Basil Bunting:

ATTIS: OR SOMETHING MISSING (1931)
Sonatina

Dea magna, dea Cybele, dea domina Dindymi, procul a mea tuus sit furor omnis, era, domo: alios age incitatos, alios age rabidos.

[Note: Parodies of Lucretius and Cino da Pistoia can do no damage and intend no disrespect.]

I

Out of puff
noonhot in tweeds and gray felt,
tired of appearance and
disappearance;
warm obese frame limp with satiety;
slavishly circumspect at sixty;
he spreads over the ottoman
scanning the pictures and table trinkets.

(That hand's dismissed shadow
moves through fastidiously selective consciousness,
rearranges pain.)

There are no colours, words only,
and measured shaking of strings,
and flutes and oboes
enough for dancers.
.... .... .... reluctant ebb:
salt from all beaches:
disrupt Atlantis, days forgotten,
extinct peoples, silted harbours.
He regrets that brackish
train of the huntress
driven into slackening fresh,
expelled when the
estuary resumes
colourless potability;
wreckage that drifted
in drifts out.

'Longranked larches succeed larches, spokes of a
stroll; hounds trooping around hooves; and the stolid horn's
sweet breath. Voice: Have you seen the
fox? Which way did he go, he go?
There was soft rain.
I recollect deep mud and leafmould somewhere: and
in the distance Cheviot's
heatherbrown flanks and white cap.

Landscape salvaged from
evinced notice of
superabundance, of
since parsimonious
soil .....
Mother of Gods.'

Mother of eunuchs.

Praise the green earth. Chance has appointed her
home, workshop, larder, middenpit.
Her lousy skin scabbed here and there by
cities provides us with name and nation.

From her brooks sweat. Hers corn and fruit.
Earthquakes are hers too. Ravenous animals
are sent by her. Praise her and call her
Mother and Mother of Gods and Eunuchs.

II

(Variations on a theme by Milton)

I thought I saw my late wife (a very respectable woman)
coming from Bywell churchyard with a handful of raisins.
I was not pleased, it is shocking to meet a ghost, so I cut her
and went and sat amongst the rank watergrasses by the Tyne.

Centrifugal tutus! Sarabands!
music clear enough to
pluck stately dances from
madness before the frenzy.
Andante .... ....Prestissimo!
turbulent my Orfeo!
A tumult softly hissed
as by muted violins,
Tesiphone's, Alecto's
capillary orchestra.
Long phrases falling like
intermittent private voices
suddenly in the midst of talk,
falling aslant like last light:
VENGA MEDUSA
VENGA
MEDUSA SÌ L'FAREM DI SMALTO
Send for Medusa: we'll enamel him!

Long loved and
too long loved, stale habit, such decay of ardour,
love never dead, love never hoping, never gay.
Ageslow venom selfsecreted. Such shame!

The gorgon's method:
In the morning
clean streets welcomed light's renewal,
patient, passive to the weight of buses
thundering like cabinet ministers
over a lethargic populace.
Streets buffeted thin soles at midday,
streets full of beggars.
Battered, filthily unfortunate streets
perish, their ghosts are wretched
in the mockery of lamps.

And O Purveyor
of geraniums and pianos to the Kaiserin!
the hot smell of the street
conversing with the bleat
of rancid air streaming up tenement stairways!

Gods awake and fierce
stalk across the night
grasping favour of men,
power to hurt or endow,
leave to inhabit
figure and name; or skulk
from impotence in light's
opacity.
Day hides them, opaque day
hides their promenades; night
reveals them stalking
(VENGA MEDUSA)
passionately.

Polymnia
keeps a cafe in Reno.
Well, (eh, Cino?)
I dare no longer raise my eyes
on any lass
seeing what one of them has done to me.
So singlehearted, so steady
never lover, none so humble.
She made a new youth lord of her.
I lower my eyes. I say:
'I will not look on any,
maybe all are jilts.'

III *

Pastorale arioso
(falsetto)

What mournful stave, what bellow shakes the grove?
O, it is Attis grieving for his testicles!
Attis stiffening amid the snows
and the wind whining through his hair and fingers!

'Pines, my sisters, I, your sister,
chaffered for lambs in the marketplace.
I also won the 14 carat halfhunter goldwatch
at the annual sports and flowershow.
The young girls simpered when I passed.
Now I am out of a job. I would like to be lady's-maid
to Dindyma.

Pines, my sisters, I, your sister,
tended the bull and the entire horse.
Pensive geldings gape stale adolescence religiously,
yearning for procreative energy;
call it God. I sat amongst the atheists,
I was bankrupted by affiliation orders
who now bow my chaste vegetable forehead
to Dindyma.

Pines, my sisters, I, your sister,
parch in calm weather, swelter in Scirocco, sway in northwind,
I am passive to the heave of spring.
In the season I will pay my phallic harvest
to Dindyma.

Dindyma! Dindyma!
The wraith of my manhood,
the cruel ghost of my manhood,
limp in hell,
leapt sleeplessly in strange beds.
I have forgotten most of the details,
most of the names,
and the responses to
the ithyphallic hymns:
forgotten the syntax,
and the paradigms
grate scrappily against reluctant nerves.

(Oh Sis!
I've been 'ad!
I've been 'ad proper!)

Shall we be whole in Elysium?
I am rooted in you,
Dindyma!
assure me
the roses and myrtles,
the lavish roses,
the naively
portentous myrtles,
corroborate the peacock.
(I've been 'ad!)'

To whom Cybele:
'The peacock's knavery
keeps you in slavery.
The roses cheat
you, butcher's meat.
The myrtles' pretence
offends commonsense.
Yet a muse defrauds
the Mother of the Gods.
Ponder this allegorical

oracle.'

Attis his embleme:
Nonnulla deest.

* See Part III. in: An "Objectivists"Anthology. Edited by Louis Zukofsky. (To, Publishers, 1932), pp. 33-35

 

(from: Confucius to Cummings. An Anthology of Poetry. Edited by Ezra Pound and Marcella Spann [New Directions: New York, 1964], pp. 313-316.)

GIN THE GOODWIFE STINT (1930)

The ploughland has gone to bent
And the pasture to heather;
Gin the goodwife stint
She’ll keep the house together.

Gin the goodwife stint
And the bairns hunger
The Duke can get his rent
One year longer.

The Duke can get his rent
And we can get our ticket
Twa pund emigrant
On a C.P.R. packet.

[gin: if; C.P.R.: In 1920 it was still possible for an emigrant pledged to agricultural labor to cross from England to Canada on a Canadian Pacific railway boat for two pounds.] 

 

THE COMPLAINT OF THE MORPETHSHIRE FARMER (1930)
[Note: The war and the Forestry Commission have outdated this complaint.]

On the up-platform at Morpeth station
in the market-day throng
I overheard a Morpethshire farmer
muttering this song:

Must ye bide, my good stone house,
to keep a townsman dry?
To hear the flurry of the grouse
but not the lowing of the kye?

To see the bracken choke the clod
the coulter will na turn?
The bit level neebody
will drain soak up the burn?

Where are ye, my seven score sheep?
Feeding on other braes!
My brand has faded from your fleece,
another has its place.

The fold beneath the rowan
where ye were dipt before,
its cowpit walls are overgrown,
ye would na heed them more.

And thou! Thou's idled all the spring,
I doubt thou's spoiled, my Meg!
But a sheepdog's faith is aye something.
We'll hire together in Winnipeg.

Canada's a cold land.
Thou and I must share
a straw bed and a hind's wages
and the bitter air.

Canada's a bare land
for the north wind and the snow.
Northumberland's a bare land
for men have made it so.

Sheep and cattle are poor men's food,
grouse is sport for the rich;
heather grows where the sweet grass might grow
for the cost of cleaning the ditch.

A liner lying in the Clyde
will take me to Quebec.
My sons'll see the land I am leaving
as barren as her deck.

[kye: cattle; coulter: plowshare; cowpit: overturned; hind: farm laborer]

** The stylistic reform, or the change in language, was a means not an end. After the war of 1914-199 there was definitely an extension of subject matter. This anthology cannot analyze the results, it is a lead up, but the poetry of the last forty years definitely breeds a discontent with a great deal that had been accepted in 1900. Of the poets who appeared in the 1920’s it has been asserted that Cummings and Bunting show a deeper concern with basic human problems in relation to the state of the times, Cummings with irony, Bunting in more glum sobriety. We have chosen two of Bunting’s poems that are easiest to grasp, but they lead up to such passages as:

"The sea is his and he
made it."--Who
made Holland and whose is it?
Man is not an end-product,
maggot asserts.

There are unforgettable lines in his "Villon."

THE WELL OF LYCOPOLIS (1935)

[Note: Gibbon mentions its effect in a footnote. The long quotations from Villon and Dante will of course be recognized. Americans may care to be informed that as a native of Paphos Venus was until recently entitled to a British passport. Her quotation from Sophie Tucker will not escape the attention of those who remember the first world war, and need not engage that of those who dont. The remarks of the brass head occur in the no longer sufficiently well-known story of Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, of which I think Messrs Laurel and Hardy could make use. Some may remember that the only one of the rivers of Paradise to which we have access on earth, namely Zamzam, is reported to be brackish.]

cujus potu signa
virginitatis eripiuntur

I

Advis m'est que j'oy regretter

Slinking by the jug-and-bottle
swingdoor I fell in with
Mother Venus, ageing, bedraggled, a
half-quartern of gin under her shawl,
wishing she was a young girl again:
'It's cruel hard to be getting old so soon.
I wonder I dont kill myself and have done with it.

I had them all on a string at one time,
lawyers, doctors, business-men:
there wasnt a man alive but would have given
all he possessed
for what they wont take now free for nothing.
I turned them down,
I must have had no sense,
for the sake of a shifty young fellow:
whatever I may have done at other times
on the sly
I was in love then and no mistake;
and him always knocking me about
and only cared for my money.
However much he shook me or kicked me I
loved him just the same.
If he'd made me take in washing he'd
only have had to say: 'Give us a kiss'
and I'd have forgotten my troubles.
The selfish pig, never up to any good!
He used to cuddle me. Fat lot of good it's done me!
What did I get out of it besides a bad conscience?
But he's been dead longer than thirty years
and I'm still here, old and skinny.
When I think about the old days,
what I was like and what I'm like now,
it fair drives me crazy to
look at myself with nothing on.
What a change!
Miserable dried up skin and bone.

But none of their Bacchic impertinence,
medicinal stout nor portwine-cum-beef.
A dram of anaesthetic, brother.
I'm a British subject if I am a colonial,
distilled liquor's clean.
It's the times have changed. I remember during the War
kids carrying the clap to school under their pinnies,
studying Belgian atrocities in the Sunday papers
or the men pissing in the backstreets; and grown women
sweating their shifts sticky at the smell of khaki
every little while.
Love's an encumberance to them who
rinse carefully before using, better
keep yourself to yourself.
What it is to be in the movement!
'Follow the instructions on page fortyone'
unlovely labour of love,
'or work it off in a day's walk,
a cold douche and brisk rub down,
there's nothing like it.'
Aye, tether me among the maniacs,
it's nicer to rave than reason.'
Took her round to Polymnia's, Polymnia
glowering stedfastly at the lukewarm
undusted grate grim with cinders
never properly kindled, the brass head of the
tongs creaking as she twitched them:
'Time is, was, has been.'
A gassy fizzling spun from among the cinders.
The air, an emulsion of some unnameable oil,
greased our napes. We rhymed our breath
to the mumble of coke distilling.
'What have you come for? Why have you brought the Goddess? You who
finger the goods you cannot purchase,
snuffle the skirt you dare not clutch.
There was never love between us, never less
than when you reckoned much. A tool
not worth the negligible price. A fool
not to be esteemed for barren honesty.
Leave me alone. A long time ago
there were men in the world, dances, guitars, ah!
Tell me, Love's mother, have I wrinkles? grey hair?
teats, or dugs? calves, or shanks?
Do I wear unbecoming garments?'

'Blotched belly, slack buttock and breast,
there's little to strip for now.
A few years makes a lot of difference.
Would you have known me?
Poor old fools,
gabbing about our young days,
squatted round a bit of fire
just lit and flickering out already:
and we used to be so pretty!'

II

May my libation of flat beer stood overnight
sour on your stomach, my devoutly worshipped ladies,
may you retch cold bile.
Windy water slurred the glint of Canopus,
am I answerable? Left, the vane
screwing perpetually ungainlywards.
What reply will a
June hailstorm countenance?

'Let's be cosy,
sit it out hand in hand.
Dreaming of you, that's all I do.'
Eiderdown air, any
girl or none, it's the same thing,
coats the tongue the morning after.
Answer?
If words were stone, if the sun's lilt
could be fixed in the stone's convexity.
Open your eyes, Polymnia,
at the sleek, slick lads treading gingerly between the bedpots,
stripped buff-naked all but their hats to raise,
and nothing rises but the hats;
smooth, with soft steps, ambiguoque voltu.

Daphnis investigated
bubless Chloe
behind a boulder.
Still, they say,
in another climate
virgin with virgin
coupled taste
wine without headache
and the songs are simple.
We have laid on Lycopolis water.
The nights are not fresh
between High Holborn and the Euston Road,
nor the days bright even in summer
nor the grass of the squares green.

Neither (aequora pontis)
on the sea's bulge
would the 'proud, full sail'
avail
us, stubborn against the trades,
closehauled,
stiff, flat canvas;
our fingers bleed
under the nail
when we reef.

III

Infamous poetry, abject love,
Aeolus' hand under her frock
this morning. This afternoon
Ocean licking her privities.
Every thrust of the autumn sun
cuckolding
in the green grin of late-flowering trees.
I shall never have anything to myself

but stare in the tank, see
Hell's constellations,
a dogstar for the Dogstar:
women's faces
blank or trivial,
still or rippled water,
a fool's image.

At my time of life it is easier not to see,
much easier to tra-la-la
a widowed tune in poor circumstances--
tweet, tweet, twaddle,
tweet, tweet, twat.
Squalid acquiescence in the cast-offs
of reputed poetry. Here, Bellerophon,
is a livery hack, a gelding,
easy pace, easy to hire,
all mansuetude and indifference.

Abject poetry, infamous love,
howling like a damp dog in November.
Scamped spring, squandered summer,
grain, husk, stem and stubble
mildewed; mawkish dough and sour bread.
Tweet, tweet, twaddle. Endure
detail by detail the cunnilingual law.
'Clap a clout on your jowl for
Jesus sake! Fy for shame!
After hours, is it? or under age?
Hack off his pendants!
Can a moment of madness make up for
an age of consent?'
--with their snouts in the trough,
kecking at gummy guts,
slobbering offal, gobbling potato parings,
yellow cabbage leaves, choking on onion skin,
herring bones, slops of porridge.
Way-O! Bully boys blow!
The Gadarene swihine have got us in tow.

IV

Ed anche vo' che tu per certo credi
che sotto l'acqua ha gente che sospira.

Stuck in the mud they are saying: 'We were sad
in the air, the sweet air the sun makes merry,
we were glum of ourselves, without a reason;
now we are stuck in the mud and therefore sad.'
That's what they mean, but the words die in their throat;
they cannot speak out because they are stuck in the mud.
Stuck, stick, Styx. Styx, eternal, a dwelling.
But the rivers of Paradise,
the sweep of the mountains they rise in?
Drunk or daft hear
a chuckle of spring water:
drowsy suddenly wake,
but the bright peaks have faded.
Who had love for love
whose love was strong or fastidious?
Shadow and shadow noon shrinks, night shelters,
the college of Muses reconstructs
in flimsy drizzle of starlight:
bandy, hunchback, dot-and-carry-one,
praised-for-a-guinea.

Join the Royal Air Force
and See the World. The Navy will
Make a Man of You. Tour India with the Flag.
One of the ragtime army,
involuntary volunteer,
queued up for the pox in Rouen. What a blighty!

Surrendered in March. Or maybe
ulcers of mustard gas, a rivet in the lung
from scrappy shrapnel,
frostbite, trench-fever, shell-shock,
self-inflicted wound,
tetanus, malaria, influenza.
Swapped your spare boots for a packet of gaspers.
Overstayed leave.
Debauched the neighbor's little girl
to save two shillings ...

muttering inaudibly beneath the quagmire,
irresolute, barren, dependent, this page
ripped from Love's ledger and Poetry's:
and besides I want you to know for certain
there are people under the water. They are sighing.
The surface bubbles and boils with their sighs.
Look where you will you see it.
The surface sparkles and dances with their sighs
as though Styx were silvered by a wind from Heaven.