quiet americans Lycopolis’ and ‘The Spoils’ come to rest on images of young girls (not women)
‘debauched’or ‘hawked’. The male reproductive instinct is implicitly figured
as rapine, warlike, rather than consensual—and of course as unreliable: always
going off to fight. ‘Guilty of spring|and spring’s ending’.^54 Bunting’s image for
the unreliability of the male is brilliantly paradoxical: the fickle warrior is ‘an
unconvinced deserter’.^55
In the 1920s Bunting was Ford Madox Ford’s amanuensis while the latter was
working on the first book of his great sequence of novels about the First World War,
Parade’s End(1924–8). One wonders to what extent this tale of another ambivalent
warrior, or unkinged king, the Yorkshire aristocrat Christopher Tietjens, with its
sense of the lumpishness of the male, his insistent Northernness, his protracted
absence when he goes off fighting, leaving wartime girls to ‘wake discontent’,
and its startling set-piece evocations of sexual longing, guilt, and yet at the same
time idyllic consummation (the two works feature two of the most memorable
journeys by horse and cart in English literature), may have lingered in Bunting’s
unconscious memory. And then there are the larks.Briggflattswatches them rise
and fall—enacting the fateful male principle: ‘Painful lark, labouring to rise’:
‘Breathless lark|drops to nest’. In Ford’sAManCouldStandUp, Tietjens corrects
his sergeant’s sentimentalizing of the skylarks that were such an obstinate feature
of the battlefield, their ‘Woner’ful trust in yumanity! Woner’ful hinstinck set in the
fethered brest by the Halmighty!’:
Tietjens said mildly that he thought the sergeant had got his natural history wrong. He must
divide the males from the females. The females sat on the nest through obstinate attachment
to their eggs; the males obstinately soared above the nests in order to pour out abuse at
other male skylarks in the vicinity.^56
Thus for Ford, as for Bunting, the sexual division of labour and the origin of wars.
I want to end by looking at J. H. Prynne’sKitchen Poems(1968). Although
the five related poems that comprise the book are not war poems in the usual
sense, they deal in original and sophisticated ways with Britain’s situation after
- This is post-war poetry specifically addressed to the nation’s post-imperial
condition. On the one hand Prynne takes his aesthetic bearings, as is well known,
from American poets such as Charles Olson and William Carlos Williams, with
their post-Imagist emphasis on dynamic syntax (mimetic of the human being as
breathing, walking, doing—mentally and physiologicallyon the move)andhighly
particularized language, without (to use the familiar Imagist formulae) superfluous
ornament, metre, or rhyme. But he brings to the proceedings a glowing enigmatic
irony, as the prized particularity of things gives way to, or is obscured by, the
specialization of discourse. By integrating such discourse into his verse, he can
extend the practice of defamiliarization on which art, especially modernist art,
(^54) Bunting,Briggflatts, 64. (^55) Ibid. 67.
(^56) Ford Madox Ford,AManCouldStandUp,inParade’s End(London: Everyman, 1992), 591.