Geoffrey Hill and the art of difficult poetry
Part 1
Geoffrey
Hill is one of the most important poets writing in English to day. The
distinguished literary critic and theorist Harold Bloom has said that
Hill is the strongest British poet now alive. At the same time, Bloom
recognizes the fact that he is a formidably difficult poet. As he
remarked, 'confronted by Hill's best poems, a reader is at first tempted
to run away, for the intellectual difficulty of the rugged, compressed
verse is more than matched by the emotional painfulness and directness
of hill's vision.' Another critic has said that A.N.
Wilson maintains that Hill is probably the best English writer alive,
in verse or prose. George Steiner believes that 'among our finest poets,
Geoffrey Hill is at present the most European - in his Latinity, in his
dramatization of the Christian condition.'. While there is some
substance to this statement, it can also be said with equal power and
conviction that Hill is most definitely rooted in the English landscape
and history.
In to day's column, I wish to examine Geoffrey Hill's work, which is
generally regarded as extremely difficult and challenging, in terms of
its relevance, applicability and illustrative instructiveness to poets
writing in Sri Lanka in Sinhala, Tamil and English.
Geoffrey Hill was born in 1932 in a small market town in
Worcestershire. His parents left school when they were in their early
teens; his father became a village constable and his mother a rural
artisan. Hill was an only child. He first attended the village school
and later a grammar school. From there he was successful in winning a
scholarship to Keble College, University of Oxford.
At Oxford he read English and obtained a first class. After that he
went to teach at Leeds University. He also has taught at Cambridge,
Boston Universities. In 2010 he was elected to be the prestigious
Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He began to write poetry when he was a
student at Oxford. One of his earliest poems which he wrote when he was
a second-year student at displays his characteristic thematic and
stylistic interests.
When the sharp star was seen That pierced each naked eye
And left its scar between
The thin ribs of the sky
Some men could not forget
What had so touched the mind
But, for all that, the threat
Took thirty years to find
This poem composed in clean rhyming quatrains raises issues of
religiosity and mundane living that are central to Hill as a poet. As a
poet he has been influenced, among others, by such eminent writers as
Blake, Hopkins, Yeats and the American poet Allen Tate.
Geoffrey Hill published his first book of poems, For the Unfallen, in
1959. Readers had to wait nine years before they were able to read his
second collection of poems, King Log. In 1971 hill published his third
volume of poems, Mercian hymns, which was different in terms of
structure from his earlier two works. After that he went to publish such
works as somewhere in such a kingdom (1975), Tenebrae (1979), the
Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy (1983), Speech, Speech (2000), A
Treatise of Civil Power (2005) and Odi Barbarae (2011); he also brought
a number of distinguished critical essays such as The Lords of Limit
(1984), The Enemy's Country (1991) and Style and Faith (2003).
There a number of features in Geoffrey Hill's writings that a Sri
Lankan reader should understandably find stimulating and instructive.
His deeply intertwined interest in religiosity and secular living is one
such feature. His profound understandings of the past, history, cultural
memory and how they labor to shape the present is another. He sought to
understand the past through the dark light of the present. Hill was also
fascinated with language - language as both a challenge and a
possibility.
As I will indicate later, his use of language is intricately
associated with his moral vision and the perceived responsibilities of a
poet. His profound investment in poetic technique and form should also
generate a great measure of interest among concerned and committed Sri
Lankan readers.
Let me quote in full one of my favorite poems by Geoffrey Hill. It
displays some of the dominant characteristics that have come to define
his work. The poem is titled September Song and deals with A Jewish
child who was sent to death by the Nazis.
September Song born 19.6.32-departed 24.9.42
Undesirable you have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or
passed over at the proper time. As estimated, you died. Things marched,
sufficient, to the end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
terror, so many routine cries.
(I have made an elegy for myself it is true)
September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of
harmless fires drifts to my eyes
This is plenty. This is more than enough.
This is an elegy that focuses on the atrocities committed by the
Nazis, how human beings were reduced to things with supreme bureaucratic
efficiency; even the 'untouchables' were admitted to the orgy of death.
On the one hand the poet identifies with the fate of the unfortunate
child; on the other he gains a critical distance from the troubling
event .The word undesirable as the opening word of the poem is
significant; the undesirable become desirable as fodder for the death
machine.
The poem focuses on a very important theme related to poetry,
brutality and history. Can one make poetry out of experiences that
appear to elude human understanding? How can the poet record the
unspeakable cruelties of incomprehensible human villainy? The very
punctuation of the lines reflects his agonized consciousness. The poem
is dark, muted, satirical and reflective giving depth and definition to
the depicted experience.
This poem which deals with the fate of a Jewish child who died in the
Nazi gas chambers raises the issue of human cruelty and aesthetic
distance that poetry normally demands. The false bureaucratic tone of
the poem makes this apparent.
In this poem, Geoffrey Hill is also directing our attention to the
inescapable corruption and debasement of language – a theme that he has
explored sensitively in some of his other poems as well. Here words such
as ‘sufficient’,’ plenty’, ‘enough’ – words that are a part of routine
living – are deployed to mask the enormity of the crime captured in the
poem. The parentheses direct our attention towards an important fact-
this has the effect of lowering the poet’s voice thereby displaying an
understandable uneasiness in the presence of unpardonable crimes.
This poem, then, like many others by Hill, exemplifies the complex
verbal structure shaped by a superior critical intelligence that guides
the textual production.
An aspect of Hill’s poetry that invites focused attention is his use
of, and relation to, language. He inhabits language in a way that
displays his sensitivity to it as well as his enviable conceptual grasp
of it. In a passage like the following one senses his proclivity towards
lyricism as well as his sensitivity to the power of words.
Rough-silvered leaves that are the snow
On Ararat seen through the leaves.
The sun lays down a foliage of shade.
In the following trope, which is characteristic of Hill, we see him
achieving the amazing feat of turning water into fire.
The sea flickers, roars, in the wide hearth
At other times, he is able to draw the reader into an excursion into
reality through the vibrancy of his language and tropes.
Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods
With smoky wings, entangles them. Trees shine
Out from their leaves.
The polysyllabic power
Hill has a rare ability to play off the different registers of
language against each other to secure his intended effects. This was
indeed something that Shakespeare achieved repeatedly in his writing.
For example Shakespeare in his famous lines was able to accomplish this.
It would the multitudinous sea incarnadine
Making the green one red
The polysyllabic power of the first line is undermined, and in a
strange way, fortified by the monosyllabic simplicity of the second. One
encounters this representational strategy in Hill’s poetry as well.
Geoffrey Hill sees the multifaceted nature of language and exploits
it deftly to his poetic advantage. He recognises that language is not
only a vehicle that can be used to communicate meaning but is also
constitutive of meaning. Moreover, for him, language has the ability to
dramatize his social and moral themes – that is to say, language, most
often in his writings, enacts the preferred themes of his poetry.
Harold Bloom, discussing the use of language by Geoffrey Hill says
that, ‘the compressed language is intimately bound up with what he is
conveying. This is true of many poets, but true to an unusual degree
with hill. It is true in another sense. The language itself is unlike
most other writing current, and coupled with this is an unusually
self-conscious on the part of the poet to the language. This is not
because he wishes to draw attention to it for its own sake, but because
the language both posits his concern, and is itself, in the way it is
used, an instance of them.’
Geoffrey Hill’s poetic imagination is closely linked to a religious
imagination. This is reflected not only in his poetry but also the
poetics that guides it and frames it. The concept of atonement that he
has proposed as a central pillar in his poetics is important in this
regard.
In his widely cited essay titled Poetry as Menace and Atonement he
makes the following observation. ‘the technical perfecting of a poem is
an act of atonement, in the radical etymological sense – an act of
atonement, a setting at once, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a
uniting in harmony; and that this act of atonement is described with
beautiful finality by two modern poets; W.B. Yeats when he writes in a
latter of September 1936, to Dorothy Wellesley, that ‘a poem comes right
with a click like a closing box’ and by T.S. Eliot in his essay of 1953,
the three voices of poetry. Hill plays with the word atonement to bring
out his privileged and projected sense , at-one-ment.
Prof. Christopher Ricks, who has been a staunch admirer of Hill’s
poetry finds this etymological gloss unconvincing. He says that,
‘at-one-ment is simply, and finally, and unanswerably, not a word in the
English language; and it will not do to be told that the technical
perfecting of a poem is an act of atonement in the radical etymological
sense – an act of at-one-ment…’Despite the controversy surrounding
Hill’s interpretation of the word atonement it is clear that he sought
to enforce a close connection between poetic imagination and religious
imagination.
Challenges
The idea of history is pivotal to Geoffrey Hill’s poetry. It informs,
inflects, challenges and reinvigorates his poetic imagination and
poetics. Many of his most moving poems have history as their chosen
subject. For example, his Mercian Hymns is a sequence of thirty prose
poems that deal with the legends and history associated with the Mercian
King Offa, who ruled in the eights century. He stands at a crucial point
in the evolution of the nation.
As Hill remarks, ‘the Offa who figures in the sequence of might
perhaps most usefully be regarded as the presiding genius of the west
midlands, his dominion enduring from the middle of the eights century
until the twentieth 9and possibly beyond.) he often selected Anglo-Saxon
kings, medieval wars, historical martyrs as his preferred terrains of
poetic re-creation and re-configuration. The idea of history is
important for Hill not only as a subject matter but also as a vital
creative force that challenges and provokes him.
Geoffrey Hill has engaged the past courageously and insightful. As a
poet he felt that it was his unavoidable responsibility to do so. His
poetry is so engaged with, and immersed in, the past that some have
discerned an understandably archaic strain in it. For example the critic
Hugh Haughton makes the following observation. ‘there is something
obstinately archaic about Geoffrey hill’s poetry.
The traditional diction, the elaborately formal architecture, the
urge towards magniloquence, the relish for oxymoron and paradox, even
the consummate finish and authority of the poems, seems to speak from
his past – as well as for it.’
However, it seems to me, that his profound interest in the past is
tempered by the urgent knowledge that past gains its life and momentum
from the imperatives of the present; how the past pulsates through the
present is what is of paramount importance to him.
This line of thinking is evident in Hill’s poetry as well as his
critical writings.
In an interview with Blake Morrison, Geoffrey Hill remarked that, ‘I
think that it is a tragedy for a nation or a people to lose the sense of
history, not because I think that the people is thereby necessarily
losing some mystical private possession, but because……it is losing some
vital dimension of intelligence. I’m entirely in sympathy with those who
would argue that in order to conduct the present one needs to be steeped
in the past.
I think my sense of history is in itself anything but nostalgic, but
I accept nostalgia as part o the psychological experience of a society
and of an ancient and troubled nation. ’As Haughton asserted, ‘no other
English poet this century has generated such a powerful and disturbing
sense of history in his work. If part of the work’s own authority
strikes us as anachronistic, it may be that that will liberate us from
anachronistic authority.’
One aspect of Hill’s many-sided and willed attempts to engage history
is manifest in his poems dealing with the British Raj in India. In terms
of subject-matter much of Hill’s poetry lies outside our immediate
province of interest in Sri Lanka.
It deals predominantly with British and European preoccupations.
However, in the poems focusing on India that I referred to, we are
closer to home – the activities of British in India find a ready echo in
the experiences of Sri Lankan’s. A Short History of British India
presents a complex engagement with history, this time with imperialism
Destiny is the real thing,
True lord of annexation and arrears.
Our law-books overrule the emperors,
The mango is the bride-bed of light. Spring
Jostles the flame-tree. But new mandates bring
New images of faith, good subhadars!
The flittering candles of the wayside shrines
Melt into dawn. The sun surmounts the dust
Krishna from Radha lovingly untwines
Lugging the earth, the oxen bow their heads
The alien conscience of our days is lost
Among the ruins and on endless roads.
Dynamics of imperialism
Here the poet casts a steady and discriminating eye on the dynamics
of imperialism. The word destiny, which is a part of the imperialist’s
lexicon, indexes the self-deceptions of both the ruler and ruled alike.
It is as if the death of conscience and death of culture are occurring
in tandem. In the previous sonnet in the sequence the poet had referred
to the ‘fantasies of true destiny that kills/under the sanction of the
English name’. The very wording of this statement subverts the vaunted
power of imperial rule.
The attitude displayed by Hill to British imperialism is indeed
complex. He is of the opinion that cultures and societies are driven by
the images they cherish and that both the British and the Indians have
been motivated by a set of misplaced and misleading values. This is how
he commences his poem a short history of British India.
Make miniatures of the once-monstrous theme
the red-coat devotees, melees of wheels,
Jagannath’s lovers. with indifferent aim
unleash the rutting cannon at the walls
of forts and palaces, pollute the wells
impound the memory for the bankrupt shame
fantasies of true destiny that kills
under the sanction of the English name
What Hill is saying is that while the British are moved to murder
Indians, Indians also kill themselves. He says that Indian devotees
thrust themselves in front of the moving wheels of the chariot of
Jagannath in the streets of Puri in Orissa to be crushed. as one critic
remarked, ‘Hill imagines the destiny of the two cultures not as a gyre
but as canon wheels colliding with each other, not to create but kill.’
He goes on to observe that the ‘red-coat devotees could refer either
to the British soldiers shooting cannons at the natives or the Indians
throwing themselves suicidally beneath their divine image.’ if the
Indians are submissive, the English are aggressive, but both violate
life to the same effect.’ as can be seen in this poem, and what
commentators have made of it, Geoffrey Hill’s attitude to the British
imperialism in India is indeed a complex one.
Hill sees Indian culture as fissured by contradictions and paradoxes.
It is, according to him, a blending of naturalness, self-sacrifice,
self-surrender, deep devotion, innocence and fatalism. He sees Indian
culture as decaying as it seeks to adapt to changing circumstances and
he focuses in the remnants of a once vital culture that are readily
available. Gone are the pastimes, the Persian
scholarship, the wild boar run to ground
the water colors of the sun and wind.
Names rise like outcrops on the rich terrain,
like carapaces of the Mughal tombs
lop-sided in the rice-fields, boarded-up near railway-sidings and
small aerodromes.
The Persians arts have disappeared and the Mughal emperors are but
fading names in history; the country has been reduced to a caricature of
its former self – at least, that is how Geoffrey Hill sees it.
I have commented at length on Hill’s poems that highlight British
imperialism and its aftermath in India because the subject is close to
us.
But more importantly, they illustrate how complex Hill’s verbal
structures are, how intricately he fashions his linguistic fabric. This
is indeed an achievement that should prove to be instructive and
inspiring to those of us in Sri Lanka interested in craft of poetry both
as writers and readers.
I started out this column by pointing out Hill’s widespread
reputation as an uncompromisingly difficult poet. Most commentators and
critics who have written about his work have pointed this out.
The perceived difficulty, in a paradoxical way, is central to his
ambitions as a poet. Hill’s difficulty arises from his subjects, his
style, his formal experimentations and his vision. All these facets of
his poetry are vitally linked to, and emerge from, his meticulously
worked out poetic textures. Hence it is very important that we pay close
and sustained attention to the dense fabric of his writing.
At this point, we need to make a distinction between obscurity and
difficulty. Obscurity, for me, is always a deficiency, a failure to
fulfill the promises expected of a writer bent on communicating with his
readers. It can be perverse, ostentatious, misplaced.
Difficulty, on the other hand, can be both positive and negative.
Some poets – Hill is a god example – seek to capture in language not
only the complexities of social and personal living but also those of
language.
This effort can result in difficulty. Difficulty can also be a
failure on the part of the reader in that he or she expects to be
spoon-fed as opposed to obscurity which almost always signals a
deficiency in the writer. Hill has his own view on this matter; he sees
the impulse to simplification a mark of tyranny, and difficulty a
signpost towards democracy.
He quotes with approval the statement by the German thinker Theodor
Haecker to the effect,’ Tyranny always wants a language and literature
that is easily understood.’ At the same time, Hill recognizes that there
can be legitimate difficulties and fake difficulties.
( To be continued )
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