Good grief, Hamilton, you showing some knowledge of Bunting? (Does this mean 
I may yet inveigle you into reading Briggflatts?)

Seriously, though, thanks for chipping in. I'd failed to find what I'd taken 
to be a complete poem in my Collected Bunting, so supposed Jon must have dug 
it out of some esoteric source which I wot not of. Coulda made a right neddy 
of meself there!

I totally agree with you about Pound though. As surely Bunting himself would 
have done?

joanna


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, December 12, 2006 5:20 PM
Subject: Bunting and Villon. WAS: Re: Old favorite


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Jon Corelis" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Sunday, December 10, 2006 5:41 AM
Subject: Old favorite


>                  Remember, imbeciles and wits
>
>                         by Basil Bunting/Francois Villon
>
>                   Remember, imbeciles and wits,
>                   sots and ascetics, fair and foul,
>                   young girls with little tender tits,
>                   that DEATH is written over all.
>  ......

It's perhaps a little misleading to present this either as a poem complete
in itself or as a version of Villon.  (It seems to me that behind it is more
Pound than anything else, with Bunting putting on Villon's voice and calling
up perhaps two particular areas of _The Testament_.)

The lines are the second part of the first of three sections of Bunting's
poem "Villon" (dated 1925) which begins his _Collected Poems_ (published in
1978 by Oxford University Press in the edition I have to hand).

In particular, the lines ...

>                   The Emperor with the Golden Hands
>                   is still a word, a tint, a tone,

... make more sense when they're seen to refer back to the second stanza of
the poem, which precedes them:

        My tongue is a curve in the ear.  Vision is lies.
        We saw it so and it was not so,
        the Emperor with the Golden Hands, the Virgin in blue.
        (-- A blazing parchment,
        Matthew Paris his kings in blue and gold.)

The lines as a whole make a pretty generalised nod towards the Ballades of
the Ladies, and Men, of Olden Times in _The Testament_, and perhaps also to
stanzas XXXIX-XVI.  (I'll append my own version of the latter.)

Pretty much standard Ubi Sunt stuff.  <g>

Robin

                                 XXXIX

I know that the rich and the poor,
Cautious and foolhardy, clergy and laity,
Noblemen, scumbags, free-handed and tight,
The short and the tall and the sweet and the sour,
Ladies with low-cut décolletage
From whatever rank of society,
With coutouried hair or henna rinses,
Death grips them all without respite.

                                  XL

And whether it's Paris or Helen who dies,
Whoever dies, dies in such misery
That his breath comes gasping and short,
His stomach bursts on his heart;
God knows the smell of his sweat then ...
And there is no one to mitigate his pain,
Because he has no child, no sister or brother
Who would willingly stand in his place.

                                 XLI

Death makes him shudder and grow pale;
The nose sharpens, the veins distend,
his neck bulges and his flesh grows soft,
Joints and muscles swell and rupture ...
Body of woman, which is so tender,
Sleek, delicate, of such precious worth,
Must you too attend these ill effects?
Yes - or walk living into heaven.