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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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