quiet americans truculent ego, in all its embattled pompous authority, now brittle, now resilient.
Heavyis the head that wears that crown—as what head, finally, does not?
Where we are who knows
of kings who sup
while day fails? Who,
swinging his axe
to fell kings, guesses
where we go?^45The poem implies that at some time or other all boys are kings with a small k.
The Sagas tell us that Eric was slain at Stainmore. Later on, the poem will bring
his death hard alongside the battle of nearby Catterick, thought to have taken
place some 350 years earlier, when the Anglian invaders butchered the warriors
of Northumbria. Their deaths were, as Bunting says, ‘celebrated in the Cymric
language’ by the bard Aneurin.^46
Grass caught in willow tells the flood’s height that has subsided;
overfalls sketch a ledge to be bared tomorrow.
No angler homes with empty creel though mist dims day.
I hear Aneurin number the dead, his nipped voice.
Slight moon limps after the sun. A closing door
stirs smoke’s flow above the grate. Jangle
to skald, battle, journey; to priest Latin is bland.
Rats have left no potatoes fit to roast, the gamey tang
recalls ibex guts steaming under a cold ridge,
tomcat stink of a leopard dying while I stood
easing the bolt to dwell on a round’s shining rim.
I hear Aneurin number the dead and rejoice,
being adult male of a merciless species.
·······
I see Aneurin’s pectoral muscle swell under his shirt,
pacing between the game Ida left to rat and raven,
young men, tall yesterday, with cabled thighs.
Red deer move less warily since their bows dropped.
Girls in Teesdale and Wensleydale awake discontent.
Clear Cymric voices carry well this autumn night,
Aneurin and Taliesin, cruel owls
for whom it is never altogether dark.^47‘This is where English poetry has got to,’ wrote Donald Davie, of this evocation
of ‘autumn twilight over an ancient battlefield in the Yorkshire dales’.^48 Aneurin’s
‘numbering’ of the dead suggests, in this poem full of musical allusions, rhythmical
(^45) Bunting,Briggflatts, 81. (^46) Bunting, ‘Notes’, inComplete Poems, 226.
(^47) Bunting,Briggflatts, 75.
(^48) Donald Davie, ‘English and American inBriggflatts’, inThe Poet in the Imaginary Museum: Essays
of Two Decades, ed. Barry Alpert (Manchester: Carcanet, 1977), 291–2.