alan marshall
counting—the scanning of the dead. ‘[N]ipped’ suggests quick movement (nipping
along),which in turn suggests life, muscular Aneurin, ‘pacing’ (in contrast to the
men ‘tall yesterday’). It also suggests pinched and pained; and, vitally, that which
pinches and gives pain—the sharp tooth of the ‘merciless species’. (‘[G]amey tang’
and ‘tomcat stink’ might recall Leopold Bloom relishing his kidney breakfast. ‘Latin
is bland’ because it is too mild in the mouth.) Mourning and rejoicing at the same
time (for poets, as for owls, it is ‘never altogether dark’), the whole passage is a vivid
example of Bunting’s Darwinian pantheism: images of hunters and hunted, and of
hunters who have themselves been hunted: the dead warriors are ‘game’, a leopard
is ‘dying’—out-hunted—as the poet interposes recollection of an expedition in
Isfahan, where during the War (when else?) he learned to hunt ibex.^49 We are
invited, by this image of him lingering at the door, looking out, to look with him.
The conceit, often used to striking effect in the cinema (John Ford’sThe Searchers
comes to mind), also reactivates the contrast of warm hearth and great outdoors
which is such a part of the emotional tonality of the opening section of the poem
(‘No one here bolts the door,|love is so sore’^50 ). The reference to girls who will
‘awake discontent’ gives expanding depth and resonance to the crisis of the boy
walking out on the girl in the first part of the poem, and evokes the situation in
which so many women found themselves following the cutting down of whole
generations of the ‘adult male’ in the two twentieth-century World Wars.
When Bunting writes ‘I hear Aneurin number the dead and rejoice,|being adult
male of a merciless species’, he is establishing the terms of his acceptance of man’s
most brutal instincts—specifically here his innate aggression. But whatBriggflatts
also does—and I struggle to think of a modern poem of any length that is quite
so intent on the connection—is to put this on the table alongside that other
brutal instinct, the sexual instinct, about which its feelings appear to be more
guilty and ambivalent. Thus the ecstatic acceptance of the battlefield, rejoicing
in the species as species, has its analogue in the earlier description of Pasiphae:
‘nor did flesh flinch|distended by the brute|nor loaded spirit sink|till it had
gloried.’^51 The whole poem in fact begins in consciousness of this problematical,
aggressive-competitive, nonetheless charming, maleness of the male: ‘Brag, sweet
tenor bull...Ridiculous and lovely.’^52 By such male stuff is the next generation
made and unmade. And so the poem moves, in its first part, from the skittishness
of the bull to that of the boy dreaming of warriors, arriving, through a series of
luminous images, at something like the truth of Melville’s words: ‘All wars are
boyish, and are fought by boys.’^53
Somewhere in Bunting’s pictures of war there seems always to be this sneaking
sense of sexual guilt. Note that the long quotations above from both ‘The Well of
(^49) Makin,Bunting, 183. (^50) Bunting,Briggflatts, 61. (^51) Ibid. 70. (^52) Ibid. 61.
(^53) Herman Melville, ‘The March into Virginia Ending in the First Manassas (July, 1861)’, in
Collected Poems of Herman Melville, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Chicago: Packard, 1947), 10.