Pinks #40: How It Feels Rubbing Down a Gravestone

Personal insights into a poetic masterpiece

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Basil Bunting’s long modernist poem Briggflatts (1966) was published sixty years ago this winter — first in Poetry magazine and then as a book from Fulcrum Press. It was subtitled “An Autobiography”, but Bunting denied that it was “a record of fact”, saying “the truth of the poem is of another kind”. Despite the often abstruse allusions, he also felt that “no notes are needed”. But he provided a handful nevertheless, on the grounds that “a few may spare diligent readers the pains of research”.

Bunting’s notes were titled “Afterthoughts”, and most relate to the Northumbrian landscape and language of his early twentieth-century youth, where the poem is primarily set (Briggflatts, the Quaker meeting house of the title, is actually over towards the west in Cumbria, but Bunting saw this as part of the old Northumbria). He had returned to North East England after travelling widely, and wrote the poem in his sixties, filling notebooks on the train as he commuted to his sub-editing job on the Newcastle Evening Chronicle.

Like T.S. Eliot’s Notes to The Waste Land, Bunting’s “Afterthoughts” have the air of a riddling hermit guarding a magic portal. The first warns that “the Northumbrian tongue” may sound strange to non-natives, and that “Southrons” — those from the south of England — “would maul the music of many lines of Briggflatts”. Further on, we are told to “piece […] together” the story of the Viking king, Eric Bloodaxe, “from the Anglo-Saxon chronicle, the Orkneyinga Saga, and Heimskringla, as you fancy”. By the time we get to the word “skerry”, Bunting’s only comment is “O, come on, you know that one” (it’s a small rocky island, covered at high tide). “Scone”, meanwhile, is singled out so that we can be told to “rhyme it with ‘on’, not, for heaven’s sake, ‘own’” (on the question of whether to apply jam or cream first, however, he is silent).

I had a new experience of Briggflatts recently when I read it alongside the much more extensive annotations that have been available for the past ten years at the back of Don Share’s excellent edition of The Poems of Basil Bunting (2016). One of the things I appreciated about how Share lays out these notes for the reader is that, as well as interleaving Bunting’s original “Afterthoughts”, he also uses bold type to pick out everything the poet said elsewhere about the poem: interviews, letters, conversations. So it’s possible at a glance to follow an extended authorial commentary on particular words and lines. Here are a few moments that illuminated for me how the poem is, in fact, a record of facts — specifically, of things Bunting himself had noticed.

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Brag, sweet tenor bull,
descant on Rawthey’s madrigal,
each pebble its part
for the fells’ late spring.
Dance tiptoe, bull,
black against may.

The poem begins with this sonorous address to a bull in a field by the River Rawthey, which runs near Briggflatts. The way that the first word of the poem, “Brag”, pararhymes with the first syllable of the title, signals the intricate sound patterning that will characterise the poem. In the last interview he ever gave, Bunting remarked that “a great deal of what people goggle at in Briggflatts is merely an undisciplined and indiscriminate use of Cynghanedd” — the Welsh poetic technique of line-enclosed consonance and rhyme which, as Bunting noted, employs “rhymes that don’t have the same vowel, only the same consonants each side of it, and funny things like that”.

In another interview, he commented on the realism of his depiction of the bull itself, which might seem a little Disneyish with its tunefulness and twinkling toes:

The bull I noticed one day in a farm near Throckley where I was living at the moment; and, you know, it struck me, at once, nobody had noticed the bull has a tenor voice. You hear of the bull bellowing and this, that, and the other. But in fact he bellows in the most melodious tenor, a beautiful tenor voice. In spring, the bull, does, in fact, if he’s with the cows, dance on the tips of his toes, as part of the business of showing off, showing that he is protecting them, you see. He’s not really doing anything, but he sees somebody walking by the hedge and he begins to dance at once, just to demonstrate to the cows what an indispensable creature he is. It is delightful, and it bears such a, a strong resemblance to the behaviour of young men in general and… well… all creatures.

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Another character in Part I of the poem is a stonemason carving a gravestone — the acoustic antithesis of the proud bull. The poet is intimately interested in his business:

A mason times his mallet
to a lark’s twitter

[…]

Rub the stone with sand,
wet sandstone rending
roughness away. Fingers
ache on the rubbing stone.

In an interview, Bunting stated that this figure was based on the father of his first love, Peggy Greenbank — to whom Briggflatts is dedicated, and who is its emotional core. Writing to his friend Louis Zukofsky as he began the poem, Bunting said that he was concerned with “Peggy Greenback and her whole ambience […] and what happens when one deliberately thrusts love aside, as I then did — it has its revenge”.

Elsewhere, in an interview, he was also keen to emphasise that he wasn’t the kind of poet who just stands around making notes about other people’s manual labour:

I’ve rubbed down gravestones and that’s how I know how it feels to rub down a gravestone. And how your fingers ache on the damn job… and so on. I take care not to write anything that I don’t bloody well know. And that is something that I think is different from how a lot of poets write. If I write about how it feels rubbing down a gravestone, well I have rubbed down a bloody gravestone.

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The interweaving five-part structure of Briggflatts represents Bunting’s long-held ambition to write a poem based on the compositional form of the sonata. This preoccupation also means that musical perception of sound is a recurring theme. Part II begins with the young poet taking in the cacophony of life in 1920s London, as he

counts beat against beat, bus conductor
against engine against wheels against
the pedal, Tottenham Court Road, decodes
thunder, scans
porridge bubbling, pipes clanking

Here the bus “conductor” is elevated to a musical role, his rhythm counterpointing the other moving parts of a bus as it reaches its stop (“Tottenham Court Road!”). In September 1928, Bunting had written a music column for a London magazine, The Town Crier, in which he commented on many of the same things more sardonically:

The sounds that are supplied to Londoners gratis — to wit, motor-horns, accelerating buses, back-firing exhausts, drays, newsboys, street-organs and drunks, all restlessly modulating on a pedal-point of rubber-on-asphalt […] The Traffic Symphony is not unstimulating to a country hearer; but after the seven hundredth and thirtieth repetition [that is, every day for two years] one prays for a transport worker’s strike, a long one, or to become temporarily deaf.

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Part V of Briggflatts opens at the dark end of the year, “solstice past”:

Winter wrings pigment
from petal and slough
but thin light lays
white next red on sea-crow wing,
gruff sole cormorant
whose grief turns carnival.

In a lecture, Bunting noted the presence of the cormorant in the illuminated manuscript of the Lindisfarne Gospels — created on the Northumbrian coast in honour of St Cuthbert — which was another structural model for his interlacing poem:

I have tried to suggest, in my poem Briggflatts, how the light reflected from the water at certain times does seem to clothe the cormorant’s shining body in a variety of colours — I have seen it quite often in quiet harbours about dawn.

The juxtaposition of “white next red” here with “grief turns carnival” suggests the etymology of “carn-”, from the Latin caro (flesh), which makes it cognate with “incarnadine” (make red). Elsewhere in the notes, Bunting comments on his image of “sunset the colour of a boiled louse” as referring to “the cochineal”, source of

the most beautiful of all the red dyes [It is] salutary to remember that one of the loveliest colours we possess comes from the louse.

This mood of seeing beauty in everything informs the final part of Briggflatts, which Bunting said reflected the spirit of “St Cuthbert in love with all creation” (according to the legend, Cuthbert shared his food with birds while living on the Farne Islands).

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Finally, a little story Bunting told about the three-stanza Coda to his long poem. I like it because its mention of muddle and tax returns illustrates the chance nature of poetic composition, even in a work as carefully planned and polished as Briggflatts:

As for the Coda, you will never believe it, but this is the truth. I’d written three-quarters of Briggflatts, was busy in fact on the last part, when I had to turn over papers on my desk to get something for the bloody income tax commissioners, and on the back of an old bill I found a poem that I’d written long before and forgotten when I wrote it, which required three or four lines cut out, and with those three or four lines cut out it was the Coda, and obviously a part of Briggflatts.

Bunting commented on the Coda that it was “carefully arranged as far as vowel sounds go to be very singable” — perhaps by sweet tenor bulls. Here it is:

A strong song tows
us, long earsick.
Blind, we follow
rain slant, spray flick
to fields we do not know.

Night, float us.
Offshore wind, shout,
ask the sea
what’s lost, what’s left,
what horn sunk,
what crown adrift.

Where we are who knows
of kings who sup
while day fails? Who,
swinging his axe
to fell kings, guesses
where we go?

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NOTES

Bunting’s reluctance to supply notes was also an expression of his belief that “poetry is written to be heard”, and that in his experience “it generally works all right if I do read Briggflatts with no explanation”. You can listen to him reading Part I here:

https://poetryarchive.org/poem/briggflatts/

More recordings of Bunting reading are available here (although some of the links no longer work):

https://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Bunting.php

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