from Odes: 36 ["See! Their verses are laid"]

By Basil Bunting 1900–1985 Basil Bunting

See! Their verses are laid

as mosaic gold to gold

gold to lapis lazuli

white marble to porphyry

stone shouldering stone, the dice

polished alike, there is

no cement seen and no gap

between stones as the frieze strides

to the impending apse:

the rays of many glories

forced to its focus forming

a glory neither of stone

nor metal, neither of words

nor verses, but of the light

shining upon no substance;

a glory not made

for which all else was made.

Basil Bunting, “36.” 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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