Geoffrey Hill – Poetry Owl

Geoffrey Hill 2

geoffrey hill

In this post[1], I shall be considering poems from Tenebrae and Canaan. I have omitted Mercian Hymns because I have discussed it in a previous post and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy because it is too long and because it is in some respects relatively straightforward.

When I first read ‘The Pentecost Castle’ which is the opening sequence in Tenebrae I had three thoughts: one was that the poem was beautiful; the second was that it sounded like devotional love poetry, akin to St John of the Cross or, further back, the Song of Solomon; the third was that the language was extraordinarily old.

It is comparatively easy to work out how the poem works its effect of loveliness. Hill uses beautiful images, many drawn from nature or from the traditional nature images of poetry: flower, briar rose, trees, aspen, river, wind, high rocks, goldfinch, hawk, heron, sparrow, sparrowhawk . There are images of heraldry and romance: gold, ermine, lily, candles, sword, citadel. The diction is poetic: slain, ,forlorn, passion, distress; the form reminiscent of ballad and folk poetry with four line stanzas and a plethora of patterning devices.

Hill acknowledges his debt to Spanish poetry in the notes, in particular, to the Penguin Book of Spanish Verse edited by J.M. Cohen and a number of poems are almost straight translations. This may account for the old-fashioned effect of the language so much at odds with, for instance, the language of Mercian Hymns. Tom Paulin notoriously refers to this style as ‘visionary mustiness’. For me, this is an apt description of a number of poems in Tenebrae which seem to combine the atmosphere of The Four Quartets with the nostalgia of various Agatha Christie movies. Having said that, Hill recognises and engages with the inauthenticity of nationalist nostalgia in The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy where the dangerously attractive myths of the ‘terre charnelle’ are both celebrated and debunked:

This is no old Beauce manoir that you keep

But the rue de la Sorbonne, the cramped shop

Hill is always more complex and complicated than I am suggesting but the language in many of the poems in Tenebrae is alienating because of its stylistic archaism. Using the analysis of syntax as a way in, I will explore one poem,‘A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook’. Hill has said that it was written quite early, in the sixties or seventies, and it may be flavoured by a young man’s desire to shock. I am not sure how to explain the title, whether it is intended to come from the notebook of a Pre-Raphaelite artist or whether it is from a notebook which is concerned with Pre-Raphaelite painting. I am unaware of any specific work of art with which the poem might be associated. Here is the poem:

A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook

Primroses; salutations; the miry skull

of a half-eaten ram; viscous wounds in earth

opening. What seraphs are afoot.

Gold seraph to gold worm in the pierced slime:

greetings. Advent of power-in-grace. The power

of flies distracts the working of our souls.

Earth’s abundance. The God-ejected Word

resorts to flesh, procures carrion, satisfies

its white hunger. Salvation’s travesty

a deathless metaphor: the stale head

sauced in original blood; the little feast

foaming with cries of rapture and despair.

The poem opens with a sequence of words and phrases separated by semi-colons, suggesting some kind of equivalence between each. However, the items are very different. “Primroses’ might indeed suggest some sort of Pre-Raphaelite outdoor painting, celebrating spring, but it is followed immediately by ‘salutations’ which floats free of syntax and explanation. To whom, from whom and on what occasion are there salutations? Why is there such a formal choice of lexis? What has this to do with the ‘miry skull/ of a half-eaten ram and why are there are ‘viscous wounds in earth’? Syntax and line endings work against other to create greater ambiguity. Perhaps the viscous wounds are in the ram’s skull and the skull itself has found an ‘opening’ in the earth. ‘Viscous’ reaps the additional benefit of looking and sounding like ‘vicious’ which introduces an idea of evil to set against the ‘seraphs’. The placing of ‘opening’ on its own at the beginning of the line extends the range of its meanings, possibly allowing for the issue of seraphs into the poem in the next sentence which takes up half a line and ends in an understated full stop, rather than affording us the clarity of a question mark or an exclamation mark which would tell us if ‘what’ was acting as an interrogative or as an intensifier. The poeticisms of ‘seraph’ and ‘afoot’ become heavily ironic when we realize what he is actually talking about. The next stanza maintains the highly poetic register with the repetition of ‘gold’, ‘seraph’ and the introduction of ‘pierced’ with its connotations of the Crucifixion. The inclusion of the ‘worm’ might stir unease. This may be another acknowledgement of the problems of dualism, body and spirit, or to put it another way, of Incarnation. A colon is followed by ‘greetings’, perhaps picking up from the ‘salutations’ in the first stanza. The next fragment sentence with its compound theological noun ‘power-in-grace’ suddenly hints that this may be a form of annunciation. Be that as it may, it is interrupted by the first unambiguously declarative sentence in the poem, which apparently comes from Pascal. This is the pivotal point of the poem from where realization grows that we are looking at blowflies and maggots.

The third stanza opens with another sentence fragment, like a caption or an exclamation: ‘Earth’s abundance.’ We can see in these two words Hill’s ambivalent attitude to the world of matter and flesh, where for him beauty so often seems to be accompanied by disgust. The version of Incarnation which follows is replete with sleazy nuance. ‘God-ejected’ simultaneously suggests ‘rejected’ and ejaculated’ while the triplet of verbs, ‘resorts’, ‘procures’, ‘satisfies’ seem better suited to prostitution than religion.

I take the ‘white hunger’ to be the maggots busy in the ram’s head. There is an echo of the image of the Samson’s riddle of the lion and the bees alluded to in an earlier poem.[2] This emergence of life from the body of the dead ram is taken to be ‘Salvation’s travesty’ and, in a bitter pun, ‘a deathless metaphor’. The poem reverts to ambiguous enjambment and fragment sentences, in parallel to the opening stanza. The final lines are both disgusted and disgusting, a disgust which seems to include sexual disgust, where the phrase ‘the little feast’ could suggest ‘the last supper and the communion feast’ or echo ‘the little death’ (le petit mort). ‘Foaming’ is a further visual reminder of the activity of the maggots but in conjunction with the ‘cries of rapture and despair’ could again be taken as sexual. The tenor of this poem recalls the bitter realization in ‘Genesis’, the first poem in For the Unfallen, that the flesh cannot be renounced:

So, the fifth day, I turned again

To flesh and blood and the blood’s pain.

Canaan was published in 1996; the poet’s New and Collected Poems were published in America in 1994. In the decade since his last published collection, many things had changed. Hill’s first marriage was dissolved and he then remarried; he moved to America. Nevertheless, the poems which open Canaan share the concerns of earlier work, although arguably they are less lyrical and more academic. For the most part, the poet has abandoned rhyme, in contrast to the careful and sustained rhyme scheme in The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy. However, the poems are as cryptic as ever, in part because of the range of learned allusion, in part because of the ambiguous syntax. The second poem in the collection seems to explore the role of the writer:

That Man as a Rational Animal Desires The Knowledge Which Is His Perfection

Abiding provenance I would have said

the question stands

even in adoration

clause upon clause

with or without assent

reason and desire on the same loop —

I imagine singing I imagine

getting it right — the knowledge

of sensuous intelligence

entering into the work —

spontaneous happiness as it was once

given our sleeping nature to awake by

and know

innocence of first inscription

In a careless first reading, it is easy to read ‘provenance’ as the much more predictable ‘providence’, which would give the opening words of the poem a churchy or religious resonance. However, having realized that the word is provenance we are left with a number of questions, not the least of which is what is the question referred to in the second line and who is ‘abiding’? Grammatically, this is a detached participle which could qualify ‘I’ or, if we take “I would have said’ as parenthetic, we can attach ‘abiding’ to ‘the question’. ‘The question’ may or may not be the title of the poem, even though this is presented as a proposition rather than as an interrogative. In fact, the provenance of the concept of the ‘rational animal’ is quite hard to pin down. Some trace it back to Aristotle, while others argue that the words ‘political’ or ‘social’ come closer to Aristotle’s meaning than ‘rational’. It appears in the writings of the neo-Platonist, Porphyry and becomes a staple of scholastic philosophy. We can see it in the dualism of medieval belief systems where rationality raised the human towards God while emotion and desire dragged him back down towards the animal.

One of the factors making this poem particularly difficult to interpret is the way so many of the lines float free of syntax so that it is almost impossible to work out how they relate to each other. Nevertheless, the third and fourth lines ‘even in adoration/clause upon clause’ could be interpreted as a defence of the place of reason in religion, as a support to rather than an opponent of faith. This seems to be an extremely theological poem, where much of the ambiguity proceeds from the use of specialised theological terms which also have a more ordinary, everyday use; for example, ‘reason’, ‘desire’, ‘sensuous intelligence’ , ‘happiness’, knowledge’, ‘nature’. A dense theological argument is further disguised by colloquial phrases, ‘on the same loop’ and suppressed syntax. Thus ‘desire’ could be human desire, including sexual desire, or it could be the Aristotelian desire for happiness which in Thomist philosophy equates to the Christian desire for God. ‘Sensuous intelligence’ could be some idealised mode of apprehension as put forward in Eliot’s theory of the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ or it could be a much drier epistemological summary of the idea that we experience the world through our bodily senses and then use our intelligence or power of reason to generalise and understand, to acquire ‘knowledge’.

For Thomas Aquinas, this knowledge acquired through the experience of the body and the application of reason can lead to God, but must be distinguished from the knowledge of God which comes through divine revelation. Thus, the ‘rational animal’ in desiring happiness is desiring the knowledge of God but that can only be achieved through revelation. Moreover, the desire for knowledge is brought into question by the story of the Fall. The ‘spontaneous happiness’ Hill seems to yearn for was lost when Adam and Eve eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. It may be that the last lines of the poem look back to the Garden of Eden when humans were happy in their knowledge of God and where Adam, in ‘the innocence of first inscription’ named all the creatures. On the other hand, the phrase ‘our sleeping nature’ seems profoundly ambiguous. Does Hill simply mean that humans once awoke to the happiness of knowing God; or does the awakening of our sleeping nature, suggest the Fall and suggest that it is, in fact, a fulfilment of our nature. ‘Sleeping nature’ somehow suggests the half-truth of Blake’s Songs of Innocence.

The poet is literally at the centre of this poem, straddling the ‘turn’ in a distorted sonnet., in which a tortured sensibility struggles with his role and his own ambivalences.

I continue to find much of Hill’s work rebarbative, when it is not simply incomprehensible because of the huge range of reference and learning. Nevertheless, I find myself becoming more sympathetic to the convoluted workings of his poetic imagination as he battles with the problem of evil, survivor’s guilt and his disaffection with the contemporary world in which he found himself. However, I need to come up for air, so I am taking a break from Hill to look at other poets before, I hope, returning to his later works.

[1] Thanks to colleagues from Giles Goodland’s course on Poetry and Syntax (OUDCE)who have contributed to my discussion of these two poems

[2] See discussion of ‘Two Formal Elegies’ in my previous post.

Trying again with Geoffrey Hill: 1

On my bookshelves, I have a row of books by Geoffrey Hill, half-read and less than half understood. Every five years or so, I read the reviews and buy another, thinking I will have another go, but every time I fail again. I first encountered Geoffrey Hill at a poetry reading in the late sixties when I was a student. I was struck by the ‘passionate intensity’ with which he read, I think mainly from King Log, when he gave the impression that he was ready and expectant himself to be carried off to martyrdom. Ever since then I have believed that he was a serious poet, albeit one I could not get on terms with. My failures have felt the more shaming because of the almost universal praise he received, even as his work became (for me) ever more obscure and inaccessible. The most recent blow was reading two reviews of The Book of Baruch in the current issue of PN Review.[1] I have held back from rushing out to buy this admittedly incomplete work, which I know I will find incomprehensible. Instead, I have resolved to make another attempt to read the poet’s work. My starting point will be the Selected Poems of 2006. I will post my efforts in chunks, as I can see this project may take a long time.

Now, having read the selections from the first two books, For the Unfallen and King Log[2], and surveyed a number of exegetical commentaries, I continue to be frustrated. Those who write about Hill tend to be apologists for his work and their arguments are often as convoluted as the poems they discuss. Also, they exercise the critic’s privilege of only explicating the bits of poems they think they understand. To my mind, much of the writing in For the Unfallen, although accomplished, is overblown and burdened by the influence of predecessors and contemporaries against whom the young (ish) poet was trying to establish himself. In King Log the voice is still assertive, still cross-grained but the dense texture of the language is becoming less orotund and more individual. From the outset, Hill’s work has been difficult; in fact, he espouses difficulty as the appropriate way to respond to a difficult world. However, his constant use of irony, his frequent shifts in register and tone, his many puns and his adoption of a variety of often inimical personas leave the reader at a loss while exonerating him from the responsibility of having actually said anything.

The poems in For the Unfallen and King Log explore history and morality in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, the period of Hill’s youth and young manhood. I want to consider in detail the texts of three very well-known poems from these two volumes where Hill treats the fate of the Jews in Europe: ‘Two Formal Elegies’ from For the Unfallen and ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’ and ‘September Song’ from King Log. Although I have read interpretations of these poems, I shall attempt to go back to the text in order to arrive at my own response.

The two formal elegies are written as sonnets and from the outset, alternative or even multiple readings are in conflict. The title and epigraph immediately make the reader uneasy. The elegies are ‘formal’ in that they are both sonnets, an observation of dignified tradition that might indicate respect; on the other hand, they may be merely exercises in form, ‘formal’ in the sense of unreal, or insincere. We wonder at the arrogance of the writer in supposing that two fourteen line poems could be adequate as elegies ‘for the Jews of Europe’; we wonder also how this writer , non-Jewish, non-combatant, can take it upon himself to write elegies ‘for the Jews (all of them, undifferentiated) of Europe’.

The first line of the first sonnet starts with a strangely confident present participle:

Knowing the dead, and how some are disposed:

The reader will assume, without indications to the contrary, that this ‘knowing’ is first person and attached to the ‘we’ in line 5. It is only later that we suspect that Hill has created a first person persona or avatar whom the poem will turn on in contempt, allowing the poet to evade criticism. At this point we merely question how the speaker can ‘know the dead’ and what is meant by ‘some are disposed’; it could mean that he knows where the bodies are and this is what the next two lines suggest; however, some have suggested that ‘disposed’ refers to attitudes and may imply the ambivalent attitudes towards Jews still held by many, even after the Holocaust. The next three lines also open with an ambiguous participle:

Subdued under rubble, water, in sand graves,

In clenched cinders not yielding their abused

Bodies and bonds to those whom war’s chance saves

Without the law:

The different burial places mentioned here could refer to all the war dead; only the ‘clenched cinders’ have immediate connotations of the slaughter of Jews. “Subdued’ stands in apposition to ‘disposed’ and half rhymes with the later ‘abused’. Is ‘subdued’ a way of saying ‘controlled’ by being killed and buried or does it suggest that all these bodies are out of sight and therefore out of our minds? It is unclear whether it is the dead or the ‘clenched cinders’ who do not yield their ‘abused bodies and bonds’ . The adjective ‘clenched’ produces a horrific onomatopoeic echo of ‘crunched’ but it also suggests ‘held on to’ or ‘withheld’. The phrase ‘bodies and bonds’ creates a sonorous alliteration but is so elliptic that it dodges interpretation. I do not understand what is meant by ‘abused bonds’ whilst ‘abused bodies’’ seems to operate at a much more obvious level. ‘Those whom war’s chance saves’ are presumably survivors, but we are not told what ‘law’ they are ‘outside’; it could be the law of Moses, so that the reference is to non-Jews, or it could be Nazi rule, in which case he might be referring to those who did not live in occupied territories or in the period of Fascism. The ponderous and inflected final three monosyllabic stresses in line four create a gnomic gravity which topples without explanation into line five.

Finally, half-way through this line, we come to the main clause:

we grasp, roughly, the song.

‘We’ should be the subject of the first five lines, with this half line as the conclusion of an elaborate periodic sentence. This reading is unsettled by the placing of a colon where we might expect a comma. ‘We’ might seem to declare an affinity between the voice of the poem and its audience, but as ‘we’ comes under attack, the perspective of the poet seems to disappear, hidden by the smokescreen of an apparent first-person statement. The reader has been cozened into identifying with the ‘we’ who may or may not be ‘those whom war’s chance saves’ but who seems increasingly unworthy of admiration. Nearly all the words in this line are ambiguous: ‘grasp’ can mean ‘seize’ or ‘take hold of’, or it can simply mean ‘understand’; ‘roughly’ is in parenthetical commas which leaves the reader dithering between the notion that ‘we’ only ‘roughly’ or ‘approximately’ understand the song or that ‘we’ with great insensitivity have seized hold of the song.

The sentence, which moves over the next three lines, is a further example of the evasion of meaning and responsibility:

Arrogant acceptance from which song derives

Is bedded with their blood, makes flourish young

Roots in ashes.

‘Song’, which may be a synonym for poetry, or even these poems, depends on ‘arrogant acceptance’, presumably acceptance of what has happened. After all, you cannot write an elegy without death. ‘Arrogant’ suggests the appropriation of something to which one is not entitled. The verb ‘is bedded’ seems to be an agricultural metaphor as it develops through ‘flourish’ and ‘young roots’. Blood and ash are both known fertilizers. However, ‘is bedded’ has sexual connotations and the grammatical analysis of the sentence suggests that it is the coupling of ‘arrogant acceptance’ with ‘blood’ which gives rise to poetry. The tone is baffling; we cannot make out if the writer is blaming those who dare to write poetry after the Holocaust or whether this is savage self-criticism. The way in which sex, death and blood sacrifice hover over the poem, and indeed the entire collection, is discomfiting for the queasy reader.

Lines eight and nine, straddling the volta, and double-spaced indicate that there is a turn:

The wilderness revives,

Deceives with sweetness harshness.

I feel this must be a reference to Samson’s riddle in Judges 14,xiv: ‘Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness’. Samson refers to a lion which he slew and in whose carcase honeybees made their nest. Not only is this a metaphor for poetry arising out of war and slaughter, the context of the riddle is the bloody conflict between the Israelites and the Philistines. In the first poem of For the Unfallen , Hill announces his commitment to blood:

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,

To ravage and redeem the world:

‘Genesis’

Differently phrased, this may be the message of the sestet:

Still beneath

Live skin stone breathes, about which fires but play

Fierce heart that is the iced brain’s to command

To judgement –studied reflex, contained breath-

Their best of worlds since, on the ordained day,

The world came spinning from Jehovah’s hand.

We can pick up the references to hot and cold-blooded behaviour –‘fires’ and ‘fierce heart’ opposed to ‘stone’ and ‘iced brain’. The suggestion seems to be that the ‘iced brain’ is ruthlessly in control in lines which could as much be about poetic composition –‘studied reflex, contained breath’ as any historical event. The phrase ‘best of worlds’ should be ironic but in conjunction with Jehovah and ‘ordained day’, it is not clear that this is so; even less clear is who ‘their’ refers to. It could be the Jews, or it could be all of us as the poet abandons any pretence at first person involvement. There is a possible interpretation of this poem where the Holocaust is seen as necessary, the harshness from which sweetness can grow. Through the ambiguity of his language, Hill prevents us from discarding this reading. The final line of the poem is highly rhetorical but still mysterious; it calls to mind the early Robert Lowell and the final line of ‘A Graveyard in Nantucket’, ‘The Lord survives the rainbow of his will.’ What Lowell meant was fairly obvious; Hill’s line is more oblique. There is a suggestion of loss of control on the part of Jehovah together with a disconcerting undertone of the language of cricket.. The command to judgement may allude to the Day of Judgement but it is far from clear who is going to do the judging.

The second sonnet is more transparent (slightly). It seems to deal with the aftermath to the War and the process of judgement, earthly this time.

For all that must be gone through, their long death

Documented and safe, we have enough

Witnesses (our world being witness-proof).

This seems to be a reference to the Nuremberg trials; again the dead are absent, ‘subdued’, this time being ‘documented and safe’. The notion of witnesses is used ironically as the poem goes on to recall what was ‘witnessed and not seen’ (l.10). ‘We’ is used almost impersonally here, in opposition to ‘they’ the guilty ones. Hill goes on to describe these ordinary people, in tones of dislike bordering on disgust. They are ‘pushing midlanders’, ‘men,brawny with life, /Women who expect life’; they have ‘thickening bodies’ they ‘relieve’ themselves on ‘scraped sand’. People are reduced to their physical needs and appetites. At the same time, there is an extended metaphor to do with sea and fire running through the octave which is not present in the sestet: ‘The sea flickers, roars, in its wide hearth.’ “Flicker’ and ‘roar ‘ seem to be opposites but may refer to different or successive aspects. ‘Hearth’ is surprising but introduces us to the idea that this may be a sea of fire, at which ‘yearly, the pushing midlanders stand/To warm themselves’. It could be that these midlanders, a word suggesting average citizens, are being confronted annually with the hell fires of the Holocaust which they succeeded in ignoring. On the other hand, ‘warming oneself’ is a pleasant experience. Could Hill be suggesting some sort of schadenfreude, where the survivors actually take pleasure in being reminded of what has happened? In the sestet, he appears to question the practice of confronting people with their past:

Is it good to remind them, on a brief screen,

Of what they have witnessed and not seen?

In the last three lines the poem drops the division of us and them as it discusses the process of formal memorialisation:

To put up stones ensures some sacrifice.

Sufficient men confer, carry their weight.

(At whose door does the sacrifice does the sacrifice stand or start?)

Erecting a memorial will cost something and will involve an appropriate number of people who will endure some sort of discomfort or inconvenience in the process. This is one reading; however, the ambiguity of the words in line 11 makes it very uncertain: ‘sufficient’ may mean enough men, or men of adequate quality to ‘carry their weight’, which might mean strong enough to carry the stones or might again be referring to the quality of the men and their fitness to be the creators of the memorial. The breakdown of certainty in the last line is shown by its question form, the brackets and the final, struggling half-rhyme as the distinction between ‘we’, including the poet, and ‘they’, the silent midlanders,[3] dissolves into ‘whose’.

Hill’s second book, King Log was published in 1968 although many of the poems date from much earlier. It opens with ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’, a disconcerting poem even after you accept that it is written in the persona of Ovid in an imaginary scenario where he is transplanted to Hitler’s Germany. The voice is that of one of those who ‘have not seen’ and here the not-seeing is presented as a deliberate choice:

I have learned one thing: not to look down

This line is typical of the way Hill exploits the tension between poetic line and the sentence. Here, the opening lines of the second stanza continue thus:

So much upon the damned

allowing the poet to capitalise on the two meanings of ‘look down’. At first, he seems to be sustaining his life of comfort and complaisance by deliberately failing to see what is going on around him in a kind of mental high-wire act; as the stanza continues we realise that he is postulating the necessity of evil, and of evil-doers as part of the divine scheme of things. ‘They, in their sphere,/Harmonize strangely with the Divine/Love’. No wonder ‘God/ Is distant, difficult.’ In the first stanza ordinary human love is presented as a lower-case verb: ‘I love my work and my children.’ This contrasts with the abstract noun Divine Love with its dramatic capitalisation. The speaker, Ovid, seems to suggest that he is playing his part in creating the harmonies of the divine plan by ‘celebrating the love-choir’ in his own ‘sphere’, implicitly that of the saved. Such a mealy-mouthed excuse is a response to the half-confessed awareness of guilt in the first stanza:

Too near the ancient troughs of blood

Innocence is no earthly weapon.

Even leaving aside the inverted syntax, these lines are puzzling, particularly because of the choice of adjectives. Why are the troughs ‘ancient’ when the crimes of the Third Reich are contemporary? Perhaps this suggests that there are always ‘troughs of blood’ and that this kind of violence is inevitable. Why ‘earthly’? Are we supposed to think that ‘innocence’ can be a heavenly weapon even though the very idea of innocence has been compromised by the epigraph which opens the poem and which suggests that guilt only comes into play if the sinner is discovered or admits to his guilt? Perhaps the suggestion is that the persona is ‘too near’ the ‘troughs of blood’ to be able to deny guilt, despite the helpless impotence of the second line: ‘Things happen.’ Hill leaves us to struggle with the moral ambivalence of this poem, while removing himself from the scene. If we choose to condemn ‘Ovid’ for focusing on his own concerns, his family and his poetry, then we seem to be condemning any production of poetry during or after the Third Reich which does not confront that evil, which is not directly and suicidally political, and Hill seems to be condemning his own project. If, on the other hand, we go along with ‘Ovid’s rationalisation which accepts the existence of the ‘sphere of the damned’ and his own ‘love-choir’ as part of the Divine harmony we find ourselves condoning a view which may or may not be that of the poet but which is very hard to swallow. Certainly, Hill’s presentation of Divine Love is never less than uncomfortable.

‘September Song’ is probably Hill’s best-known Holocaust poem. Like the others, it is a relatively tiny piece that relies for its effect on its own inadequacy, indicated in the last of fourteen short lines where the writer seems to rebuke himself for straying into the area of the unspeakable:

This is plenty. This is more than enough.

This poem differs from those discussed previously in that Hill places himself at its centre in the awkward parenthetical admission of the third stanza:

(I have made

an elegy for myself it

is true)

Much has been made of the fact that Hill’s own birth was only a couple of days different from that of the unnamed Jewish child but I think it would be shallow to interpret these lines as empathetic identification with the victim. Surely Hill is rather saying that the poet always writes out of his own needs and for his own gratification, no matter how much he may seem to refer to what is beyond himself.[4] The poem is one of contained horror but also of a frighteningly implicit determinism. The child is not ‘passed over’, a grim even offensive allusion to the Jewish Passover, because it is ‘the proper time’, ‘Things marched,/Sufficient to that end.” The ‘things’ here may remind us of the ‘things’ which ‘happened’ in ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’; there may also be an echo of Matthew VI, 34: ‘sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof’. In any case, the sorrow in the poem is marked by acceptance rather than protest and the penultimate, very beautiful, stanza reflects a survivor’s guilt but no sense that the events could have been or could be other.

September fattens on vines. Roses

flake from the wall. The smoke

of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.[5]

In what I have written so far, it will be clear that I do not particularly like or enjoy Hill’s poetry or his perspective but that I am intrigued and challenged by his work. As I move on to later volumes as represented in the Selected Poems (Penguin, 2006), I hope my understanding of his work will deepen though I doubt I will come to share his point of view.

[1] Articles by Jeffrey Wainwright and Jon Glover in PN Review 249

[2] Very helpful for these early volumes: English Association Bookmarks Number 75

The Early Work of Geoffrey Hill Part 1: For the Unfallen by
J.D. Hughes , https://www2.le.ac.uk/offices/english-association/publications/bookmarks/75Hill.pdf

[3] As Hill was born in the Midlands, this word could be self-referential.

[4] I use the masculine pronoun, because I am discussing a male poet.

[5] It is interesting that the greater directness and less traditional shape of this poem is accompanied by a decision not to capitalise line beginnings unless they also begin a sentence.