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World Wars. But the wars about which he writes date back a millennium or more,
andthere is not a passage of reportage anywhere in it. It seems that for Bunting
here, as for Hill, the mere reporting of reality or recent history is not enough.
Yet if reportage is one inadequate handle on time, so is the poetry of Eliot, the
twentieth-century poet who perhaps had most to say about it. For the Hill ofKing
Log, as we saw, English identity is not a supreme fiction, as Eliot so equably has
it;itisamuddiedthingormessofthings—forexample,athingofwars.For
Eliot time is mainly metaphysical; for Hill it is mainly historical. Bunting can also
be seen in terms of an ongoing argument with Eliot; andBriggflatts,withitsfive
sections and musical structure, its cosmopolitanism on the one hand and its sense
of place on the other, readily invites comparison withThe Waste LandandFour
Quartets. But, contrary to Eliot’s broad or airily Platonic bent, Bunting insists on
the ungainsayable specificity, the complex simplicity, of the productions of time: a
piece of music, the origin of species, the motion of the planets, the death of one
soldier at the hands of another, and so on.
There are of course important differences between the ways in whichBriggflatts
andKing Logaddress the past. Both make a case for the common nature of a given
experience (for example, suffering in battle or in love), based on our common
humanity, but whereasKing Loggestures toward the distinctiveness of a particular
historical event not by specifying it at length but rather by repeatedly drawing
attention to the way in which he, the poet, is ultimately restricted to his own history
(‘I have made|an elegy for myself’; or ‘I believe in my|Abandonment, since it is
what I have’; or ‘I would have preferred|You to them’ while being ‘too late’ for
either^42 ), a solipsism that is not a million miles away from the Eliot ofThe Waste
Land, Bunting tries to make a more sustained attention to historical detail part of
the constitutive action of the poem.
The poet weaves together several histories, including passages from his own life.
In the magnificent first section he presents an episode of youthful love, and then
commemorates the abrupt desertion of that love by the boy-poet who heads south
and turns up, in the second section, in the Tottenham Court Road. Before that, on
the moors, the youth recalls the life and death of the Viking Eric Bloodaxe, who in
the middle of the tenth century had been king of Norway but then fled to Britain
rather than do battle with his rebellious brother. After he arrived, Eric held sway
as and where he could: ‘king of Orkney, king of Dublin, twice|king of York’.^43
But it was, thinks Peter Makin, in his fine querulous book, the makeshift life of a
pirate: ‘He was trying to live out the glory of a Viking, when he had abandoned the
premiss (ruthlessness) on which it was based.’^44 This is partly true, but only partly.
For kingliness also figures in the poem, as it does in Shakespeare, as an image of the
(^42) Hill, ‘September Song’, 67; ‘Funeral Music 6’, 75; ‘Tristia: 1891–1938’, 81; inCollected Poems.
(^43) Bunting,Briggflatts,inComplete Poems, 69.
(^44) Peter Makin,Bunting: The Shaping of his Verse(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), 173.