from Odes: 10. Chorus of Furies

By Basil Bunting 1900–1985 Basil Bunting

Guarda mi disse, le feroce Erine

Let us come upon him first as if in a dream,

anonymous triple presence,

memory made substance and tally of heart’s rot:

then in the waking Now be demonstrable, seem

sole aspect of being’s essence,

coffin to the living touch, self’s Iscariot.

Then he will loath the year’s recurrent long caress

without hope of divorce,

envying idiocy’s apathy or the stress

of definite remorse.

He will lapse into a halflife lest the taut force

of the mind’s eagerness

recall those fiends or new apparitions endorse

his excessive distress.

He will shrink, his manhood leave him, slough selfaware

the last skin of the flayed: despair.

He will nurse his terror carefully, uncertain

even of death’s solace,

impotent to outpace

dispersion of the soul, disruption of the brain.

Basil Bunting, “10. Chorus of Furies (from Odes)” from Complete Poems, edited by Richard Caddel. Reprinted with the permission of Bloodaxe Books Ltd., www.bloodaxebooks.com.

Source: Collected Poems (Bloodaxe Books, 1968)

Biography

Basil Bunting, described as "the last minor master of the modernist mode" by Donald Hall in the New York Times Book Review, achieved his greatest popularity in the mid-1960s as one of the leaders of the new British literary avant-garde. Bunting's work was not always well-received; much of his early writing went largely unnoticed for years due to a mistaken association with Mussolini. Ezra Pound, an admirer of Bunting's poetry, . . .

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