Briggflatts by Basil Bunting is one of the great poems of the twentieth century, though it has not always occupied a central place in discussions of modern poetry. The reasons for this are complex, and have to do with a range of contentious biographical and historical factors (such as the marginal status of modernism in the UK and Bunting's own variable reputation). Another factor, the poem's supposed difficulty, requires some qualification. Briggflatts is a dense, carefully wrought high-modernist work. As with other poems in this bracket (The Waste Land, The Cantos, The Maximus Poems) it repays diligent close reading and re-reading. But it is arguably more vital (and, dare I say it, accessible) than those works, and can in fact be appreciated pretty well by first-time readers. As a teacher of undergraduate students over the last few years, I have found that Part 1 in particular lends itself very well to group reading and seminar discussion: indeed, the first section of Briggflatts seems to me to serve as a far better introduction to modernist poetry in a pedagogical context than a work like The Waste Land, with its copious and contested layers of allusion. It does help, it is true, to have a skeleton key to unlock the door to Briggflatts. But I think the really essential facts about the poem can be summarised in a relatively tight space. The following brief guide should hopefully provide a good foundation for first-time readers. My intention is to try to shine light on the basic subjects and structures of the poem, without diminishing its music and magic.
AN, 2017
Part 1
Season: Spring
Phase of Bunting’s life: Childhood
Location: Northern England
Part 1 is the most immediate and tightly structured in the
poem. Twelve stanzas, each of thirteen lines, sketch an idealised panorama of
Northumbria (in Bunting’s poetic vocabulary this meant pretty much the whole of
Northern England). The verse here is emphatically musical, foregrounding
alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme, with a stark rhyming couplet at the
end of each stanza to draw it to a close. In one sense, this is pure sound
evoking a pastoral idyll and it should be enjoyed as such: Bunting himself said
that readers (or listeners) shouldn’t try too hard to uncover ‘meaning’ beneath
the musical surface of his verse. At its simplest, this whole section is an
extension of the song of the bull (‘Brag, sweet tenor bull’) in the first line.
However, that is not quite the whole story; there is also a
definite realist narrative here. Bunting is recalling a childhood ‘holiday
romance’ with a girl called Peggy, which took place in the early 1910s in
Brigflatts (the correct spelling), a tiny village in the North Pennines.
Rawthey is a river; Garsdale, Hawes and Stainmore are nearby locations; the
stonemason and miners are local characters. Part 1 is therefore the beginning
of a process of remembering real things, literally the first chapter in an
autobiography. Deeper history also comes to the surface with the first, brief
appearance of the Viking warrior and sometime ruler of Northumbria Eric
Bloodaxe, killed in battle on Stainmore around 954AD. This enigmatic darker
image or ‘tone’ prepares the way for the mournful conclusion to part 1. Spring
ends, the natural presences begin to die and rot, and somehow—we never quite
find out why or how—the poet’s idyllic love affair with Peggy is ‘lain aside’
and forgotten.
Part 2
Season: Summer
Phase of Bunting’s life: Early adulthood to early middle age
Locations: London; North Sea; Italy; North Pennines; Middle
East; Mediterranean
Part 2 is by some distance the longest in the poem. In stark
contrast to the chiselled stanzas of part 1, part 2 is an eclectic collage of
clashing poetic fragments, perhaps intended to mirror the immature, evolving
state of Bunting’s mind throughout his wandering 20s and 30s. We start with an
intentionally dramatic change of location, from the idealised North to
artificial, money-obsessed London (Bunting is nodding at similar depictions of
the capital in Wordsworth’s Prelude). From this point onward there are
continual geographical shifts (again, this is a recollection of real events in
Bunting’s early life). We are treated to a short tour around 1920s Bloomsbury
bohemia (lines 1-23), a jaunt along the Italian coast and mountains (most of
the middle of part 2 from ‘About ship! Sweat in the south’) and finally to a
more obscure conclusion that includes flashes of the Middle East, where Bunting
spent the latter part of World War II (‘Asian vultures riding on a spiral
column of dust’) and generalised Mediterranean references—as well as spending
the early 1930s in Italy, Bunting returned there during and after the war as a
soldier and intelligence agent. In between these biographical fragments, more
indirect passages and mythical subjects jostle in typical high-modernist
fashion. The Bloodaxe narrative is treated more fully: we see Eric cruelly
commanding a longship in the North Sea (‘Under his right oxter …’) and then
dying a horrifically violent death back in the Pennines in the first great
climax of the poem (the long passage beginning ‘Loaded with mail of linked
lies’). Paralleling this episode, Bunting nods in the final lines of the
section at the Ancient Greek myth of Pasiphae, who gave birth to the Minotaur
after an encounter with a bull sent by the sea-god Poseidon (note the subject
rhyme with the bull at the start of the poem).
As well as being a sometimes chaotic—though often
beautiful—record of the frustrations of Bunting’s early adulthood, part 2 is
also the place where the underlying moral of Briggflatts is first advanced. Put
very simply: human beings cannot control the world, they must find a way to
co-operate and co-exist with it. As Bunting put it (far more eloquently) in his
‘Note on Briggflatts’: ‘Those fail who try to force their destiny, like Eric;
but those who are resolute to submit, like my version of Pasiphae, may bring
something new to birth, be it only a monster.’
Part 3
Season: n/a
Phase of Bunting’s life: n/a
Locations: Edge of the world; Northumbrian arcadia
Part 3 is outside the main structure of the poem: it refers
neither to a season nor to a specific period in Bunting’s life. Nevertheless,
Bunting intended it to be the climax of the narrative. In musical terms this is
the ‘loudest’, most forcefully expressed part of the poem, the place where the
moral first hinted at in part 2 is affirmed in a dramatic ‘big reveal’. The
section is based on an episode from the medieval Persian epic poem Shahnameh,
which includes a portrayal of the Greek leader Alexander the Great (356-323BC).
In Shahnameh, Alexander journeys with his troops to the mountains of Gog and
Magog at the edge of the world. At the summit he leaves his men behind and
encounters an angel (Bunting has him played by the Biblical figure ‘Israfel’)
who is poised to blow a trumpet to signal the end of the world. There is some
ambiguity in Bunting’s retelling of this legend. What exactly happens to
Alexander on the mountain? Why does Israfel ‘delay’ in blowing the trumpet?
What sort of divine intervention is at play here? Yet the underlying moral is
clear. Alexander tries to conquer the world and reach the limits of experience,
but in doing so he is ultimately returned back to the ground, to his homeland
(for Alexander this was Macedonia, but Bunting describes it here as a kind of
Northumbrian arcadia). Lying dazed in the moss and bracken after his fall from
the mountain, he encounters the hero of Briggflatts, the slowworm (actually a
snake-like lizard) who advises him to lie low, be patient, persistent and
mindful of the beauty of his surroundings.
This is the most abstract moment in the poem, but there are
also clear parallels here and throughout part 3 with Bunting’s biography. The
opening passages of the section caricature greedy, powerful people who obstruct
creativity and make life a literal shitty nightmare. As a struggling poet for
much of his life, Bunting had built up some resentment towards these
establishment ‘turd-bakers’, such as the businessman and newspaper owner Hugh
Astor (‘Hastor’). The overall narrative shape of part 3 also mimics the curve
of Bunting’s middle years: after spending much of the 1940s in Persia (poring
over works like Shahnameh) he returned in the 1950s to Northumberland, the
homeland from which he would eventually write Briggflatts.
Part 4
Season: Autumn
Phase of Bunting’s life: Late middle age
Locations: North Yorkshire; Lindisfarne; Tynedale
Part 4 is the shortest section in Briggflatts, and is best
viewed (or heard) as a penultimate, minor-key movement resembling those in
pieces of classical music (Bunting called Briggflatts a ‘sonata’). You don’t
need to follow this musical analogy too closely, but it might be worth spending
some time looking at the way Bunting weaves together different textures and
‘themes’ in the second half of part 4.
Aside from its musical properties, part 4 is also notable
for its elegiac subjects. It begins with allusions to the sixth-century poet
Aneirin (the correct spelling), whose most famous work Y Gododdin describes the
Battle of Catterick and its aftermath in North Yorkshire around 600AD. The
purpose of this allusion is twofold. Firstly, Bunting is nodding at what is in
effect the first Northumbrian poem (although Aneirin was a ‘Welsh’ poet, we
should remember that the Welsh or Britons lived in Northumbria prior to the
Anglo-Saxon arrivals of the fifth and sixth centuries). In terms of the realist
dimension, there may also be a glance here at the war and destruction Bunting
witnessed in the mid-twentieth century (we are now, chronologically, up to the
1940s-1950s). More personally, the litany of death and decay segues eventually
into a recollection of the lost love affair with Peggy. In some of the most
moving lines in the poem, Bunting says ‘goodbye’ to his memories of Peggy as he
settles down to lonely old age in post-war Northumberland.
But there is some light in the gloom. Aside from the
redemptive music of the baroque composer Domenico Scarlatti, we also encounter
the Northumbrian Renaissance of the seventh and eighth centuries (a dramatic
‘rebirth’ following the violent period marked by events like the Battle of
Catterick). Among other achievements, this cultural upsurge produced the
Lindisfarne Gospels (celebrated in the gorgeous passage beginning ‘Columba,
Columbanus …’), a beautiful illuminated book created in part to celebrate the life
of the Northumbrian saint Cuthbert, who appears here as the (positive) mirror
image to the (negative) portrait of Eric Bloodaxe in part 2. Aside from his
Northumbrian pedigree, Bunting gives Cuthbert a starring role because he
reputedly ‘saw God in everything’. In line with the moral of Briggflatts,
Cuthbert was a quiet hero living on the margins of society who loved nature
without seeking to control it.
Part 5
Season: Winter
Phase of Bunting’s life: Old age
Locations: North Northumberland, Farne Islands
If part 4 was mostly tragic notes with a brief major-key
interlude, part 5 is the opposite. Like the final movement of a symphony, this
is a resounding conclusion to the poem (‘years end crescendo’) although it ends
with a sad diminuendo.
In musical verse that often recalls the ‘Sirens’ episode in
Joyce’s Ulysses, Bunting revisits the idyllic landscape of part 1 (the powerful
opening syllable ‘Drip’ recalls part 1’s ‘Brag’). But now that he is an old man
the perspective is different. We have moved from the mountains in springtime to
the Northumberland coast in winter, where the sea speaks of finality and the
end of a journey. Having accepted the need to be patient and respect human
limitations in the face of nature, it is now possible to appreciate the
precious details of life: rock pools, a spider’s web, the lapping of the ocean,
the way birds fly in harmony, the skill of shepherds in handling sheep dogs,
the inexplicable wonder of the night sky. There is a kind of spiritual idealism
here, and this conclusion is certainly upbeat and effusive in some ways, with
the faint suggestion of a happier ending to Bunting’s life than was predicted
in part 4. Part 5 is on the whole concerned with images in themselves rather
than any more complex symbolism, but the line ‘Young flutes, harps touched by a
breeze’ may just carry a hint of the optimism Bunting felt in the mid-1960s,
when he was ‘rediscovered’ by younger poets and finally became a celebrated
literary figure. However, there is still the nagging sense of tragedy that has
persisted throughout Briggflatts. As the stars shine out over the Farne
Islands, where St Cuthbert once lived and worshipped, Bunting remembers Peggy
for the last time, and awaits a final ‘uninterrupted night’.
Coda
The Coda is a fragment composed prior to the rest of the
poem, which Bunting rediscovered and welded on at the last minute. It is a
condensed summary of the key philosophical motifs in the previous sections: the
power of music, the impermanence of all creation, the impossibility of knowing
everything. Tellingly, the poem ends with a question mark (this is a work of
literature that proclaims its own uncertainty and inability to conquer the
world with language). For all that, one thing is certain in the end: as Bunting
once remarked, Briggflatts is ‘about love, in all senses’.
