A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  I see Aneurin’s pectoral muscle swell under his shirt,

  pacing between the game Ida left to rat and raven,

  young men, tall yesterday, with cabled thighs.

  Red deer move less warily since their bows dropped.

  Girls in Teesdale and Wensleydale wake discontent.

  Clear Cymric voices carry well this autumn night,

  Aneurin and Taliesin, cruel owls

  for whom it is never altogether dark, crying

  before the rules made poetry a pedant’s game.22

  After Aneirin and Taliesin the story of north Britain is taken on by the great Christian missionaries:

  Columba, Columbanus, as the soil shifts its vest,

  Aidan and Cuthbert put on daylight,

  wires of sharp western metal entangled in its soft

  web, many shuttles as midges darting;

  not for bodily welfare nor pauper theorums

  but splendour to splendour, excepting nothing that is.

  Four generations of inspiring, mainly Celtic, Christian evangelists were responsible for the greatest achievements of the early Church in the British Isles. Columba, who was born in 521, founded the monastic community at Iona; a generation later Columbanus (born in 540) took his mission to the Franks; Aidan (who died in 651) founded the great monastery and the See of Lindisfarne in about 635; and Cuthbert (who died in 687) founded the city of Durham. It was these saints who introduced the distinctly Celtic architecture and design that is so prevalent in the north of Britain, and that Bunting valued so highly – the ‘wires of sharp western metal entangled in its soft web’.

  He had been enchanted by the Lindisfarne Codex since he was a small child, when the illustrated edition of J. R. Green’s A Short History of the English People ‘was in our house always’,23 and the design of the Lindisfarne Codex was in Bunting’s mind while he worked on the interrelationships between parts of the poem: ‘The image of history is that of continually changing racial identity but continually recurring and lasting cultural identities, and the flowering of art and literature and history in ancient Northumbria has been a lasting thing.’24

  After the Celtic saints Bunting moves on to the beautiful lyric about Scarlatti that opens this chapter. As the sun ‘rises on an acknowledged land’ an extraordinary and tender celebration of love unfolds. Bunting tended to slow his pace markedly when he reached this point in his reading:

  My love is young but wise. Oak, applewood,

  her fire is banked with ashes till day.

  The fells reek of her hearth’s scent,

  her girdle is greased with lard;

  hunger is stayed on her settle, lust in her bed.

  Light as spider floss her hair on my cheek which a puff scatters,

  light as a moth her fingers on my thigh.

  We have eaten and loved and the sun is up,

  we have only to sing before parting:

  Goodbye, dear love.

  Her scones are greased with fat of fried bacon,

  her blanket comforts my belly like the south.

  We have eaten and loved and the sun is up.

  Goodbye.

  With that ‘goodbye’ the brief idyll ends. The images of applewood and ashes, cobwebs, hair and puffs that do so much to sustain the almost weightless happiness of the lovers return in a different guise in a mirror image of innocence; grief, loss, betrayal:

  Applewood, hard to rive,

  its knots smoulder all day.

  Cobweb hair on the morning,

  a puff would blow it away.

  Rime is crisp on the bent,

  ruts stone-hard, frost spangles fleece.

  What breeze will fill that sleeve limp on the line?

  A boy’s jet steams from the wall, time from the year,

  care from deed and undoing.

  Shamble, cold, content with beer and pickles,

  towards a taciturn lodging among strangers.

  Her scones and her blanket are replaced by beer, pickles and cold.

  At this point, perhaps the lowest of the entire poem, the tone changes once again. Up to now the poet has been a ‘rat’ in the colloquial sense, the ‘love rat’ who betrays and deceives a young love. At the end of part four of Briggflatts the poet becomes a rat proper, and embraces his new state:

  Where rats go go I,

  accustomed to penury,

  filth, disgust and fury;

  evasive to persist,

  reject the bait

  yet gnaw the best.

  My bony feet

  sully shelf and dresser,

  keeping a beat in the dark,

  rap on lath

  till dogs bark

  and sleep, shed,

  slides from the bed.

  O valiant when hunters

  with stick and terrier bar escape

  or wavy ferret leaps,

  encroach and cede again,

  rat, roommate, unreconciled.

  The unreconciled rat shares some characteristics with the poet; both are intelligent, both are adult males of a merciless species. In her study, The Nets of Modernism, Maud Ellmann doesn’t mention the poet-rat in Briggflatts specifically but she notes the importance of rats in modernist literature generally: ‘popping up irrepressibly in modernist texts, the rat signals the breakdown of boundaries, at once calamitous and liberating’.25 Ellmann’s fascinating analysis of ‘the Modernist rat’ in Freud’s transformation of Dr Ernst Lanzer into the Rat Man and in key modernist texts such as Ulysses, The Waste Land and Beckett’s Watt, describes early twentieth-century laboratory experiments using rats in mazes. ‘The influential behaviorist John Broadus Watson argued that … stripped of baggage such as language, intellection, will, and feeling, rats performed their tasks with greater alacrity than human beings. In Watson’s experiments, rats had to find their way to rewards placed in the center of the maze. Their success was measured by speed, which reduced behaviour to a matter of mechanical efficiency.’ Watson’s discoveries were published in Psychological Review in 1907.26 Bunting’s rat ‘threaded Schoenberg’s maze’ in part two of Briggflatts. By the end of part 4 the poet has transformed himself into a modernist trope. He has embraced the rat world.

  Starlight quivers

  The fifth part of Briggflatts immediately announces the arrival of a new season:

  Drip – icicle’s gone.

  Slur, ratio, tone,

  chime dilute what’s done

  as a flute clarifies song,

  trembling phrase fading to pause

  then glow. Solstice past,

  years end crescendo.

  The rest of part five is a long meditation on natural beauty not as it is found in the great Romantic tradition, in the sublime and the magnificent, but in its everyday manifestations:

  Conger skimped at the ebb, lobster,

  neither will I take, nor troll

  roe of its like for salmon.

  Let bass sleep, gentles

  brisk, skim-grey,

  group a nosegay

  jostling on cast flesh,

  frisk and compose decay

  to side shot with flame,

  unresting bluebottle wing.

  Not many poets have discovered the divine in maggots (gentles) on rotting flesh. Bunting moves on to celebrate man’s relationship with nature, at its simplest, in an enigmatic stanza that for me carries the full weight of the poem. It is perhaps its central statement, clean, deliberate and full of wonder:

  Shepherds follow the links,

  sweet turf studded with thrift;

  fell-born men of precise instep

  leading demure dogs

  from Tweed and Till and Teviotdale,

  with hair combed back from the muzzle,

  dogs from Redesdale and Coquetdale

  taught by Wilson or Telfer.

  Their teeth are white as birch,

  slow under black fringe

  of silent, accurate lips.

  The ewes are heavy with lamb.
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  Snow lies bright on Hedgehope

  and tacky mud about Till

  where the fells have stepped aside

  and the river praises itself,

  silence by silence sits

  and Then is diffused in Now.

  I use the word ‘deliberate’ to describe this passage so as not to repeat Bunting’s ‘precise’ or ‘accurate’, but precision is the guiding principle. Peter Makin had some shrewd things to say about this stanza. Makin asks how exactly an instep can be ‘precise’, how lips (not teeth) can be ‘accurate’ and records his answer in the context of Bunting’s many statements about the poet’s responsibility to record the world as accurately as a scientist would. Makin’s comments on the opening couplet of this stanza are rewarding:

  Bunting has put, not fells, or rough bent, or hillsides, but ‘links’: firm, smooth, grassy mounds. On them, move shepherds. But it is said here, ‘Shepherds follow the links.’ That is another denotative (semantic) choice. They don’t walk, they don’t stride: they are not Wordsworth being sublime on a felltop, or Kaspar David Friedrich being dramatic: they ‘follow’ the links. It seems that the path is quietly evident. Then again, these links have flowers. How? D. H. Lawrence’s bundles of flame? Enthusiastic little Wordsworthian armies? Medieval patches of enamelling? Seas of thrashing Van Gogh irises? No; no; no; no.

  Sweet turf studded with thrift.

  That is (the metaphor also tells us), small flowers, decisively, firmly, neatly inserted at intervals in the links: they are studded with them.27

  Bunting’s observations of nature were consciously scientific. Lucretius, the only poet who turned the ‘vocabulary of science into magnificent poetry’, was an important early influence on Bunting, as was Darwin.

  I think that a man who wants to write in the 20th century makes a great mistake if he doesn’t begin by reading The Origin of Species, where he will find the most magnificent example of the building up and testing of hypothesis … Darwin was a very good prose writer. He does not of course go in for purple patches, but for what he wants to do, his prose is not only adequate, it’s very hard indeed to think of any way of improving it.28

  In the twentieth century only Hugh MacDiarmid had come close. Reviewing MacDiarmid’s More Collected Poems in 1970 Bunting asked if any other poet since Lucretius had:

  used the vocabulary of science with such skill as Hugh MacDiarmid? It hardly hampers him, but moves evenly at a clear, demonstrative pace through the long syntax … There is sharp focus. The matter is new to nearly all of us, facts worth learning, a brilliant show we could enjoy without caring whether it were a simile or not … Pound and Zukofsky have sought a poetry of facts too, but neither, I think, has ever quite separated facts from metaphysics. MacDiarmid has his mysticism; and no doubt science itself is founded on undefined faith: but MacDiarmid sees things washed clean of irrelevancies as Darwin did. Suckling poets should be fed on Darwin till they are filled with the elegance of things seen or heard or touched.29

  The precise observation of the maggots and the bluebottles’ wing in the previous stanza might have alerted us to this unexpected debt. As Thom Gunn says, this passage is, ‘like an old dream of order … in this specific and fecund scene, seeming spontaneity is a re-enactment of tradition; each detail recognizes its relation to each other detail, and is at ease in that established relation. Bunting’s comparison of the dogs’ teeth to the color of birchbark is as much a matter of course as the dogs’ relation to their masters and to the sheep.’30

  From gentles, to sheepdogs to the skies, Briggflatts reaches its magnificent conclusion by contemplating the stars, Aldebaran, Capella, Betelgeuse, Rigel, Orion, Procyon:

  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;

  fifty years a visit postponed.

  She has been with me fifty years.

  Starlight quivers. I had day enough.

  For love uninterrupted night.

  The selection of the stars is as precise as the shepherds’ insteps. ‘They came in first as a means of fixing the time and date,’ he told an interviewer. ‘If you notice where the stars are at the beginning of the star passages and where they are at the end of them, and go to a nautical almanack and work things out backwards, you’ll find that you must be in approximately the latitude of the Farne Islands at approximately New Year’s Eve.’31

  Night, float us

  Bunting was by no means ashamed that the Coda to Briggflatts was not written with its eventual purpose in mind: ‘I’d written three-quarters of Briggflatts, was busy in fact on the last part, when I had to turn over papers on my desk to get something for the bloody income tax commissioners, and on the back of an old bill I found a poem that I’d written long before and forgotten when I wrote it, which required three or four lines cut out, and with those three or four lines cut out it was the Coda, and was obviously a part of Briggflatts.’32

  As Thom Gunn says, although the poet has arrived at ‘the essential beginnings by returning to his own beginnings’ that arrival is not permanent. ‘The Coda, if nothing else, would take care of such a cheerful notion.’33 It does indeed, and the poem is a kind of celebration of ignorance:

  A strong song tows

  us, long earsick.

  Blind, we follow

  rain slant, spray flick

  to fields we do not know.

  Night, float us.

  Offshore wind, shout,

  ask the sea

  what’s lost, what’s left,

  what horn sunk,

  what crown adrift.

  Where we are who knows

  of kings who sup

  while day fails? Who,

  swinging his axe

  to fell kings, guesses

  where we go?

  If the Coda celebrates ignorance, or at least accepts it as an essential part of the human condition, Bunting decisively rejected pessimism:

  As for pessimism, no, though I’m a lot more at home with Timon or Schopenhauer than with Leibniz or the passing Pippa, but nihilist if you like. Yeats was perturbed by that in my very earliest published poems. But the last lines of The Well of Lycopolis and the Spoils are hopeful; even if Briggflatts closes in darkness. Those are the ‘thoughtful’ poems. It’s only humanists who must find the world hopeless. It’s a good enough world for stars or mushrooms, and why assume that it was meant for us.34

  BRIGGFLATT S, AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, FOR PEGGY

  Peggy Briggflatts contains no detachable meaning but that is not to say that it is not ‘about’ something. Bunting considered it ‘a description of my life, what I have made of it and what it has made of me’.35 He told Bridson that Briggflatts was about love, ‘in all senses, beginning with a kind of Daphnis and Chloe and ending with St Cuthbert in love with all creation’.36 If nothing else Briggflatts is an enormous feat of memory, something he distrusted: ‘I distrust memory extremely, but the effort to remember the various episodes in Briggflatts, for they ar
e all however altered based upon my own past, the effort to remember it was a severe one which went on for many months. So that to make then into now is not something you can just say … it takes some doing!’37

  Briggflatts was published in 1966 in Poetry, which celebrated its one hundredth anniversary in 2012. As part of that celebration its current editors, Don Share and Christian Wiman, published a selection of one hundred poems, including the first part of Briggflatts, which exemplify the magazine at its best over its distinguished history. Wiman’s introduction reflects on the fact that much of the poetry of the last hundred years is extremely demanding of its readers, and that Bunting is sometimes taken as an example of that difficulty, even though Briggflatts ‘now seems obviously one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century’. Wiman’s observations on the ‘difficulty’ of Briggflatts are apt:

  If you are not very familiar with poetry, you will likely have some trouble figuring out exactly what is being described, which is fine, which is, in fact, exactly what the poet intended. Besides being ‘about’ a man who realizes, way too late, that the most intense and defining experience of his life occurred during an adolescent love affair, Briggflatts is a palimpsest of history, nature, learning, loss. It is the testament and artefact of a man who has lived so thoroughly into the language, so thoroughly through the language, that it has become a purely expressive medium. Because of cadence and pacing, and the way sounds echo and intensify sense, the word is restored to a kind of primal relation with the world; language itself takes on the textures and heft of things … As a general rule, it’s safe to say that if you can paraphrase a poem, it’s not a poem. There’s no other way of saying what Bunting is saying in Briggflatts. The language is action. Great poetry is usually difficult in some way, and then clear in ways we would never expect. (‘It is easier to die than to remember’ – Bunting) Its difficulty, you might say, makes new clarities possible in and for us.38