alan marshall
smoked opium with the tribal chieftains. Then he married an Iranian woman and
becameforeign correspondent forThe Times.^37
Bunting’s contrasting experiences of twentieth-century wars are correspondingly
reflectedinhispoetry.In‘TheWellofLycopolis’(1935)herattlesofftheexpectations
of the average British Tommy in the First World War:
Join the Royal Air Force
and See the World. The Navy will
Make a Man of You. Tour India with the Flag.
Oneoftheragtimearmy,
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...^38This has the hard-edged satiric grimness, the contempt for imperial wars, for the
carnage visited on the ‘involuntary volunteer[s]’ of the ‘ragtime army’, the poor, the
‘uneducated workingmen’ (‘(The day being Whitsun)’^39 ), that is common to poetry
in the 1920s and 1930s—though it is expressed with a rhythmical and syntactical
variety and control that are exceptional. If it makes us think ofThe Waste Land,as
it is perhaps bound to, then that is because it is inclined to overstate the shallowness
of human experience.
In ‘The Spoils’ (1951), by contrast, a poem that deals directly with the Second
World War, the sense of the vividness of things, the strange intensity of reality,
precludes any such presumption. Cynicism is inadequate—though not irony. ‘We
marvelled’:
Broken booty but usable
along the littoral, frittering into the south.
We marvelled, careful of craters and minefields,
noting a new-painted recognisance
on a fragment of fuselage, sand drifting into dumps,(^37) Information about Bunting’s life is taken from Keith Alldritt’s satisfyingly spare biography,The
Poet as Spy: The Life and Wild Times of Basil Bunting(London: Aurum Press, 1998).
(^38) BasilBunting,‘TheWellofLycopolis’,inComplete Poems(Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Bloodaxe,
2000), 44.
(^39) Bunting, ‘[The day being Whitsun we had pigeon for dinner]’, in ‘First Book of Odes’, ibid. 103.