The Poems of Basil Bunting by Don Share

Author:Don Share [Don Share]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571258390
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Published: 2016-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

Fathoms dull the dale,

slime voices.

Watchdog the whale,

gulfweed curtain.

BB wrote that the way the stanza ‘subsides to next to nothing is intentional’ (BB to LZ, 6 December 1964; quoted Forde, 223, and Lesch, 338).

II. 57. kittiwake. Common species of small gull. OED: ‘Named in imitation of its cry.’

II. 63. Boiled louse: coccus cacti, the cochineal, a parasite on opuntia. At a reading, BB commented: ‘The most beautiful of all the red dyes [It is] salutary to remember that one of the loveliest colours we possess comes from the louse’ (1976 Harvard reading).

II. 81–109. In 1950–1, BB lived with his wife and daughter in Lido di Camaiore, south of Rapallo and about four miles west of Lucca, in view of the Apuan Alps, where marble was quarried. His work for the Westminster Press and for an English paper, Northern Echo – and, Alldritt claims, as a spy for MI6 – took him to Parma, Milan, Siena, and Rome (Alldritt, 121). BB had also spent time in Rapallo with EP in 1924–5; see Makin, chap. 3.

II. 84. Lucca is the setting for events described in Dante, Purgatorio XXIV. Cp. Byron, Don Juan, XV st. 73: ‘The simple olives, best allies of wine, / Must I pass over in my bill of fare? / I must, although a favourite “plat” of mine / In Spain, and Lucca, Athens, every where: / On them and bread twas oft my luck to dine, / The grass my table-cloth, in open air’. Also EP, Cantos, LXXVI, p. 459: ‘The rain has fallen, the wind coming down / out of the mountain / Lucca, Forti dei Marmi, Berchthold after the other one’, and LXXVIII, p. 483: ‘The moon split, no cloud nearer than Lucca.’

II. 86. olives. Cp. ‘Villon’, III. 1–3, ‘Under the olive trees / walking alone / on the green terrace’ and FBO 8. 3, ‘where the olive stirs and dozes’.

II. 90–2. Antonietta’s … Amalfitan kisses. William Corbett, in his brief memoir of BB’s 1976 reading at Harvard writes: ‘Back at our house he spoke of the young Italian girl he must have remembered from these lines he had read in Briggflatts … He was over thirty at the time and she perhaps no older than sixteen. He would have married her but her family objected, and soon after their lovemaking in that Amalfi cave they parted. He paused to say, “I hope I’m not speaking too roughly”’ (reprinted in William Corbett, All Prose [Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2002], 160–1).

II. 104. cumber. OED v.1 cites Alexander. Cp. Swinburne, ‘Evening on the Broads’, 13: ‘Cover the brood of her worlds that cumber the skies with their blossom.’ Also Scott, The Bridal of Triermain, II. X, ‘Cares, that cumber royal sway.’ EDD cites George Eliot, Adam Bede, I. 159: ‘I shall be nought but cumber, or a sittin’ i’ th’ chimney-corner.’

II. 107. Garfagnana. Valley between the Apuan Alps and the Tuscan–Emilian Apennines created by the Serchio River and its tributaries.

II. 108. la Cisa. Sanctuary of La Mare de Déu de la Cisa, built in the eighteenth century.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.