It appears before us,
wringing its dry hands,
quoting from Nietzsche’s book,
from Shakespeare.
Sing us, we say,
more sunlit occasions;
the child by the still pool
multiplying reflections.
It remains unconsoled
in its dust-storm of tears,
remembering the Crusades,
the tortures, the purges.
But time passes by:
it commits adultery
with it to father the cause
of its continued weeping.
Filed under Poem
The poet was also a conscientious objector, life model, sailor, journalist and intelligence officer, and his letters, to Ezra Pound especially, are both challenging and moving
Funny old life, eh? Small world, etc. In one of those curious, Alan Bennett-y, believe-it-or-not-but-I-once-delivered-meat-to-the mother-in-law-of-T.S.-Eliot-type coincidences, it turns out that Mark Knopfler once worked as a copy boy on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle when Basil Bunting was working there as a sub-editor. Knopfler being Knopfler, he eventually wrote a sad sweet song about it, ‘Basil’, in which he describes England’s most important modernist poet sitting stranded in the newspaper offices, surrounded by up-and-coming Bri-Nylon-clad jack-the-lads, wearing his ancient blue sweater, puffing on his untipped Players, clearly ‘too old for the job’ and ‘bored out of his mind’. ‘Bury all joy/ Put the poems in sacks/ And bury me here with the hacks.’
Good old/poor old Basil: the sweater-wearing, sharp-bearded Bunting is periodically disinterred by poets and scholars seeking out alternative histories of English verse in which the off-beat, the eccentric, the experimental and the downright odd are shown to truly express and characterise the national spirit rather than the usual bland mainstream pap.
The academic and poet Alex Niven – one of the UK’s rather more interesting younger cultural critics, the author of both New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England (2019) and a short book about Oasis’s Definitely Maybe – now adds to this history with a selected edition of Basil Bunting’s letters. In his introduction to the volume, Niven acknowledges that even during his lifetime, Bunting was a ‘relatively unknown figure’ and that there is a ‘gappiness’ to the correspondence. Gappiness is well put – and a bit of an understatement. In both Bunting’s letters and the poetry there are years of billowing nothing. But what is there is remarkable and certainly deserves to be added to the alt. Eng. Lit. canon.
In the silence
that is his chosen medium
of communication and telling
others about it
in words. Is there no way
not to be the sport
of reason? For me now
there is only the God-space
into which I send out
my probes. I had looked forward
to old age as a time
of quietness, a time to draw
my horizons about me,
to watch memories ripening
in the sunlight of a walled garden.
But there is the void
over my head and the distance
within that the tireless signals
come from. An astronaut
on impossible journeys
to the far side of the self
I return with the messages
I cannot decipher, garrulous
about them, worrying the ear
of the passer-by, hot on his way
to the marriage of plain fact with plain fact.
Filed under Poem
The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley: Vol. VII edited by Nora Crook.
Johns Hopkins, 931 pp., £103.50, May 2021, 978 1 4214 3783 5
A summer storm in the Ligurian Sea can blow up out of nowhere. The Shelleys moved to the Bay of Lerici, halfway between Pisa and Genoa, at the end of April 1822. The place they rented, Casa Magni, was a former boathouse between the fishing village of Lerici and the even smaller hamlet of San Terenzo. ‘The sea came up to the door,’ Mary Shelley later wrote. ‘A steep hill sheltered it behind.’ As well as Mary, her husband, their surviving son and their servants, the household included their new friends Edward and Jane Williams, their children and servants, and Mary’s half-sister, Claire Clairmont.
Clairmont’s five-year-old daughter with Byron, Allegra, had died of typhus (or possibly malaria) only a few days earlier, in the convent near Ravenna where her father had more or less abandoned her. Percy Shelley had been fond of the child: ‘with me/She was a special favourite,’ he wrote in ‘Julian and Maddalo’ (1818); waiting in Byron’s Venetian palazzo for her father to turn up, they had ‘sat there, rolling billiard balls about’. Williams wrote in his journal that as they sat on the terrace one night, Shelley
grasped me violently by the arm and stared steadfastly on the white surf that broke upon the beach under our feet … I demanded of him if he were in pain – but he only answered by saying: ‘There it is again! There!’ … He saw, as plainly as he then saw me, a naked child rise from the sea, and clap its hands as in joy, smiling at him.
Shelley’s poetry is full of supernatural phenomena, ‘spirits of the air,/And genii of the evening breeze’. It’s possible to account for them through reference to classical models, but it’s also worth remembering that the sight of a ghostly child rising from the sea was as real to him as the sound of a skylark singing on a summer evening.
… how can I express the excellence I have found,
that has no color but clearness;
No honey but ecstasy …
…………………………………
No passion but peace,
The pure flame and the white, fierier than any passion; no time but spheral eternity.
Filed under Poem
Justine Dieuhl
As we would always wish
to find her waiting for us,
seated, delphinium-eyed, dressed
for the occasion; out of doors
since it is always warm
where she is.
The red kerchief
at the neck, that suggests
blood, is art leading
modesty astray.
The hands,
large enough for encircling
the waist’s stem, are,
as ours should be, in
perfect repose, not accessory
to the plucking of her own flower.
Filed under Poem
BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS
From:
The fascination of what’s difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There’s something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day’s war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I’ll find the stable and pull out the bolt.
Filed under Poem
Goethe, they say, was a great poet, Pindar, perhaps, was a great poet, Shakespeare and Sophocles
Stand beyond question. I am thinking of the few, the fortunate,
Who died fulfilled.
I think of Christopher Marlowe, stabbed through the eye in a tavern brawl by a serving man,
Spilling his youth and brains on the greasy planks. I think of young Keats,
Wild with his work unfinished, sobbing for air, dying in Rome. I think of Edgar Poe
And Robert Burns. I think of Lucretius leaving his poem unfinished to go and kill himself. I think of Archilochus
Grinning with crazy bitterness. I think of Virgil
In despair of his life-work, begging his friends to destroy it, coughing his lungs out.
Yet the young men
Still come to me with their books and manuscripts,
Eager to be poets, eager to be praised, eager as Keats. They are mad I think.
Filed under Poem
R. S. Thomas
From:
So God is born
from our loss of nerve?
He is the tree that looms up
in our darkness, at whose feet
we must fall to be set again
on its branches on some April day
of the heart.
He needs us
as a conductor his choir
for the performance of an unending
music.
What we may not
do is to have our horizon bare,
is to make our way
on through a desert white with the bones
of our dead faiths. It is why
some say, if there were no tree,
we would have to set one up, but
of steel and so leafless that
he had taken himself
off out of the reach
of our transmitted prayers.
Nightly
we explore the universe
on our wave-lengths, picking up nothing
but those acoustic ghosts
that could as well be mineral
signaling to mineral
as immortal mind communicating with itself.
Filed under Poem
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