Bunting’s Monosyllables

notes of Basil Bunting's Briggflatts that 'the insistent intimate nature of his work moves in the closeness of monosyllables, with a music made of their singleness', 1 while Kenneth Cox offers a bravura account of the auditory shape of the poem's first line as sounded by the poet himself:It consists of four words in five syllables, so disparate in meaning they might seem hard to combine.A monosyllabic imperative is succeeded by a vocative phrase containing four different vowels: Brag, sweet tenor bull Bunting sustained the vowel Brag without wobble, as though to signal the opening of his poem and give warning that the meaning announced is to be sound as well as sense.He made a slight pause at the comma.He had a way of pronouncing sweet that recalled the action of sipping a liquid through a lump of sugar: his love of language was as much oral as aural.He made a sharp cut between the final implosive t of sweet and the following explosive t of tenor.Tenor, its two syllables almost equal in length, was at the peak of his intonation, the r lightly trilled.The last word bull, strong by nature, was not emphasised.The vocative phrase as a whole descended in equidistant steps from top to bottom of the vocalic scale. 2 Though brought up in the North and with a set of grandparents from the Northeast, my voice cannot begin to produce the vocalisation I am 1