Aging & Wisdom Quote by Basil Bunting

Bunting’s line snaps like a cold wire: a single “moment” pitched against an entire “age,” private impulse trying to outvote public law. The question form is doing most of the work. It’s not seeking an answer so much as staging a moral courtroom in miniature, where desire pleads temporary insanity and the state counters with the bland, heavy machinery of consent.

The phrasing is slyly legalistic. “Age of consent” is bureaucratic, impersonal, a policy term meant to protect bodies by reducing them to thresholds and numbers. Bunting yokes it to “madness,” a word that romantic culture has long used to varnish obsession as fate. The friction exposes how easily passion borrows the language of exception: I wasn’t myself; it was only once; the rules are too crude for what I felt. By setting “madness” against “consent,” Bunting refuses the sentimental story that intensity is its own alibi.

The subtext is harsher than the elegance suggests. Consent is not only a feeling but a social guarantee, especially where power and age distort choice. The line hints at the classic modernist temptation to treat transgression as art’s oxygen, then asks what that costs when the transgression isn’t abstract but embodied. It also reads as self-indictment: the speaker recognizes the seduction of the excuse even while exposing it as thin.

Contextually, Bunting’s era is one in which poets often flirted with the mythology of the unruly male genius. This question punctures that pose. It’s wit with consequences: a neat epigram that forces romance to meet statute, and makes “moment” sound embarrassingly small.