A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  Every Sonata regularly constructed contains a first movement called the Allegro; a slow movement, the Andante or Adagio; and an animated Finale.

  Between the first and second movements, or between the second and third may be introduced a short piece – a Minuet, Scherzo, or Intermezzo.142

  Lavignac describes the five-part structure of the eighteenth-century sonata as first theme and second theme in the Allegro; development of the themes with variations in the Andante; and return to the two themes in the third Finale (which is followed by a coda). So, as Gordon says, ‘the sonata form develops two tonally contrasting themes through three basic stages’.143 So how does this relate to ‘Villon’? Two themes are certainly announced in the first section. In the first, Villon reflects on the difference between the world promised by art, religion and power (‘the Emperor with the Golden Hands, the Virgin in blue’) and the reality of life in prison. The second theme, a series of relaxed quatrains with a folksy ABAB rhyme scheme, shows art triumphing over death:

  Remember, imbeciles and wits,

  sots and ascetics, fair and foul,

  young girls with little tender tits,

  that DEATH is written over all.

  Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul

  they are so rotten, old and thin,

  or firm and soft and warm and full –

  fellmonger Death gets every skin.144

  The sonata analogy leads us to expect development of these themes in the second section, but with a perceptible change of pace, tone and rhythm, and the change of key in ‘Villon’ is immediately obvious:

  Let his days be few and let

  his bishoprick pass to another,

  for he fed me on carrion and on a dry crust,

  mouldy bread that his dogs had vomited,

  I lying on my back in the dark place, in the grave,

  fettered to a post in the damp cellerage.

  The second section develops the art versus death theme by showing how artists, Villon (and by implication Bunting), are imprisoned by powerful, violent forces. A central section of heavy iambic tetrametre and a dominating AABB rhyme scheme gives this section an authority that Villon’s bitter voice in the first lacks:

  They took away the prison clothes

  and on the frosty nights I froze.

  I had a bible where I read –

  that Jesus came to raise the dead

  I kept myself from going mad

  by singing an old bawdy ballad

  and birds sang on my windowsill

  and tortured me till I was ill.

  One senses Bunting’s own prison experience showing through here. The tone has changed from the theatricality of the first section to one of thoughtful honesty, a listing of the facts of the case. Its close is a bleak analysis. Homer and Dante live, but Villon?

  Blacked by the sun, washed by the rain,

  hither and thither scurrying as the wind varies.

  Villon’s fate is random, attested by Bunting’s abandonment of recognisable metre.

  The two themes of the first section return in the lyrical third section of ‘Villon’. In the first section the poet (either of them) had been unable to trace a link between beauty (‘A blazing parchment,/Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold’) and the reality of life, in or outside prison

  It was not so,

  scratched on black by God knows who,

  by God, by God knows who.

  In the third section the poet sees how the two are reconciled. Man’s eternal suffering is a direct consequence of his thirst for beauty:

  below me the ports

  with naked breasts

  shipless spoiled sacked

  because of the beauty of Helen.

  And the second theme, art triumphing over death, returns in its developed guise. Art supplies form to life:

  precision clarifying vagueness;

  boundary to a wilderness

  of detail; chisel voice

  smoothing the flanks of noise;

  catalytic making whisper and whisper

  run together like two drops of quicksilver.

  So Bunting’s description of ‘Villon’ as a sonata is not fanciful. The poem follows the developmental theme and changes of pace and tone followed in sonatas composed by Johann Christian Bach and Domenico Scarlatti. That in itself, of course, doesn’t make it a good poem.

  I want to look briefly at the opening of ‘Villon’ to show how Bunting handles the contradictions that fuel the poem. Bunting sets the scene by introducing the imprisoned poet:

  He whom we anatomized

  ‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowers

  and thought on his wit and how neatly he described things’

  speaks

  to us, hatching marrow,

  broody all night over the bones of a deadman.

  My tongue is a curve in the ear. Vision is lies.

  We saw it so and it was not so,

  the Emperor with the Golden Hands, the Virgin in blue.

  (– A blazing parchment,

  Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold.)

  It was not so,

  scratched on black by God knows who,

  by God, by God knows who.

  In the dark in fetters

  on bended elbows I supported my weak back

  hulloing to muffled walls blank again

  unresonant. It was gone, is silent, is always silent.

  We ‘anatomized’ Villon. He is dead and we have dissected what is left of him, his corpse in the metaphor, his poetry in reality. But ‘anatomized’ carries the strong counter-suggestion of giving Villon an anatomy, shape, structure, life. The process of anatomising juxtaposes life and death carefully. Bunting also clearly has in mind the common sixteenth-century sense of ‘anatomize’ as a comprehensive and systematic exposure of a person’s moral faults, the sense in which Oliver seeks to ‘anatomize’ his brother Orlando to Charles the Wrestler in the first scene of As You Like It. The poet is dead, the poetry alive. The dead poet ‘speaks’. That word’s occupation of its own line brings the reader up short because of the prosaic quotation that precedes it. The quotation is from Clément Marot’s preface to his 1533 edition of Villon’s poems. Marot (who returns in a different guise a few lines later), a member of the royal household of François I, also spent much of his career in prison as a consequence of his Protestant activism. Marot was an acclaimed wit who prized wit highly and who fully acknowledged Villon’s own. As a courtier, however, and the son of a courtier (his father had been poet to the court of Anne of Brittany), he seems to have found Villon’s low birth and vulgarity inexcusable. So his supercilious comment, in Bunting’s translation at least, damns with the faintest possible praise – ‘how neatly he described things’. We have been lulled into the mood of polite sixteenth-century manners by Marot’s lines and we are surprised when the dead poet suddenly ‘speaks/to us’.

  As he speaks the poet works: ‘hatching marrow,/broody all night over the bones of a deadman.’ The dominant theme in these lines is the process of nurturing something to life. The eggs that the poet is ‘hatching’ as he broods are marrow/Marot and bones. He makes life out of death. He is, in a sense, bringing Marot to life, creating his own Collected Poems in his dungeon, as well as giving himself immortality in verse. But marrow is not just the animal life force; it is also the best part of anything, its inner meaning or purpose. Villon/Bunting in expressing themselves in poetry are doing that which defines them as beings. And hatching does not relate only to birth. It is also the process of marking a drawing or painting with fine, close diagonal lines to evoke shades, textures and colour, a technique that developed in the Middle Ages and which Villon’s near contemporary, Albrecht Dürer, made his own. Hatching is particularly useful in black and white representations of full colour images. Bunting artfully prefigures the glorious luxury of the following stanza with the hatching image, as well as the immediate return to bitter monochrome. Marrow (pronounced marra) has anothe
r submerged meaning that may be unfamiliar to those who don’t know Bunting’s northern English. In the north of England marra is a friend or companion, a peer or one of a pair, a match in a contest. The poet is incubating other poets, strengthening the link between Bunting and Villon as poets and as prisoners. Kenneth Cox thought the line ‘broody all night over the bones of a deadman’ mere decoration, that it ‘only adds atmospheric effect’.145 It clearly does a great deal more than that. Even the condensation of ‘dead man’ into one word works hard. He is not a dead man; being dead he has lost his humanity and metamorphosed into something else, something quite different, a ‘deadman’. There is very little in Bunting’s poetry that is merely decorative. He was too good an editor, and he had Pound constantly looking over his shoulder.

  The phrase ‘hatching marrow’ is the pivot of these lines, signposting a number of routes into the next stage of the poem. Monochrome and colour, life and death, friends and enemies, Villon’s poetry and Marot’s dead prose, art and criticism, prison and freedom, a dead man speaking; in just six lines Bunting keeps so many meanings and contradictions in play that they threaten to spin out of control, but they never do. Indeed, the second stanza develops new pairings and contradictions. ‘My tongue is a curve in the ear’ suggests that we are doomed to incomprehension, reaching forward into the fourth stanza where the poet in his dungeon speaks to ‘muffled walls blank again/unresonant. It was gone, is silent, is always silent./My soundbox lacks sonority.’ What the poet says is not what the listener hears and what the seer sees simply deceives him: ‘Vision is lies./We saw it so and it was not so.’

  At this point we are launched abruptly into another world:

  the Emperor with the Golden Hands, the Virgin in blue.

  (– A blazing parchment,

  Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold.)

  But it is an illusion, ‘it was not so.’ More pairings: art and life, vision and reality, speech and sight, lies and truth, secular and religious, state and church. Victoria Forde notes that, throughout ‘Villon’, ‘the constant grouping and regrouping of subjects has the kind of intricacy and precarious stability of a steadily shifting kaleidoscope design’.146 The reader needs to give way to these mutiple ‘meanings’ and hold them as equal possibilities. As Bunting wrote to Donald Davie fifty years later, ‘critics sometimes forget that other poets besides Dante can bundle two or three different meanings into a sentence on occasion’.147

  The emperor with the golden hands is lifted from Villon’s:

  Voire, ou soit de Constantinobles

  L’emperieres au poing dorez.148

  The reference may be to Byzantine iconography. The complex of buildings at the Byzantine court housed an extraordinary quantity of Christian relics, more than 3,600 representing 476 different saints. These treasures conferred enormous political and religious power on Constantinople during the early Middle Ages. Of these buildings two in particular were outstanding not just because of the prestige of the relics they contained but because they were vitally important parts of the court’s ceremonial life. One of these was the Church of the Virgin of the Pharos which housed Christianity’s most important relics, those of Christ’s Passion – the crown of thorns, the cross, the nails, the sponge, fragments of Longinus’ spear – as well as an imprint of Christ’s face, one of his sandals and the right arm of John the Baptist. The other important building was Hagios Stephanos, the Church of St Stephen of Daphne, the first martyr of the Christian church, which was built specifically to house St Stephen’s right arm. Within the Church of St Stephen was a portico called ‘the Golden Hand’. According to Ioli Kalavrezou this was an extremely important location, being the place where ‘the emperor and the empress would show themselves to the courtiers and dignitaries after the coronation, and where the adoration and acclamations would take place … a pivotal point in the processional entries and exits of the emperor from and to the palace, and also the place where he would be awaited and acclaimed on the major feast days.’ Villon, and by extension Bunting, consciously evoke the holiest of holies and the most politically loaded location in the entire early medieval world.149 The glory of the emperor is conferred by God directly through the presentation of the royal crown by the holy, golden hand. Bunting silently amends Villon by shifting the plural to ‘hands’ and away from ‘l’emperieres’. It is the emperors of the golden hand that Villon conjures rather than the emperor of the golden hands.

  Matthew Paris, the thirteenth-century English monk and historian, illustrated his manuscripts with exquisite, brightly coloured miniatures. Bunting’s deliberate archaism, replacing the required apostrophe with ‘his’ (‘Matthew Paris his kings’), subtly roots the image in the early modern period and suggests a religious dimension. This grammatical aberration was popular from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries and lingers in perhaps its most famous incarnation in the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, ‘And this we beg for Jesus Christ his sake’.

  The glory of all this art, holiness and supreme imperial power, however, is illusory and we return with this insight to a world of bleak monochrome:

  It was not so,

  scratched on black by God knows who,

  by God, by God knows who.

  The artist uses his primitive tools to reverse out his message from a black surface, emphasising the theme of inversion that permeates the poem. Who is the artist? All three possibilities leave us in the dark. Either God knows who the artist is but we don’t, or God is the artist, or nobody, including God, knows who the artist is. These three lines are despairing. The four heavy beats, ‘It was not so’, allow no room for ambiguity. This vision of artistic anonymity and futility sets up the brutish inarticulacy that follows.

  The glorious world of colour is, of course, set against the monochrome of the coal mine. Anonymous miners, ‘God knows who’, would leave messages ‘scratched on black’ for their marrows. The contorted prisoner/miner writhes against his fate:

  In the dark in fetters

  on bended elbows I supported my weak back

  hulloing to muffled walls blank again

  unresonant. It was gone, is silent, is always silent.

  Is this Villon or Bunting? In fact it is both, plus another prisoner-poet. Bunting explicitly invokes Sir Walter Raleigh, imprisoned in the Tower of London by Elizabeth I after his secret marriage to one of her maids of honour. Raleigh expressed his frustration at imprisonment in ‘The Ocean to Cynthia’:

  But now, close kept, as captives wonted are,

  That food, that heat, that light, I find no more.

  Despair bolts up my doors; and I alone

  Speak to dead walls; but those hear not my moan.

  Bunting invoked Raleigh to balance the books. Villon had been imprisoned in Paris for drunken violence, as had Bunting. But Bunting had been a prisoner of conscience, a political prisoner like Raleigh, towards the end of the First World War and soon after in Norway, if we are to take at face value his claim to have been on a mission to Quakerise the revolution fomented by Lenin and Trotsky in Russia.

  We have looked at just eighteen lines of a poem that consists of more than 160. The purpose of this has been to attempt to show just how complex and exciting ‘Villon’ is. It is a forgotten gem of modernist poetry. With its rich structure, swooping rhythms and intense condensation it deserves to be considered alongside Eliot’s The Waste Land and Pound’s ‘Homage to Sextus Propertius’ as a third pillar of the modernist revolution in poetry. Pound performed the same kind of surgery on ‘Villon’ as he had on The Waste Land and when one considers his legacy it is impossible not to be rocked by Ezra Pound’s genius.150 Bunting was to write more great poems (notably ‘The Well of Lycopolis’ and his poem of the Second World War, ‘The Spoils’) but he didn’t hit the form of ‘Villon’ for another forty years, and then he surpassed it.

  Too complicated for me!

  After ‘Villon’ Bunting’s poetry became increasingly authoritative. Two poems written in 1926
, ‘I am agog for foam’ and ‘After the grimaces of capitulation’ survived his ferocious self-culling. He was beginning to feel more confident. At the end of 1928 he sent ‘Aubade’ (‘After the grimaces of capitulation’) to Pound and asked, ‘Is this a poem? Have I found my voice? Everybody says it is exceedingly disagreeable of me to be unpleasant about sunrise and the loud chorus of complaints encourages me to think that I must have done something of my own at last.’151

  ‘I am agog for foam’, which Bunting told Louis Zukofsky that Yeats particularly liked,152 is an exquisite love poem dedicated to Peggy Mullet (who is not, as is often suggested, Peggy Greenbank from Brigflatts):

  I am agog for foam. Tumultuous come

  with teeming sweetness to the bitter shore

  tidelong unrinsed and midday parched and numb

  with expectation. If the bright sky bore

  with endless utterance of a single blue

  unphrased, its restless immobility

  infects the soul, which must decline into

  an anguished and exact sterility

  and waste away: then how much more the sea

  trembling with alteration must perfect

  our loneliness by its hostility.

  The dear companionship of its elect

  deepens our envy. Its indifference

  haunts us to suicide. Strong memories

  of sprayblown days exasperate impatience

  to brief rebellion and emphasise

  the casual impotence we sicken of.

  But when mad waves spring, braceletted with foam,

  towards us in the angriness of love

  crying a strange name, tossing as they come

  repeated invitations in the gay

  exuberance of unexplained desire,

  we can forget the sad splendour and play