While not having the significance and originality of musical sound and structure in his poetry, Bunting's use of image and symbol is an important aspect of his work and worth considering in its own right. In his mature work he employs a post-"Symboliste" technique to striking effect. Also, one never loses sight of the idea of music, for Bunting's most highly developed symbolism has an analogy with this form of art. (p. 82)

Particularly noteworthy in Bunting's pictorial imagery is his insistence, nearly to the point of obsession, on the physically disgusting. (p. 83)

Various other images that recur through Bunting's work are often connected with his main preoccupations. As is natural in a poet who is not only a lover of music but also the exponent of a particularly musical form of poetry, references to this art abound. "Seeing" in terms of sound and music imagery comes as naturally to him as it did to Spenser. The poetic utterance is described as sound reaching an ear: "My tongue is a curve in the ear." (p. 84)

More important are the musical parallels Bunting makes in Briggflatts, where he frequently sees a musical pattern in nature, whether it be the polyphonic design formed by bull's song and the river Rawthey, lark and the mason's mallet … or the attribution of musical forms to fish, birds and animals…. (p. 85)

This is Basil Bunting's imagination informing his very strict observation of nature, and while it cannot be classed as a pattern of symbolism,… it is significantly indicative of a poet's vision. (pp. 85-6)

Bunting's description of nature make his preference for country over town quite obvious, especially where nature is in relation with art as in Briggflatts, and with the life of a civilisation as in The Spoils. Urban life, as accurately described in Attis and Aus dem zweiten Reich, Bunting views with intense dislike. Thus, there is the traditional symbolic opposition between town and country, that is … one of the guide lines of Chomei at Toyama.

Further images with a definite function are the frequent references to sculpting or chiselling and writing, which support the theme (so important in Bunting) of the difficulties of artistic expression and creation….

Such images abound in Briggflatts, where the mason working at his marble tombstone (partly symbolising the artist) is one of the important figures of the poem. (p. 87)

This imagery is developed through further associations ("a name cut in ice" and "name in soft slate"), to include not only the act of writing—which is furthermore evoked at other points in Briggflatts, for example: "Wind writes in foam on the sea:"…—but also the page:

               It looks well on the page …

and the book:

          The sheets are gathered and bound,
          the volume indexed and shelved,
          dust on its marbled leaves….

So the book is connected up again with the marble tombstone, one of Bunting's ways of building images into patterns.

Thus, in a poem such as Briggflatts, recurring and associated images provide links to bind the whole together. The same purpose is served by the imagery drawn from urban and country settings in Chomei at Toyama. This is raised to the level of a symbolic opposition, basic to our understanding of the poem. (pp. 87-8)

Recurring images, especially as employed in Briggflatts, go a long way to creating symbolic patterns similar to those Bunting fashions out of references to sex and to the sea. Sexual images stand half-way between those which just happen to recur and are employed in a fairly conventional manner, and the rare example of sea imagery that builds, across the poems, into a pattern of very personal symbolism.

Sex also has a personal meaning for Bunting in that it is often used to signify artistic activity. It is also mainly employed in a negative way to refer to artistic sterility…. In attacking what he considers to be T. S. Eliot's poetic failure after his adoption of orthodox religion and right-wing politics, Bunting represents him as the eunuch, Attis, and employs such deliberately ambiguous terms as "ithyphallic" to describe the poet's technique…. Poetry, love and nature are seen engaged in the same acts:

        Infamous poetry, abject love,
        Aeolus' hand under her frock
        this morning. This afternoon
        Ocean licking her privities.
        Every thrust of the autumn sun
        cuckolding
        in the green grain of late-flowering trees….

The sex imagery is particularly significant and more far-reaching in this poem, because it unites Bunting's two main subjects, love and poetry.

The symbolic functions of sexual imagery here can all be interpreted in a quite straightforward manner. Examples from different poems can be viewed together for convenience, but do not gain in subtlety for that. When fulfilling a symbolic rôle, they form a consistent pattern, rather than the very complex design made by all the references to the sea in Bunting's poetry. Seen as a whole, they become a strikingly original way of showing the poet's struggle, "stubborn against the trades" …, against a philistine society.

The sea in Bunting's poetry shows how the boundary between image and symbol is sometimes ill-defined. Also, it indicates that his symbolism is not referential in a facile way: it is definitely post-"Symboliste". It avoids, however, obscurity, because the context of the long poem informs symbol (and vice versa). Sometimes the whole of a poem becomes a symbol. (pp. 88-9)

Even the long poem, Briggflatts, could be considered in its totality as a pure symbol in that it is the autobiography of any artist, just as the whole of a Shakespeare play, such as King Lear or A Winter's Tale, can be seen as a symbol of the total human condition. Basil Bunting has said that one could compare Briggflatts, the poem, to the Quaker hamlet in Yorkshire after which it is named. Like the Quaker meeting house where the believer waits to be "moved", the reader enters the poetic structure in which he lets experiences, emotions, ideas, happen to him.

Basil Bunting's use of imagery and symbolism becomes more and more personal as his work develops, so that the most striking examples of all are to be found in the very late work and especially in Briggflatts. One very idiosyncratic use of imagery is for "shock" effect. Bunting delights in shocking the reader by creating a bisociation between his habitual reaction and the function of the image in the poem. (p. 92)

Intellectually, this procedure can be viewed as similar to René Char's shock associations of words. In Bunting, it probably developed from his insistence on images of foulness and decay in the earlier poems.

A similar, but subtler "shock" image is that of the rat in Briggflatts. [Like the vulture in The Spoils], this animal usually disgusts the onlooker. Not so Bunting, who compares the situation of a trapped rat to that of the poet in a hostile, uncomprehending world…. The image is subtle because Basil Bunting is playing on our usual reaction, so that we feel what the "normal" representative of society feels, as well as being conscious that Bunting admires the rat. (p. 93)

[The mason in Briggflatts] is not a fixed symbol of one particular thing, but has different associations according to his appearances in the poem. At first he is a rather sinister, dehumanised character, associated with death…. He is also an artist, creating a monument to the dead; and through him are proclaimed the processes of nature…. As artist he assumes the guilt of one who is unable to express the burden of his experience in his work…. (p. 95)

Even though the mason does not appear directly in the rest of the poem, the reader feels his presence by association, when Bunting talks of "White marble stained like a urinal" … and of "marbled leaves."… Thus, through its previous use—death, art etc.—the mason figure fulfills the same kind of rôle as a Wagnerian "leitmotif" at its most sophisticated, that is to say, it is not a motto for a particular emotion or idea, but is modified with each appearance, while at the same time remaining recognisable.

A more extreme example of this kind of technique is the slowworm figure in Briggflatts, which has even fewer fixed associations than the mason…. Like the blind beggar in Madame Bovary or the sinister station porter in Anna Karenina, the slowworm is a mysterious, deliberately unexplained presence at certain points of the action. It appears as part of the polyphonic pattern Bunting weaves out of the bull's song and dance, the "lark's twitter", the mason's mallet and the grave…. In the furrow (a deliberate parallel with the grave) it is associated with death. It then reappears as a phallic symbol in the love scene between the two children…. (p. 96)

It comes again in Part III. After a description of the failure of Alexander's journey because of the essentially corrupt nature of humanity, the reader is presented with a man at his weakest, near death, poisoned by an adder. The slowworm makes its sudden, mysterious appearance on this scene:

       Heart slow, nerves numb and memory, he lay
       on glistening moss by a spring;
       as a woodman dazed by an adder's sting
       barely within recall
       tests the rebate tossed to him, so he
       ascertained moss and bracken,
       a cold squirm snaking his flank
       and breath leaked to his ear:
       I am neither snake nor lizard,
       I am the slowworm….

We are led away from the association with death. The passage develops into the slowworm's song and a new entry into the world of nature…. Finally, the tone becomes hushed and religious, under the effect of the slowworm's presence…. A brief, final "rappel" of the slowworm in Part V makes it an element in the new pattern, of stars, light, love, literature and time, that Bunting creates towards the end of his poem:

               ......... light from the zenith
          spun when the slowworm lay in her lap
          fifty years ago….

The phallic symbol of Part I again, therefore, but transmuted, by its new context.

Transformation, according to poetic context and the active reaction of the reader's mind, raises the slowworm—with the rat, [and] the mason …—to a level where language transcends its immediate function and becomes a kind of music. (pp. 97-8)

Anthony Suter, "Imagery and Symbolism in Basil Bunting's Poetry," in Agenda, Spring, 1978, pp. 82-98.