Poets are not dependable critics of their own work, but I take Basil Bunting at his word when he insists that the primary appeal of his poetry is sound, what his friend Pound called melopoeia. To Bunting “a poem is a series of sounds in the air, just as music.” [1] Commentary on his poetry might best be limited to a florilegium of choice excerpts with, perhaps, some analysis of their musical patterns, but I here adopt the more perilous route of explicating Bunting’s Ode 15, an ars poetica, more abstract in language and more dependent on meaning than much of his work. Bunting often shrank from thematic implications altogether and, when he did theorize (as in his relation to Objectivism), he was likely to be a skeptic, criticizing propositions more often than embracing them, but this poem sets forth an unusually clear and rather extravagant notion of poetry’s potential. Yet immediately after celebrating his art, he deflates his own ideas, then continues into a dancing dialectical series of turns.
The poem is
susceptible to paraphrase, a characteristic that comes and goes in
Bunting. Though the syntax slows to a
sonorous and auspicious pace, at moments suspending meaning over rocky
syllables, the first sentence makes grand claims for the aesthetic. According to the ode, nothing directly
observed in itself (“substance”) or preserved in memory (what “time/ stills or
restrains”) can match for beauty (“design” and “supple measure”) the artistic
product compounded of perception (“the tread/ sensuous things/ keep in our consciousness”)
and reflection (“thought’s intricate polyphonic/ score”). Art, then, trumps life.
Should there be
any doubt, Bunting specifically names his subject: “man’s craft,” but what
makes the literary gesture the more bold and dramatic is his ready concession that
poetry is always “the word spoken in shapeless night,” that is to say, spoken from
the depths of human ignorance, without any comforting access to special truth. What is inscrutable and unknowable becomes the
very center of the revelation (as it is for the apophatic mystic). The poet works not by accumulation but by
removal, according to the formula dichten = condensare, with “paring
away/ waste” in order to produce “the forms/ cut out of mystery!” Mystery is not eliminated; the poem is made entirely
of mystery, but hewn to a becoming shape.
The exclamation point, rare in Bunting, betrays his enthusiasm.
The poem thus
produced surpasses other cognitive processes, but its excellence rests not so
much in what it is as in the care with which it is constructed. Its “taut” (well-crafted) sound ventures into
a realm beyond what is perceptible (that is, into the “unseen”). Only in this way is art capable of
representing nature in the most profound mimesis: the clouds, the woods, the
grain come into view. The last term
suggests the cyclic turn of life summarized in the seasons, indicating
completeness but, at the same time, summoning thoughts of mortality. Thus, as art is itself a part of nature, the
artist and the work may age alike. Since
the author’s powers are limited by time, the appeal of a verse may also fade,
as a blade of grass will dry, wither, and blow away unknown.
This prediction
of the production and then the decay of art and insight is instantly enacted on
the page. After asserting what seemed
for a moment the preeminent power of poetry, the poem reverses and ends with a
concession of sorry defeat. The
“breeze,” which had resembled “a polyphonic score,” is at this point unfelt and
unheard. The final sound is the “thud of
the ictus,” referring at once to the final syllables of Bunting’s rolling iambs
and anapests and, in medical terminology, to a sudden attack or seizure,
especially stroke, the body’s thud to the floor. Bunting has eloquently cut the ground from
under himself. He lies at the end at our
feet.
The dialectic
continues in an “Appendix” that followed in the Poetry Magazine
publication providing a further image encapsulating the poem’s movement but
emphasizing the inevitable collapse with Modernist irony. The molten iron, not only glowing but
superabundant, overflowing can turn to a cold lump, drained of drama,
“turmoil,” and “peril.” Emphasizing the
loss of visionary excitement, the crashing return to the mundane in this coda heightens
the bathos, with the final use of the devastating vulgarity “blob” a last
indignity. For the Collected Poems,
Bunting decided to omit these last lines (though he doubtless regretted losing
the archaic “spilth,” around which the passage revolved), leaving a more
delicate but equally ambiguous conclusion.
Thus he embraces
poetry’s potential to embody the world and generate beauty while accepting its
ultimate failure which parallels the inevitable weakening of its makers. While a carefully constructed pattern of
words may well represent subjective experience, this labor will in the end
inevitably reveal nothing but “mystery.”
One is left not with truth, but with the consciousness of aesthetic
grace: “supple,” “deft,” “sharp,” “taut,” everything seen “in its due
array.” The pleasure of the beauty
implied by those adjectives remains undeniable if insubstantial, and the reader
of Bunting’s verse, as melodious as that of Gerard Manley Hopkins (though
Bunting lacked the Jesuit’s metaphysical foundation), will make do with the
experience of the words’ music, very nearly literally one writer’s “whistling
in the dark.” While this commentary may
be amusing, even useful for some, I do not doubt that, were Bunting to have
read it, he would have declared “What the hell, it’s all rubbish. Put it on a string and hang it up in the
bathroom!” [2]
1.
Jonathan Williams, “An Interview with Basil Bunting,” Conjunctions
No. 5, 1983.
2.
Ibid.
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