A Strong Song Tows Us

by Richard Burton

  of a biased bowl,

  shall I come near the jack?

  What twist can counter the force

  that holds back

  woods I roll?

  You who elucidate the disk

  hubbed by the sun,

  shall I see autumn out

  or the fifty years at risk

  be lost, doubt

  end what’s begun?

  These lines were enclosed as a handwritten postscript: ‘This occurred to me after I had sealed the envelope, but what the hell. Perhaps by tomorrow I shall think it’s shit, but tonight it seems to be words for music. If you don’t play bowls (not ten-pins, but on the grass with biased balls) in America you may not quite get it. On the other hand, it may amuse you.’7 These lines make one wonder if the whole Briggflatts enterprise was planned to effect a reconciliation with Peggy. The image elaborates on the question asked in part one of the poem: ‘Wiped of mould and mites/would the ball run true?’ In the first stanza if Peggy is the jack then Bunting is both bowler and bowled. He is rolling the woods as well as being rolled towards the jack. The poet is writing the future just as Villon did in his cell.

  After London the hardship of life at sea in the northern ocean numbs memory:

  No tilled acre, gold scarce,

  walrus tusk, whalebone, white bear’s liver.

  Scurvy gnaws, steading smell, hearth’s crackle.

  Crabs, shingle, seracs on the icefall.

  Summer is bergs and fogs, lichen on rocks.

  Who cares to remember a name cut in ice

  or be remembered?

  A name carved in ice is no more durable than those that are ‘split in soft slate’ in Brigflatts’ graveyard.

  The chisel in part one signals an abrupt shift in tone and in part two there is a similarly sudden move from cold to warm, hardship to ease:

  About ship! Sweat in the south. Go bare

  because the soil is adorned,

  sunset the colour of a boiled louse.

  Steep sluice or level,

  parts of the sewer ferment faster.

  Days jerk, dawdle, fidget

  towards the cesspit.

  Love is a vapour, we’re soon through it.

  Life is still without hope, and our fate sealed whichever part of the sewer we inhabit, but there may be incidental pleasures to be found along the way:

  Flying fish follow the boat,

  delicate wings blue, grace

  on flick of a tissue tail,

  the water’s surface between

  appetite and attainment.

  Flexible, unrepetitive line

  to sing, not paint; sing, sing,

  laying the tune on the air,

  nimble and easy as a lizard,

  still and sudden as a gecko,

  to humiliate love, remember

  nothing.

  In lines 6–8 Bunting is, according to Donald Davie, ‘honouring the cantabile art practised by Lawes and Jenkyns, by Waller and Dowland and Lovelace, in the seventeenth century, as by Arnold Dolmetsch and Pound … in the twentieth’.8 Davie may be correct in this but it is a reductive interpretation that robs the lines of some of their magic. Song is certainly the hero but it is song found in the behaviour of lizards and geckoes. The ‘flexible, unrepetitive line’ is the surface of the sea, about which the flying fish dart to satisfy appetite below and aspiration above. It is a purely natural rhythm, irreducible to art. But Bunting does not deny appetite and the relaxed Italian idyll of ‘submarine Amalfitan kisses’ that follows is a celebration of the senses although, as we have seen, still loaded with guilt.

  Part two stays in Italy for a little longer:

  White marble stained like a urinal

  cleft in Apuan Alps,

  always trickling, apt to the saw. Ice and wedge

  split it or well-measured cordite shots,

  while paraffin pistons rap, saws rip

  and clamour is clad in stillness:

  clouds echo marble middens, sugar-white,

  that cumber the road stones travel

  to list the names of the dead.

  In the heat of Italy the cold of the north is recalled by locating to a marble quarry in the Alps, the mason’s yard at Brigflatts recalled by the industrial carving of headstones. ‘There is a lot of Italy in churchyards,’ the poem continues, wittily pointing to the Italian appetite for marble monuments as well, perhaps, as a sense of a culture that has been suffocated by the Church. Another ‘self-contained fragment’ that Bunting sent to Zukofsky, acknowledging his debt to Kipling along the way,9 follows the quarry section and, as with the bowling lyric, reintroduces the direct voice of the poet:

  Win from rock

  flame and ore.

  Crucibles pour

  sanded ingots.

  Heat and hammer

  draw out a bar.

  Wheel and water

  grind an edge.

  No worn tool

  whittles stone;

  but a reproached

  uneasy mason

  shaping evasive

  ornament

  litters his yard

  with flawed fragments.

  The ‘reproached uneasy mason’ of part two is a travesty of the atoned mason of part one, the distance between them measured by the Brigflatts mason’s understanding that ‘rocks happen by chance’ and the poet-mason’s attempt to shape ‘evasive ornament’. It returns the scene to the fells, and to Eric Bloodaxe:

  Loaded with mail of linked lies,

  what weapon can the king lift to fight

  when chance-met enemies employ sly

  sword and shoulder-piercing pike,

  pressed into the mire,

  trampled and hewn till a knife

  – in whose hand? – severs tight

  neck cords? Axe rusts. Spine

  picked bare by ravens, agile

  maggots devour the slack side

  and inert brain, never wise.

  What witnesses he had life,

  ravelled and worn past splice,

  yarns falling to staple? Rime

  on the bent, the beck ice,

  there will be nothing on Stainmore to hide

  void, no sable to disguise

  what he wore under the lies,

  king of Orkney, king of Dublin, twice

  king of York, where the tide

  stopped till long flight

  from who knows what smile,

  scowl, disgust or delight

  ended in bale on the fellside.

  Bloodaxe’s stuttering achievements are reduced and restricted by his infidelity, ‘no sable to disguise what he wore under the lies’. At this stage part two of Briggflatts swings back into lyric:

  Starfish, poinsettia on a half-tide crag,

  a galliard by Byrd.

  Anemones spite cullers of ornament

  but design the pool

  to their grouping. The hermit crab

  is no grotesque in such company.

  Asian vultures riding on a spiral

  column of dust

  or swift desert ass startled by the

  camels’ dogged saunter

  figures sudden flight of the descant

  on a madrigal by Monteverdi.

  But the music’s power is limited. It cannot penetrate places nature has fled:

  But who will entune a bogged orchard,

  its blossom gone,

  fruit unformed, where hunger and

  damp hush the hive?

  A disappointed July full of codling

  moth and ragged lettuces?

  Once again the music is driven by nature:

  Yet roe are there, rise to the fence, insolent;

  a scared vixen cringes

  red against privet stems as a mazurka;

  and rat, grey, rummaging

  behind the compost heap has daring

  to thread, lithe and alert, Schoenberg’s maze.

  In the previous stanza the attempts to turn nature into
ornament fail; there is no fruit, no honey, no produce. But nature will not be shut out. The deer have no fear, the fox performs her folk dance undeterred, and the rat, which will reappear dramatically in part four, reproduces Schoenberg’s sinewy rhythms.

  But we desired Macedonia

  The third part of Briggflatts has consistently caused readers more difficulties than the rest of the poem, partly because it departs from the autobiography, albeit a minimalist one, that we have come to expect from the first two parts, partly because it presents an almost Blakean vision that is not very transparent, and partly because it depicts a world that many readers do not recognise.

  Bunting told Donald Davie that the theme of part three, Alexander’s meeting with the angel on the mountain top, ‘is the rejection of what is usually reckoned as success and as consistency. But it’s not a piece of theology or philosophy. Its reason for existence is only to be a poem.’10 Elsewhere he described Alexander’s encounter with Israfel as ‘the confrontation of ambition with something more full-fated that’s in store for all of us … the futility of mankind’ though he was quick to point out that this was just one of many possible ‘meanings’.11 It is uncompromising, a pitiless view of human ambition:

  Tides of day strew the shingle

  tides of night sweep, snoring;

  and some turned back, taught

  by dreams the year would capsize

  where the bank quivers, paved

  with gulls stunned on a cliff

  not hard to climb, muffled

  in flutter, scored by beaks,

  pestered by scavengers

  whose palms scoop droppings to mould

  cakes for hungry towns. One

  plucked fruit warm from the arse

  of his companion, who

  making to beat him, he screamed:

  Hastor! Hastor! But Hastor

  raised dung thickened lashes to stare

  disdaining those who cry:

  Sweet shit! Buy!

  for he swears in the market:

  By God with whom I lunched!

  there is no trash in the wheat

  my loaf is kneaded from.

  Nor will unprofitable motion

  stir the stink that settles round him.

  Leave given

  we would have slaughtered the turd-bakers

  but neither whip nor knife

  can welt their hides

  As we have seen, this passage is a barely concealed sneer at journalism in general and The Times and Hugh Astor in particular (Bunting explains dismissively in a note that Hastor is ‘a Cockney hero’), but it may also describe a world in which turd bakers could flourish. If we regard the word ‘rubbish’ in Sir Reader Bullard’s description of Teheran during the war as the euphemism of a career diplomat we can envisage the scene Bunting describes: ‘The task of supplying the bakers of Tehran with enough flour was stupendous. At times the American Food Adviser, in spite of occasional loans of flour from the British Army, had only a three days supply in hand, and had to use barley or some other foodstuff to eke out the wheat flour. Some bakers increased the difficulties by selling in the black market part of their quota of flour and replacing it by rubbish.’12 We know from Bullard’s letters from Teheran that bran, straw, charcoal dust and ‘all kinds of chaff and muck’ were mixed into Persian bread at the time.13

  The poem then drops many circles in this Inferno before Alexander climbs the mountain to meet Israfel:

  Guides at the top claim fees

  though the way is random

  past hovels hags lean from

  rolling lizard eyes

  at boys gnawed by the wolf,

  past bevelled downs, grey marshes

  where some souse in brine

  long rotted corpses, others,

  needier, sneak through saltings

  to snatch toe, forearm, ear,

  and on gladly to hills

  briar and bramble vest

  where beggars advertise

  rash, chancre, fistula,

  to hug glib shoulders, mingle herpetic

  limbs with stumps and cosset the mad.

  The Shahnameh was the source for this story:

  But we desired Macedonia,

  the rocky meadows, horses, barley pancakes,

  incest and familiar games,

  to end in our place by our own wars,

  and deemed the peak unscaleable; but he

  reached to a crack in the rock

  with some scorn, resolute though in doubt,

  traversed limestone to gabbro,

  file sharp, skinning his fingers,

  and granite numb with ice, in air

  too thin to bear up a gnat,

  scrutinising holds while day lasted,

  groping for holds in the dark

  till the morning star reflected

  in the glazed crag

  and other light not of the sun

  dawning from above

  lit feathers sweeping snow

  and the limbs of Israfel,

  trumpet in hand, intent on the east,

  cheeks swollen to blow,

  whose sigh is cirrus: Yet delay!

  When will the signal come

  to summon man to his clay?

  We really need Ferdowsi’s original, in which Alexander is Sekandar, to supply some context here:

  Sekandar made his way to the mountain summit alone. There he saw Esrafil, the angel of death, with a trumpet in his hand, his head raised at the ready, his cheeks filled with breath, his eyes brimming with tears, as he waited for God to order him to blow. Seeing Sekandar on the mountain Esrafil roared with a voice like thunder,

  ‘Stop struggling, slave of greed! One day, at last,

  Your ears will hear the mighty trumpet’s blast –

  Don’t worry about crowns and thrones! Prepare

  To pack your bags and journey on elsewhere!’

  Sekandar said, ‘I see that I’m to be

  Hurried about the world perpetually,

  And that I’ll never know another fate

  Than this incessant, wandering, restless state!’

  He descended the mountain, weeping and praising God, then set out on the dark road again, following his guides.14

  For Bunting this was one of the greatest moments of poetry: ‘The one in Firdosi which I made use of in ‘Briggflatts’ of Alexander climbing the mountain and seeing on top the Angel of the Resurrection ready to blow the trumpet and put an end to the world. And it’s not merely because the incident itself is striking but because the words make it so much more striking.’15 Only with Ferdowsi can we see ‘the confrontation of ambition with … the futility of mankind’ that is Bunting’s thrust. For once the condensation is too intense (Bunting claimed to have cut the poem down from twenty thousand lines to around seven hundred).16 He insisted that Briggflatts needed no notes although ‘a few may spare diligent readers the pains of research’.17 Even a diligent reader is likely to miss the point here without a note of explanation. Bunting, of course, wouldn’t have had much sympathy with this, but his stated ‘meaning’ is all but invisible.

  Bunting’s own gloss is also necessary if we are properly to follow the transition from Alexander’s encounter with the Angel of Death to the passage which follows it:

  Alexander wanders through country after country where the most horrible things are going on, and ultimately comes to the mountains of Gog and Magog on the edge of the world. And his troops refuse to follow him, but all alone he climbs up to the top of the mountain, and there he sees the Angel sitting exactly as in my poem, with the trumpet ready to his lips to blow, and looking anxiously to the east for the signal to blow the trumpet and put an end to the world. And that of course does Alexander’s business for him: he falls off the mountain, comes to, and leads everybody home in peace to Macedonia.18

  In Briggflatts Alexander’s fall from the top of the mountain is condensed out of existence. After Israfel’s delayed sigh we return from the ‘ed
ge of the world’ to a world that is very similar to that around the River Rawthey, but it is Alexander who wakes:

  Heart slow, nerves numb and memory, he lay

  on glistening moss by a spring;

  as a woodman dazed by an adder’s sting

  barely within recall

  tests the rebate tossed to him, so he

  ascertained moss and bracken,

  a cold squirm snaking his flank

  and breath leaked to his ear:

  I am neither snake nor lizard,

  I am the slowworm.

  The bowls and slow-worm themes re-emerge and interweave as in a sonata.

  In his brilliant comparison of Briggflatts, The Waste Land and Pound’s ‘Canto 47’ (which, incidentally, shows how much more Bunting had been influenced by Eliot than by Pound), Thom Gunn, one of Bunting’s most sensitive critics, observed that,

  when Alexander falls stunned from the mountain, Bunting has him fall to a ground very like that of Northumberland. As he lies there, Alexander, the Achiever, hears the song of the slowworm at his ear – and the slowworm sings, among other things, ‘I prosper/lying low.’ The song gives Alexander pause:

  So he rose and led home silently through clean woodland

  where every bough repeated the slowworm’s song.

  It is the song of the natural world, which is clean of the achiever and his ambition, and which is also helpless before him.19

  I hear Aneurin number the dead

  Part four of Briggflatts takes us back to the north of England, many miles north of Brigflatts, where the poem started, to the banks of the River Till.20 It is autumn:

  Grass caught in willow tells the flood’s height that has subsided;

  overfalls sketch a ledge to be bared tomorrow.

  No angler homes with empty creel though mist dims day.

  I hear Aneurin number the dead, his nipped voice.

  Slight moon limps after the sun. A closing door

  stirs smoke’s flow above the grate. Jangle

  to skald, battle, journey; to priest Latin is bland.

  Rats have left no potatoes fit to roast, the gamey tang

  recalls ibex guts steaming under a cold ridge,

  tomcat stink of a leopard dying while I stood

  easing the bolt to dwell on a round’s shining rim.

  I hear Aneurin number the dead and rejoice,

  being adult male of a merciless species.

  Aneirin, as his name is now usually spelt, a seventh-century court poet, described in his bloody poem, Y Gododdin, the fate of the warriors of Gododdin, a small Brythonic kingdom located between the Firth of Forth and Hadrian’s Wall, at the Battle of Catraeth (now Catterick in north Yorkshire). In the post-Roman sixth century the land between the Antonine Wall and Hadrian’s Wall, the ‘Intervallum’, was a battleground for the native Britons and Picts, and the incursive Germanic Angles and Gaelic Scots from Dalriada in Ulster. The Battle of Catraeth was fought in about 600 by Britons and Angles and Aneirin recorded it in a celebration of the warrior class and its glorification of slaughter, feasting and death. As Norman Davies has shown, the slaughter at Catterick was ‘shocking even for a society that lived from warfare’.21 The native tribes were wiped out and just one of the three hundred chieftains who had taken part survived. The heavy loss opened the door to the Angles who proceeded to occupy the entire region in the following decades. In Bunting’s poem Aneirin numbers the Catraeth dead, as he does in Y Gododdin, as a prime specimen of his ‘merciless species’. The proximity of this to the cold-eyed Bunting gazing on the dying leopard he has just shot clearly suggests that we should amalgamate the poets as we amalgamated Bunting and Villon. Aneirin–Bunting’s job is to record death without pity or shame.