Poem of the week: from Briggflatts by Basil Bunting
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Version 0 of 1. Briggflatts IBrag, 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. A mason times his mallet to a lark’s twitter,listening while the marble rests, lays his ruleat 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 slothe lies. We rot. Decay thrusts the blade, wheat stands in excrement trembling. Rawthey trembles. Tongue stumbles, ears err for fear of spring.Rub the stone with sand, wet sandstone rending roughness away. Fingers ache on the rubbing stone.The mason says: Rockshappen by chance.No one here bolts the door,love is so sore. Stone smooth as skin, cold as the dead they load on a low lorry by night. The moon sits on the fell but it will rain.Under sacks on the stone two children lie,hear the horse stale, the mason whistle, harness mutter to shaft, felloe to axle squeak, rut thud the rim,crushed grit. Stocking to stocking, jersey to jersey,head to a hard arm,they kiss under the rain, bruised by their marble bed. In Garsdale, dawn;at Hawes, tea from the can. Rain stops, sackssteam in the sun, they sit up. Copper-wire moustache, sea-reflecting eyesand Baltic plainsong speech declare: By such rocksmen killed Bloodaxe. This week, come rain or shine, Poem of the week celebrates a rite of spring with the vibrant opening stanzas of Basil Bunting’s epic poem Briggflatts. “An autobiography but not a record of fact,” as the poet warns, it’s a five-part work, 700 lines altogether, using a variety of formal structures and recurrent themes and symbols tightly intermeshed. I can’t think of a better introduction to Briggflatts and its background than Don Share’s essay, here. While his invitation to plagiarise is tempting, readers will get more insight and pleasure by going direct to source, and dipping for themselves. My own comments will be far fewer than even five stanzas from this extraordinary and beautiful poem deserve. Bunting’s grammar alone could merit a book. Virtuoso of the verb and grand-master of the preposition, he rarely wastes time on an adverb, but is more liberal with exact and sensuous adjectives. His syntax is so rigorously constructed that not a word, a breath, a letter, even, seems wasted. Speaking of letters, try and listen to one of the online recordings of Bunting himself reciting, and note how audibly he pronounces the letter R, wherever in a word it may occur. His delivery reminds us that language is built of muscle and saliva, air and bone. Part One introduces the “plot” – the poet’s first love, remembered over a life-span. There are 12 13-line stanzas which I’m tempted to call Triskaidecans (I know - there must be a better word). Whatever a 13-line stanza should be called, Bunting works it marvellously, entwining staccato and legato elements into one harmonious whole, like a flowing hillside studded by rocks. Although the stress-pattern varies, it often echoes the paired lifts and drops of Anglo-Saxon alliterative metre - and many of the lines have two main stresses or “lifts”. Line one, for instance, shouldn’t be sounded as a three-beat trochaic line (tum-te-tum-te-tum) but with a major stress at the beginning and end of the line: tum–te-te-te-tum. In each stanzaic unit, all significant words (and few are not significant) make alliterative or assonantal relationships with others. The rhyming or para-rhyming couplets at the stanza’s end are like concluding, home-key chords that emphasise sounds already melodically registered. “Brag, sweet tenor bull …” Bunting summons the frisky bull as a poet a few centuries earlier would have summoned the muse. So the poem begins with an incantation, evoking youthful sexual energy and copiousness. The bull will re-appear later, when Bunting recalls the legend of Pasiphae. Here, he’s almost a cartoon, “ridiculous and lovely”, his black hide spattered with may (the hawthorn-flower, as a terse note by the poet explains), and his boastful voice (“tenor” and “descant”) is high-pitched and immature. Rawthey is the river, and its madrigal the polyphony of water over pebbles. The rhythm and mood change dramatically in the first line of the next stanza: three tapping stresses for the mason’s mallet, “timed” to the lighter metrical flourish of “a lark’s twitter”. That wholly original image of the “painful lark, labouring to rise” connects to the activities of the mason, and perhaps also to those of the poet, chipping away at difficult memories, foreshadowing the great cri de coeur near the end of Part One, “It is easier to die than to remember”. The “raw” in “Rawthey” underlines it all. Bunting’s orchestration of repeated Rs excites multiple sexual tremblings, and Eliot’s “cruellest month” seems to liquefy. Meanwhile, the labour of the mason goes on, a two-stanza ostinato-bass of tapping and sanding and getting the memorial-work done. Halfway through the next stanza, after an enchanting “moon” image that might be out of a nursery rhyme, the boy and girl-lovers almost casually appear, lying newly awake on the gravestone where they’ve been sleeping. Again, there’s the contrary motion – the cold, passive corpses loaded onto the “low lorry”, the warm-blooded children stirring, then sitting up. Bunting immediately takes us into the soundscape in their heads, and makes us hear all the small, complex interactions of horses and cartwheels. The young lovers touch and kiss in stanza five, a masterpiece of tactile finesse and density of texture. Bunting isn’t concerned only with bringing a personal narrative to life, though, and the clear-etched details of the young man’s face and speech at the end of the stanza instigate a swift genetic spiral to the Northumbrian king, Eric Bloodaxe, and an encounter with raw, unburied history: “… By such rocks/men killed Bloodaxe.” Which brings me to Bunting’s publisher, the eminently viable Bloodaxe Books. Their latest edition of Briggflatts includes a CD of the whole poem, and a DVD containing extracts. The full text isn’t available online, but you can at least read the rest of Part One here. |