Basil Bunting

I He whom we anatomized ‘whose words we gathered as pleasant flowers and thought on his wit and how neatly he described things’ speaks to us, hatching marrow, broody all night over the bones of a deadman. My tongue is a curve in the ear. Vision is lies. We saw is so and it was not so, the Emperor with the Golden Hands, the Virgin in blue. (—A blazing parchment, Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold.) It was not so, scratched on black by God knows who, by God, by God knows who. In the dark in fetters on bended elbows I supported my weak back hulloing to muffled walls blank again unresonant. It was gone, is silent, is always silent. My soundbox lacks sonority. All but inaudible I stammer to my ear: Naked speech! Naked beggar both blind and cold! Wrap it for my sake in Paisley shawls and bright soft fabric, wrap it in curves and cover it with sleek lank hair. What trumpets? What bright hands? Fetters, it was the Emperor with magic in darkness, I unforewained. The golden hands are not in Averrhoes, eyes lie and this swine’s fare bread and water makes my head wuzz. Have pity, have pity on me! To the right was darkness and to the left hardness below hardness darkness above at the feet darkness at the head partial hardness with equal intervals without to the left moaning and beyond a scurry. In those days rode the good Lorraine whom English burned at Rouen, the day’s bones whitening in centuries’ dust. Then he saw his ghosts glitter with golden hands, the Emperor sliding up and up from his tomb alongside Charles. These things are not obliterate. White gobs spitten for mockery; and I too shall have CY GIST, written over me. Remember, imbeciles and wits, sots and ascetics, fair and foul, young girls with little tender tits, that DEATH is written over all. Worn hides that scarcely clothe the soul they are so rotten, old and thin, or firm and soft and warm and full— fellmonger Death gets every skin. All that is piteous, all that’s fair, all that is fat and scant of breath, Elisha’s baldness, Helen’s hair, is Death’s collateral: Three score and ten years after sight of this pay me your pulse and breath value received. And who dare cite, as we forgive our debtors, Death? Abelard and Eloise, Henry the Fowler, Charlemagne, Genée, Lopokova, all these die, die in pain. And General Grant and General Lee, Patti and Florence Nightingale, like Tyro and Antiope drift among ghosts in Hell, know nothing, are nothing, save a fume driving across a mind preoccupied with this: our doom is, to be sifted by the wind, heaped up, smoothed down like silly sands. We are less permanent than thought. The Emperor with the Golden Hands is still a word, a tint, a tone, insubstantial-glorious, when we ourselves are dead and gone and the green grass growing over us. II Let his days be few and let his bishoprick pass to another, for he fed me on carrion and on a dry crust, mouldy bread that his dogs had vomited, I lying on my back in the dark place, in the grave, fettered to a post in the damp cellarage. Whereinall we differ not. But they have swept the floor, there are no dancers, no somersaulters now, only bricks and bleak black cement and bricks, only the military tread and the snap of the locks. Mine was a threeplank bed whereon I lay and cursed the weary sun. They took away the prison clothes and on the frosty nights I froze. I had a Bible where I read that Jesus came to raise the dead— I kept myself from going mad by singing an old bawdy ballad and birds sang on my windowsill and tortured me till I was ill, but Archipiada came to me and comforted my cold body and Circe excellent utterer of her mind lay with me in that dungeon for a year making a silk purse from an old sow’s ear till Ronsard put a thimble on her tongue. Whereinall we differ not. But they have named all the stars, trodden down the scrub of the desert, run the white moon to a schedule, Joshua’s serf whose beauty drove men mad. They have melted the snows from Erebus, weighed the clouds, hunted down the white bear, hunted the whale the seal the kangaroo, they have set private enquiry agents onto Archipiada: What is your name? Your maiden name? Go in there to be searched. I suspect it is not your true name. Distinguishing marks if any? (O anthropometrics!) Now the thumbprints for filing. Colour of hair? of eyes? of hands? O Bertillon! How many golden prints on the smudgy page? Homer? Adest. Dante? Adest. Adsunt omnes, omnes et Villon. Villon? Blacked by the sun, washed by the rain, hither and thither scurrying as the wind varies. III Under the olive trees walking alone on the green terraces very seldom over the sea seldom where it ravelled and spun blue tapestries white and green gravecloths of men Romans and modern men and the men of the sea who have neither nation nor time on the mountains seldom the white mountains beyond or the brown mountains between and their drifting echoes in the clouds and over the sea in shrines on their ridges the goddess of the country silverplated in silk and embroidery with offerings of pictures little ships and arms below me the ports with naked breasts shipless spoiled sacked because of the beauty of Helen precision clarifying vagueness; boundary to a wilderness of detail; chisel voice smoothing the flanks of noise; catalytic making whisper and whisper run together like two drops of quicksilver; factor that resolves unnoted harmonies; name of the nameless; stuff that clings to frigid limbs more marble hard than girls imagined by Mantegna ... The sea has no renewal, no forgetting, no variety of death, is silent with the silence of a single note. How can I sing with my love in my bosom? Unclean, immature and unseasonable salmon.

Poetry? It’s a hobby. I run model trains. Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons. It’s not work. You dont sweat. Nobody pays for it. You could advertise soap. Art, that’s opera; or repertory— The Desert Song. Nancy was in the chorus. But to ask for twelve pounds a week— married, aren’t you?— you’ve got a nerve. How could I look a bus conductor in the face if I paid you twelve pounds? Who says it’s poetry, anyhow? My ten year old can do it and rhyme. I get three thousand and expenses, a car, vouchers, but I’m an accountant. They do what I tell them, my company. What do you do? Nasty little words, nasty long words, it’s unhealthy. I want to wash when I meet a poet. They’re Reds, addicts, all delinquents. What you write is rot. Mr Hines says so, and he’s a schoolteacher, he ought to know. Go and find work.

See! Their verses are laid as mosaic gold to gold gold to lapis lazuli white marble to porphyry stone shouldering stone, the dice polished alike, there is no cement seen and no gap between stones as the frieze strides to the impending apse: the rays of many glories forced to its focus forming a glory neither of stone nor metal, neither of words nor verses, but of the light shining upon no substance; a glory not made for which all else was made.

Four white heifers with sprawling hooves trundle the waggon. Its ill-roped crates heavy with fruit sway. The chisel point of the goad, blue and white, glitters ahead, a flame to follow lance-high in a man’s hand who does not shave. His linen trousers like him want washing. You can see his baked skin through his shirt. He has no shoes and his hat has a hole in it. ‘Hu ! vaca ! Hu ! vaca !’ he says staccato without raising his voice; ‘Adios caballero’ legato but in the same tone. Camelmen high on muzzled mounts boots rattling against the panels of an empty packsaddle do not answer strangers. Each with his train of seven or eight tied head to tail they pass silent but for the heavy bells and plip of slobber dripping from muzzle to dust; save that on sand their soles squeak slightly. Milkmaids, friendly girls between fourteen and twenty or younger, bolt upright on small trotting donkeys that bray (they arch their tails a few inches from the root, stretch neck and jaw forward to make the windpipe a trumpet) chatter. Jolted cans clatter. The girls’ smiles repeat the black silk curve of the wimple under the chin. Their hats are absurd doll’s hats or flat-crowned to take a load. All have fine eyes. You can guess their balanced nakedness under the cotton gown and thin shift. They sing and laugh. They say ‘Adios!’ shyly but look back more than once, knowing our thoughts and sharing our desires and lack of faith in desire.

Nothing substance utters or time stills and restrains joins design and supple measure deftly as thought’s intricate polyphonic score dovetails with the tread sensuous things keep in our consciousness. Celebrate man’s craft and the word spoken in shapeless night, the sharp tool paring away waste and the forms cut out of mystery! When taut string’s note passes ears’ reach or red rays or violet fade, strong over unseen forces the word ranks and enumerates... mimes clouds condensed and hewn hills and bristling forests, steadfast corn in its season and the seasons in their due array, life of man’s own body and death... The sound thins into melody, discourse narrowing, craft failing, design petering out. Ears heavy to breeze of speech and thud of the ictus.

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.

Guarda mi disse, le feroce Erine Let us come upon him first as if in a dream, anonymous triple presence, memory made substance and tally of heart’s rot: then in the waking Now be demonstrable, seem sole aspect of being’s essence, coffin to the living touch, self’s Iscariot. Then he will loath the year’s recurrent long caress without hope of divorce, envying idiocy’s apathy or the stress of definite remorse. He will lapse into a halflife lest the taut force of the mind’s eagerness recall those fiends or new apparitions endorse his excessive distress. He will shrink, his manhood leave him, slough selfaware the last skin of the flayed: despair. He will nurse his terror carefully, uncertain even of death’s solace, impotent to outpace dispersion of the soul, disruption of the brain.

Muzzle and jowl and beastly brow, bilious glaring eyes, tufted ears, recidivous criminality in the slouch, —This is not the latest absconding bankrupt but a ‘beautiful’ tiger imported at great expense from Kuala Lumpur. 7 photographers, 4 black-and-white artists and an R.A. are taking his profitable likeness; 28 reporters and an essayist are writing him up. Sundry ladies think he is a darling especially at mealtimes, observing that a firm near the docks advertises replicas fullgrown on approval for easy cash payments. ♂Felis Tigris (Straits Settlements) (Bobo) takes exercise up and down his cage before feeding in a stench of excrements of great cats indifferent to beauty or brutality. He is said to have eaten several persons but of course you can never be quite sure of these things.

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?

(Kamo-no-Chomei, born at Kamo 1154, died at Toyama on Mount Hino, 24th June 1216) Swirl sleeping in the waterfall! On motionless pools scum appearing disappearing! Eaves formal on the zenith, lofty city Kyoto, wealthy, without antiquities! Housebreakers clamber about, builders raising floor upon floor at the corner sites, replacing gardens by bungalows. In the town where I was known the young men stare at me. A few faces I know remain. Whence comes man at his birth? or where does death lead him? Whom do you mourn? Whose steps wake your delight? Dewy hibiscus dries: though dew outlast the petals. I have been noting events forty years. On the twentyseventh May eleven hundred and seventyseven, eight p.m., fire broke out at the corner of Tomi and Higuchi streets. In a night palace, ministries, university, parliament were destroyed. As the wind veered flames spread out in the shape of an open fan. Tongues torn by gusts stretched and leapt. In the sky clouds of cinders lit red with the blaze. Some choked, some burned, some barely escaped. Sixteen great officials lost houses and very many poor. A third of the city burned; several thousands died; and of beasts, limitless numbers. Men are fools to invest in real estate. Three years less three days later a wind starting near the outer boulevard broke a path a quarter mile across to Sixth Avenue. Not a house stood. Some were felled whole, some in splinters; some had left great beams upright in the ground and round about lay rooves scattered where the wind flung them. Flocks of furniture in the air, everything flat fluttered like dead leaves. A dust like fog or smoke, you could hear nothing for the roar, bufera infernal! Lamed some, wounded some. This cyclone turned southwest. Massacre without cause. Portent? The same year thunderbolted change of capital, fixed here, Kyoto, for ages. Nothing compelled the change nor was it an easy matter but the grumbling was disproportionate. We moved, those with jobs or wanting jobs or hangers on of the rest, in haste haste fretting to be the first. Rooftrees overhanging empty rooms; dismounted: floating down the river. The soil returned to heath. I visited the new site narrow and too uneven, cliffs and marshes, deafening shores, perpetual strong winds; the palace a logcabin dumped amongst the hills (yet not altogether inelegant). There was no flat place for houses, many vacant lots, the former capital wrecked, the new a camp, and thoughts like clouds changing, frayed by a breath: peasants bewailing lost land, newcomers aghast at prices. No one in uniform: the crowds resembled demobilized conscripts. There were murmurs. Time defined them. In the winter the decree was rescinded, we returned to Kyoto; but the houses were gone and none could afford to rebuild them. I have heard of a time when kings beneath bark rooves watched chimneys. When smoke was scarce, taxes were remitted. To appreciate present conditions collate them with those of antiquity. Drought, floods, and a dearth. Two fruitless autumns. Empty markets, swarms of beggars. Jewels sold for a handful of rice. Dead stank on the curb, lay so thick on Riverside Drive a car couldnt pass. The pest bred. That winter my fuel was the walls of my own house. Fathers fed their children and died, babies died sucking the dead. The priest Hoshi went about marking their foreheads A, Amida, their requiem; he counted them in the East End in the last two months, fortythree thousand A’s. Crack, rush, ye mountains, bury your rills! Spread your green glass, ocean, over the meadows! Scream, avalanche, boulders amok, strangle the dale! O ships in the sea’s power, O horses On shifting roads, in the earth’s power, without hoofhold! This is the earthquake, this was the great earthquake of Genryaku! The chapel fell, the abbey, the minster and the small shrines fell, their dust rose and a thunder of houses falling. O to be birds and fly or dragons and ride on a cloud! The earthquake, the great earthquake of Genryaku! A child building a mud house against a high wall: I saw him crushed suddenly, his eyes hung from their orbits like two tassels. His father howled shamelessly—an officer. I was not abashed at his crying. Such shocks continued three weeks; then lessening, but still a score daily as big as an average earthquake; then fewer, alternate days, a tertian ague of tremors. There is no record of any greater. It caused a religious revival. Months ... Years ... ........... Nobody mentions it now. This is the unstable world and we in it unstable and our houses. A poor man living amongst the rich gives no rowdy parties, doesnt sing. Dare he keep his child at home, keep a dog? He dare not pity himself above a whimper. But he visits, he flatters, he is put in his place, he remembers the patch on his trousers. His wife and sons despise him for being poor. He has no peace. If he lives in an alley of rotting frame houses he dreads a fire. If he commutes he loses his time and leaves his house daily to be plundered by gunmen. The bureaucrats are avaricious. He who has no relatives in the Inland Revenue, poor devil! Whoever helps him enslaves him and follows him crying out:Gratitude! If he wants success he is wretched. If he doesnt he passes for mad. Where shall I settle, what trade choose that the mind may practise, the body rest? My grandmother left me a house but I was always away for my health and because I was alone there. When I was thirty I couldnt stand it any longer, I built a house to suit myself: one bamboo room, you would have thought it a cartshed, poor shelter from snow or wind. It stood on the flood plain. And that quarter is also flooded with gangsters. One generation I saddened myself with idealistic philosophies, but before I was fifty I perceived there was no time to lose, left home and conversation. Among the cloudy mountains of Ohara spring and autumn, spring and autumn, spring and autumn, emptier than ever. The dew evaporates from my sixty years, I have built my last house, or hovel, a hunter’s bivouac, an old silkworm’s cocoon: ten feet by ten, seven high: and I, reckoning it a lodging not a dwelling, omitted the usual foundation ceremony. I have filled the frames with clay, set hinges at the corners; easy to take it down and carry it away when I get bored with this place. Two barrowloads of junk and the cost of a man to shove the barrow, no trouble at all. Since I have trodden Hino mountain noon has beaten through the awning over my bamboo balcony, evening shone on Amida. I have shelved my books above the window, lute and mandolin near at hand, piled bracken and a little straw for bedding, a smooth desk where the light falls, stove for bramblewood. I have gathered stones, fitted stones for a cistern, laid bamboo pipes. No woodstack, wood enough in the thicket. Toyama, snug in the creepers! Toyama, deep in the dense gully, open westward whence the dead ride out of Eden squatting on blue clouds of wistaria. (Its scent drifts west to Amida.) Summer? Cuckoo’s Follow, follow—to harvest Purgatory hill! Fall? The nightgrasshopper will shrill Fickle life! Snow will thicken on the doorstep, melt like a drift of sins. No friend to break silence, no one will be shocked if I neglect the rite. There’s a Lent of commandments kept where there’s no way to break them. A ripple of white water after a boat, shining water after the boats Mansami saw rowing at daybreak at Okinoya. Between the maple leaf and the caneflower murmurs the afternoon—Po Lo-tien saying goodbye on the verge of Jinyo river. (I am playing scales on my mandolin.) Be limber, my fingers, I am going to play Autumn Wind to the pines, I am going to play Hastening Brook to the water. I am no player but there’s nobody listening, I do it for my own amusement. Sixteen and sixty, I and the gamekeeper’s boy, one zest and equal, chewing tsubana buds, one zest and equal, persimmon, pricklypear, ears of sweetcorn pilfered from Valley Farm. The view from the summit: sky bent over Kyoto, picnic villages, Fushimi and Toba: a very economical way of enjoying yourself. Thought runs along the crest, climbs Sumiyama; beyond Kasatori it visits the great church, goes on pilgrimage to Ishiyama (no need to foot it!) or the graves of poets, of Semimaru who said: Somehow or other we scuttle through a lifetime. Somehow or other neither palace nor straw-hut is quite satisfactory.