quiet americans a tank’s turret twisted skyward,
hereand there a lorry unharmed
out of fuel or the crew scattered;
leaguered in lines numbered for enemy units,
gulped beer of their brewing,
mocked them marching unguarded to our rear;
discerned nothing indigenous, never a dwelling,
but on the shore sponges stranded and beyond the reef
unstayed masts staggering in the swell,
till we reached readymade villages clamped on cornland,
empty, Arabs feeding vines to goats;
at last orchards aligned, girls hawked by their mothers
from tent to tent, Tripoli dark
under a cone of tracers.
Old in that war after raising many crosses
rapped on a tomb at Leptis; no one opened.^40The sense of the marvellous is conveyed through rich detail and unexpected apt
vocabulary: ‘frittering’, for instance, which can mean things being worn away
or being fried, whether from desert heat or from enemy fire. ‘[N]ew-painted
recognisance’ suggests military identification and reconnaissance, but also art’s
own preoccupation with the shock of recognition—the news that stays news
(‘new-painted’). The archaism ‘leaguered’ means beleaguered, besieged—but also
evokes the arbitrariness, and archaism, of leagues, tribes, of those national, ethnic,
or ideological associations between whom wars are waged. The details are choice: a
‘lorry unharmed’ (but what about the crew? The military eye is utilitarian, practical);
‘a tank’s turret twisted skyward’ (spiralling vainly heavenwards); ‘Arabs feeding
vines to goats’—an inversion, surely, of the fructuous order of things (wherein
Arabs might drink wine from goatskins). The poem marvels at war, at what it makes
and unmakes, but it marvels just as much at that baffling power of dissociation
that is able to combine aesthetic observation with adroit survival skills (‘careful of
craters and minefields’), the contemplative and the purposive. As that other veteran,
Oppen, put it, ‘There is a simple ego in a lyric,|A strange one in war.’^41 Bunting here
demonstrates as vividly as any poet writing in English during the twentieth century
the Tolstoyan truth of these great words and the tremendous ambivalence which
they allow. Nevertheless, in such passages the poem comes close to reportage—and
perhaps only the studied nature of the language prevents its being so.
However, it is in his masterpiece of the 1960s,Briggflatts, named after a Quaker
meeting-house, that Bunting presents his most profound coming to terms with
what war means and has meant to him and to us. The poem is presented as ‘an
autobiography’ and was written by a poet who found himself caught up in two
(^40) Bunting, ‘The Spoils’, ibid. 56.
(^41) Oppen, ‘Blood from the Stone’, inNew Collected Poems, 53.