, spending the night drinking in the local bars where he introduced me to Glenfiddich. It was a weekend festival and on the Monday morning we travelled north together on the train – he on his way to Scotland and I to Newcastle. I persuaded him to stop off in Newcastle for a few hours so he could meet Basil on his lunch break from Thompson House. It was my habit in those days to meet BB for a lunch time drink in a bar close to his work in the centre of town. BB was delighted to find MacDiarmid waiting there and they got on well immediately.378

  After a reading at Morden Tower a few months later the poets went back to the Pickards’ flat:

  The old men were bubbling with the Glenfiddick Fire Water and the youngsters blissful on beer and marijuana.

  BB: ‘MacDiarmid, this working class lad here spells cunt with a K, but writes marvellous poetry … ’

  HMcD: ‘I hate the fucking working class … ’

  Mischief sparkled in their eyes all night long, and Bunting sang from his seemingly endless repertoire of bawdy songs.379

  FOUR

  AN ACKNOWLEDGED LAND

  It is time to consider how Domenico Scarlatti

  condensed so much music into so few bars

  with never a crabbed turn or congested cadence,

  never a boast or a see-here; and stars and lakes

  echo him and the copse drums out his measure,

  snow peaks are lifted up in moonlight and twilight

  and the sun rises on an acknowledged land.

  Briggflatts IV

  THE PULSE OF GOD’S BLOOD

  It is time to consider Briggflatts.

  Bunting eventually felt compelled to write an explanatory note about Briggflatts, although he suppressed it during his lifetime. As it is the poet’s only complete statement about one of the twentieth century’s most important poems it is worth considering in full:

  Briggflatts is a poem: it needs no explanation. The sound of the words spoken aloud is itself the meaning, just as the sound of the notes played on the proper instruments is the meaning of any piece of music. Yet I have been teased so much by people who cannot be content to listen without reasoning, and by people who think they detect in the poem notions alien to it and sometimes repulsive to me that I will set down, if I can, some hint of the state of its maker’s mind.

  Commonplaces provide the poem’s structure: spring, summer, autumn, winter of the year and of man’s life, interrupted in the middle and balanced around Alexander’s trip to the limits of the world and its futility, and sealed and signed at the end by a confession of our ignorance. Love and betrayal are spring’s adventures, the wisdom of elders and the remoteness of death, hardly more than a gravestone. In summer there is no rest from ambition and lust of experience, never final. Those fail who try to force their destiny, like Eric; but those who are resolute to submit, like my vision of Pasiphae, may bring something new to birth, be it only a monster.

  What Alexander learns when he has thrust his way through the degraded world is that man is contemptibly nothing and yet may live content in humility. Autumn is for reflexion, to set Aneurin’s grim elegy against the legend of Cuthbert who saw God in everything, to love without expectation, wander without an inn, persist without hope. Old age can see at last the loveliness of things overlooked or despised, frost, the dancing maggots, sheepdogs, and particularly the stars which make time a paradox and a joke till we can give up our own time, even though we wasted it. And still we know neither where we are nor why.

  All old wives’ chatter, cottage wisdom. No poem is profound.

  The name ‘Briggflatts’, that of a remote hamlet and a Quaker meeting house, ought to warn people not to look for philosophy. Unfortunately T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets are also named after little hidden places, and they do expound the mystical Christianity that nineteenth century theologians brewed from a mash squeezed ultimately, I think, from Plotinus. No scheme of things could be further from my own.

  Yeats too professed Plotinus, though his spirit seems nearer to that of Iamblichus. Pound took his gods from Ovid, close cousins to the gods of The Golden Bough, never truly pagan but spangles on a neo-Platonic chiffon. Both Pound and Yeats fancied the dreary n
otion of a history that repeats itself, not as the Buddhists see it, nor as Toynbee, but the cruder Spengler, and that too is part of the neo-Platonic outlook. Pound had too much sense to be consistent. A kind of pragmatism often hidden under the robes of his own private Confucius represents him best. He was not averse to reason, much more a moralist than a metaphysician; yet the scheme of The Cantos rests in the mood of Spengler, even, but not consciously, in the mood of Hegel.

  Hierarchy and order, the virtues of the neo-Platonic quasi-religion, were prime virtues also to Yeats, Pound and Eliot. They are not virtues to me, only expedients that chafe almost as vilely as the crimes they try to restrain. Amongst philosophers I have most sympathy with Lucretius and his masters, content to explain the world an atom at a time; with Spinoza who saw all things as God, though not with his wish to demonstrate that logically; and with David Hume, the doubter. The men I learned poetry from did not much value these. Perhaps that is why it took me so long to make a poem that reflects, fragmentarily, my whole mind.

  Call it God, call it the universe, all we know of it, extended far beyond our telescopes or even inferences, detailed more minutely than our physicists can grope, is less than the histology of a single cell might be to a man’s body, or to his conduct. The day’s incidents hide our ignorance from us; yet we know it, beneath our routine. In silence, having swept dust and litter from our minds, we can detect the pulse of God’s blood in our veins, more persuasive than words, more demonstrative than a diagram. That is what a Quaker meeting tries to be, and that is why my poem is called Briggflatts. Let the incidents and images take care of themselves.1

  Shining slowworm part of the marvel

  The poem opens in Brigflatts itself:

  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.2

  Hugh Kenner asked in a review of Briggflatts if the first four words of this poem had ever been together in a line of poetry before. It seems unlikely. The opening image is one of the most arresting in twentieth-century verse. The soundscape conjured in these lines is enchanting, exactly capturing the essence of May in the fells of the north Pennines. The madrigal sung by the swollen River Rawthey, which runs just behind the hamlet, is the authentic voice of the fells; each pebble on its bed applying tiny modulations to create a song sung in thousands of counterpoint parts. It is an effect Bunting caught beautifully in a later lyric:

  Stones trip Coquet burn;

  grass trails, tickles

  till her glass thrills.3

  Above the Rawthey’s main melody and harmonising with it is the bull’s tenor descant. The contrasts suggested by the descant on Rawthey’s madrigal are paralleled by the figure of the black bull set against the brilliant white may blossom hedge, and the harmony is supplied by the reflected contrast of the pale blossom on the bull’s black hide as it drops and fills the furrows to pave the slowworm’s way.

  The behaviour of the bull had been in Bunting’s notebooks for at least a dozen years before he worked it into the opening of Briggflatts. ‘The bull had been in my mind for ages,’ he told an interviewer in 1970,

  but he hadn’t been put down as having anything to do with [Briggflatts] until quite late in the process … the bull I noticed one day in a farm near Throckley … it struck me, at once, nobody had noticed the bull has a tenor voice. You hear of the bull bellowing and this, that, and the other. But in fact he bellows 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 tips of his toes, part of the business of showing off, showing that he is protecting them, you see. He’s not really doing anything, but he sees somebody walking by the hedge and he begins to dance at once, just to demonstrate to the cows what an indispensable creature he is. It is delightful, and it bears such a, a strong resemblance to the behaviour of young men in general …4

  It struck him as, ‘comically like a young man … his voice was a tenor voice, more like a young man’s still, his attitude to the field of heifers, he’s showing off all the time …’5 The temptation to read the bull as the thirteen-year-old Bunting displaying for his best friend’s young sister is one to be resisted. We should take the poem as it comes and not be derailed by the (natural enough) desire to read in autobiographical meanings.

  The second stanza sharpens the focus to the sounds of the hamlet itself:

  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

  naming none,

  a man abolished.

  Painful lark, labouring to rise!

  The solemn mallet says:

  In the grave’s slot

  he lies. We rot.

  John Greenbank’s father, the stonemason, is at one with his environment, the tempo of his work set by the rhythm of the lark’s song, more contrasts and harmony. The mason chisels the name of the dead man into the marble and we can feel Bunting reaching back forty years to the poet ‘broody all night over the bones of a deadman’ in ‘Villon’, the ‘deadman’ who is something other than a ‘dead man’. Here he is ‘a man abolished’. Bunting also takes the opportunity to repeat a sly dig at Vaughan Williams, whose lark he accused of ascending apparently interminably in The Outlook in 1928.

  Part one of Briggflatts consists of twelve thirteen-line stanzas which describe a day and night of tender intimacy between two very young lovers on the fells around Sedbergh;

  Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey,

  head to a hard arm,

  they kiss under the rain,

  bruised by their marble bed.

  The young lovers walk in the fells and, after a brief meditation on the death of Eric Bloodaxe,

  they trudge and sing,

  laying the tune frankly on the air.

  All sounds fall still,

  fellside bleat,

  hide-and-seek peewit.

  Their song reflects Rawthey’s madrigal from the first stanza, and the bull’s descant is replaced by the sounds of the sheep and lapwings.

  Their caresses continue at night when her parents are asleep:

  Gentle generous voices weave

  over bare night

  words to confirm and delight

  till bird dawn.

  Rainwater from the butt

  she fetches and flannel

  to wash him inch by inch,

  kissing the pebbles.

  Shining slowworm part of the marvel.

  The mason stirs:

  Words!

  Pens are too light.

  Take a chisel to write.

  By this, the ninth stanza, the pebbles and slow-worm have returned in different guises in true sonata style. ‘I have a very slight knowledge of some of the most elementary tasks of masonry,’ Bunting told an interviewer.

  I’ve rubbed down a gravestone in the days when it was a matter of doing it by hand … ‘Pens are too light. Take a chisel to write’… is very good advice if you translate it from the figure into the way one actually does write with a typewriter. Namely don’t be in any hurry about it and think it bloody thoroughly out before you put down a word! … If you’re writing with a chisel you have to be certain of every word, and they have to be the fewest you can possibly use, and the shortest you can possibly find.6

  The chisel is an important point of inflection in the first part of Briggflatts. The tender lyricism of the first nine stanzas has celebrated a love that is both innoce
nt and sexual, full of childlike wonder at the part love plays in a world which is not separate from nature. The chisel ends that brutally. We move from a prelapsarian world of endless innocent delight to bitter reflection on one that is forever lost. The chisel and marble, hard and inflexible, mark a transition to a world of words:

  Every birth a crime,

  every sentence life.

  Wiped of mould and mites

  would the ball run true?

  No hope of going back.

  Hounds falter and stray,

  shame deflects the pen.

  Love murdered neither bleeds nor stifles

  but jogs the drauftsman’s elbow.

  What can he, changed, tell

  her, changed, perhaps dead?

  Delight dwindles. Blame

  stays the same.

  The poet has betrayed love and his words coalesce as ‘sentences’, lifelong imprisonment for the guilty man. The final stanza of part one returns to its beginning, but it is no longer spring and the world has changed irrevocably:

  Dung will not soil the slowworm’s

  mosaic. Breathless lark

  drops to nest in sodden trash;

  Rawthey truculent, dingy.

  Drudge at the mallet, the may is down,

  fog on fells. Guilty of spring

  and spring’s ending

  amputated years ache after

  the bull is beef, love a convenience.

  It is easier to die than to remember.

  Name and date

  split in soft slate

  a few months obliterate.

  This is, for me, one of the most moving stanzas in English poetry.

  Love is a vapour, we’re soon through it

  The second part of Briggflatts continues the theme of guilt but individualises it, ‘sick, self-maimed, self-hating’. It begins in London but quickly shifts to the far north. In between the London and polar scenes is a short, discrete lyric that Bunting sent to Zukofsky in a letter written in November 1964:

  You who can calculate the course