I’ve got a stack of interesting new books I’m looking forward to writing about here, but it’s world poetry day today (apparently), so I thought I’d write about a single poem I think about often. This is the first poem from Basil Bunting’s second book of Odes, written in the 1960s. (Bunting, born in 1900, wrote most of his poetry in the 20s and 30s, and then had another productive period quite late in his life.)
A thrush in the syringa sings.‘Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,lust, familiar things.Death thrusts hard. My sonsby hawk’s beak, by stones,trusting weak wingsby cat and weasel, die.Thunder smothers the sky.From a shaken bush Ilist familiar things,fear, hunger, lust.’O gay thrush!
In this deceptively simple poem, we hear not the thrush’s song in the abstract — not just a thrush singing — but its content, what the thrush is actually singing about. This is the first poem in a book of odes, and the songbird as a figure for the poet is of course a traditional motif: that is partly the force and irony of the repeated ‘familiar things’. We are used to encountering singing birds in lyric verse.
For any twentieth-century reader, the most obvious connection here is surely to Hardy’s ‘Darkling Thrush’, whose ‘ecstatic sound’ in the bleakest of landscapes seem inexplicable to the speaking voice of the poem, forcing him to conclude that the bird must have access to ‘some blessèd hope, whereof he knew / But I was unaware’. Like Bunting’s thrush in the thunderstorm (‘From a shaken bush’), Hardy’s bird is ‘blast-beruffled’. Hardy had recently turned 60 when he wrote ‘The Darkling Thrush’ in 1900, the year of Bunting’s own birth, and the ‘agèd thrush’ suggests the poet himself, reflecting on why he sings and of what, and on what kind of knowledge is involved in writing poetry.
Bunting’s relationship to the darkling thrush is ironic. Hardy imagines that some kind of hope must ‘tremble through’ the thrush, and Bunting’s poem starts and end from the perspective of the interpreting observer, from as it were Hardy’s perspective (‘O gay thrush!’), but he answers Hardy’s poem by purporting to record what the bird is actually singing about: not some powerful but intangible hope or ‘joy illimited’ but death; hunger; lust; ‘familiar things’.
Bunting’s remarkable poems are, indeed, preoccupied with death, hunger and lust.1 (As also with memory and stillness.) A considerable part of their power is the combination of most distilled and conscious artistry of Bunting’s extraordinary ear with these basic themes, honestly confronted. Bunting was excited by physical and sexual vulnerability. There is a vein of predation in his poetry, candidly rendered. (As he says in the fourth part of Briggflatts: ‘I hear Aneurin number the dead and rejoice, / being adult male of a merciless species.’) Horace Odes 1.23, a particularly perfect depiction of desire as predation, echoes through Bunting’s verse.
A syringa is a type of lilac: the thrush shelters in it as it shaken by the thunderstorm. A lilac in the rain, with a bird singing in it, reminds me of this much simpler, but highly memorable piece of verse by Wilfrid Wilson Gibson, dating from 19182:
We who are left, how shall we look again
Happily on the sun or feel the rain
Without remembering how they who went
Ungrudgingly and spent
Their lives for us loved, too, the sun and rain?A bird among the rain-wet lilac sings –
But we, how shall we turn to little things
And listen to the birds and winds and streams
Made holy by their dreams,
Nor feel the heart-break in the heart of things?
Bunting calls the bush a syringa, though, not a lilac. He does so I think, firstly, to create a contrast of register (there are few poets as sensitive to register as Bunting): thrush is a very ordinary English word, derived from Old English — a strong Germanic term, suggesting the ‘plainsong speech’ of the opening part of Briggflatts. Syringa, by contrast, is a Latin word borrowed from Greek, and it’s not an everyday sort of word I don’t think, it is slightly technical and self-conscious. (Lilac, though itself originally borrowed from Persian, has a different and more ordinary feel.) Secondly, its internal -ing sound establishes the structural rhyme of the poem: sings — wings — things.
The thrush is singing but the syringa also conveys the song: syrinx is the Latin (and Greek) word for a simple reed pipe, or Pan-pipes. Bunting is reminding us of the story of Syrinx, the nymph who escaped rape by Pan by transformation into a reed, syrinx (σῦριγξ in Greek), from which Pan then made his pipes.3 This is a well-known story: the best-known poem about it in English is perhaps Elizabeth Barrett-Browning’s ‘A Musical Instrument’, a clever poem which makes no explicit reference to the initial threat of sexual violence, though relies upon it: ‘What was he doing, the great god Pan / Down in the reeds by the river?’. The thrush sitting in the syringa suggests the invention of music and of pastoral song — but also the merciless rapacity of (divine) lust.
Sonically, the poem is a good way into Bunting’s particular music. The poem is structured around certain key rhymes and partial rhymes, irregularly spaced: sings/wings/things, but also die/sky/I, sons/stones and the chime between lust and list. In that sense it has a more ‘obvious’ music than quite a lot of Bunting, where partial and internal rhymes are often more dominant. But this little poem also gives us a taste for one of Bunting’s greatest and most distinctive strengths, which is his ear for quantity in English verse: for the length of syllables as well as their stress. This is most obvious when he puts a series of long syllables together, as here in: Death thrusts hard. He was fascinated by the creation of quantitative patterns which are unusual in English, and this give his verse its very distinctive sound and effect of concentration.
Many Latin lyric metres — such as asclepiad and sapphic lines — contain one or more choriambs, a sequence of two long syllables surrounding two shorter ones, like this: — u u — . Latin lyric lines often contain two or sometimes even three choriambs one after another. Here, for instance, from Odes 1.5 are two examples of Bunting’s version of a greater asclepiad line:
thoughts grown stale in the mind, tardy of birth, rank and inflexible
[. . .]
timetamed whimper and shame changes the past brought to no utterance
The quantitative pattern here is:
— — — uu — — uu — — uu — u x
This fascination with the choriambic measure derives from Bunting’s long study of Latin verse, especially Horace, though also from Ezra Pound whose fascination with choriambs is striking though not very much discussed. I suspect it grew more generally, too, from his multilingualism and his reading in and translation from French and Persian poetry: learning to hear the music of other languages opened up possibilities in his own.
Some of the most intensely experimental quantitative poems in Bunting’s first book of Odes are beautiful but challenging — they don’t really sound like anything else — and they sometimes feel a bit undigested: the technical experiment, the sense of trying something out, is quite close to the surface. But it is very helpful to read these poems carefully if you want to get your “ear in” to what Bunting is doing, especially if you don’t have experience of quantitative verse in an ancient language. Listen to the recurring choriambs in this statement of Bunting’s ars poetica (from Odes 1.15):
Nothing substance utters or timestills and restrainsjoins design andsupple measure deftlyas thought’s intricate polyphonicscore dovetails with the treadsensuous thingskeep in our consciousness.Celebrate man’s craftand the word spoken in shapeless night, thesharp tool paring awaywaste and the formscut out of mystery
The sounds of ‘A thrush in the syringa sings’ are more spaced out than this, closer to ordinary language and to familiar English verse sounds, though unmistakably the work of the same poet. Here he is finding a way to integrate his quantitative metrics fully into English verse. In Bunting’s greatest poem, Briggflatts, also written in the 1960s, we hear the fruition of this process. The remarkable quantitative music of Briggflatts is central to its effect but it has lost the self-consciousness of many of the first book of Odes: it never sounds, as some of the Odes do, as if it is primarily about its own technique.
Though written so much later than most of the rest of them, Briggflatts is I think my favourite modernist poem and I do recommend that you read it if you haven’t.4 For now, here’s the beginning, a very appropriate passage for the start of spring (Rawthey is a river):
Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madigral,
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.
Hunger perhaps sounds a bit surprising, and we might be tempted to take it metaphorically, as desire or curiosity: but actually there’s an awful lot about food and drink in Bunting, so I think it is useful to take it literally.
Bunting, from a Quaker background, spent several months in prison in 1918 as a conscientious objector: he was imprisoned because he refused to serve either as a soldier, or to do agricultural work instead, on the grounds that in the latter case he would effectively be sending another man to fight in his place.
The story is in Ovid, Metamorphoses 1, as well as many other places.
The whole thing is not online, though you can read the opening movement here. It’s in the Bloodaxe Complete Poems, of course, but there’s also an excellent separate Bloodaxe edition of it which comes with a CD of Bunting reading the poem himself. If you’re interested in reading about Bunting’s poetry, Liam Guilar’s blog has a great archive of posts about Bunting here, including many useful reviews.
If I may be permitted to blow my own tuba, I have written at some length on Bunting's Horace in a chapter, 'Soiled Mosaic: Bunting’s Horace Translations', in McGonigal and Price, "The Star You Steer By: Basil Bunting and British Modernism" (2000), which will doubtless be findable in a public library near you. I wish I’d had this blogpost at the time; the stuff on Bunting’s use of Latin metres is fascinating, and I would have profited by it no end.
Harry Gilonis
As I reread 'One Poem' in small bites this morning, in Paris, with an unusual helicopter flying overhead (why? a demonstration?), a couple of other things come to mind: the line breaks and punctuation (esp. the full stop at the end of line/stanza 1 - it could be a colon, or a dash, if Bunting uses dashes - ) and the irony, if it is irony, of the last line. 'This could almost be a WCWilliams poem,' I thought. But is Williams ironic or is celebration his default tone?) That led me from Bunting's irony to tone in British 20c poetry versus irony in American poetry of the same period.
I'm also intrigued by Bunting's rhyme (and MMoore comes to mind).
(In my 'Collected Poems' (Oxford, 1978) the poem is in 5 stanzas; the first and the last are a single line/sentence, so looks more WCW-ish). I rather like the way it looks above, which, I think may be due to the difficulty of reproducing poetry lineation in blogs. It looks less random than in the free-verse-y shape in my book.)