A celebration with a warning
Grey Gowrie
SCENES FROM COMUS by Geoffrey Hill Penguin, £9.99, pp. 66, ISBN 0141020237 Geoffrey Hill publishes books in verse rather than collections of poems. This is admirable but presents a reviewer with problems. You want to recommend him more or less unconditionally as England’s best hope for the Nobel Prize. At the same time, there is the risk that new readers, acquainted with the easy-going chattiness of Betjeman, say, or Larkin, may find this writer too dense and allusive. Scenes from Comus is a case in point. Read it once, by itself, and you may struggle. Read it as the envoi it really is to Hill’s previous books, the last four in particular, and you will discover clarity as well as density, as if observing a city from the air.
Hill is 73 now. He has been an admired and productive poet for more than 50 years. His technical skill and distinct voice give pleasure page by page wherever you plunge into his work. As the most intimate form of writing, poetry allows your own introspectiveness contact with others’ introspection. I have not met Hill but I believe that if he rang me up I would know in moments who was calling and what he wanted. This is of course an illusion, but it is the illusion endemic to poetry as an art. Scenes from Comus, therefore, is indeed a pleasure; it must give pleasure, as Wallace Stevens said of what he called ‘the poem of the act of the mind’. But the longer-lived pleasure which demands enlightenment also means wrestling again with the angels of Canaan, The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech! and The Orchards of Syon. These books constitute a ‘matter of England’ epic and Hill’s ‘daily acknowledgement/ of what is owed to the dead’. They belong in the company of T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets.
The present volume, the envoi, addresses a living composer, Hugh Wood, and a dead exemplar, John Milton. William Carlos Williams has a phrase which serves well for Milton: ‘a chastity packed with lewdness’. Geoffrey Hill, like Eliot before him, is steeped in both the chastity and the lewdness of the English 17th century. Sensuality, in poetry as in love-making, flowers only within formal and ethical borders. Hill grew up in the West Midlands, near the Severn whose goddess, Sabrina, appears in Milton’s masque and not far from Ludlow where it was performed for Lord Bridgewater in 1634. Comus celebrates virginity in the most enticing and erotic language (no virtue in refusing the apple if it is not delicious) and acts as an appropriate foil for Hill’s meditation on old age, on his own works or ‘plays’, on masque-mask issues of identity and authenticity, and on the chastity of the coming dark. An added complication, and fascination, of the work is that he duels with Comus while on a trip to Iceland, that poetry-haunted shrine to linguistic purity where 11-year-olds can read poems from the Dark Ages without special training.
A professor of English literature who lives and teaches in New England, Hill is a bookish writer ‘Rewriting his own deepest reading: that/fair comment on the wiped out fifty years/from genesis to this.’ You might hold his erudition against him did he not share the Yeats and Pound gift of finding certain works of literature as numinous as a landscape, a love-affair, an intuition or any other milestone in the artistic life. His reading is not lost on him. Consider the titles mentioned as well as a long poem of 1983 called The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy. Hill’s brow is high, and I suspect he despises the Amis-Larkin pose (itself a mask) of ‘filthy literature’. But his ear is true and his music aims high and low: the quality Dryden approved in Chaucer.
I’m tired now the whole time and yet I wish to take up my bed and walk; to Compostela, for example, bush-hat hung round with clamshells on return:
or ride the Gulf Stream through to Akureyri and find a hot spring equal to my bulk sheltered by palm trees, bowed by frangipani or bougainvillaea, wallowing in Icelandic Christian Poetry till the fish come home.
People who like poetry cannot get enough of this kind of riffing and improvisation. As with jazz, you either get it or you don’t. Hill is valuable, too, for high seriousness and his belief that there is an English spiritual landscape to match the peopled beauty of the physical one: Christian, hierarchical, sensuous yet selfdenying. Even his patriotism is erotic; he talks of ‘Britannia, his “deep/and passionate love”, high-stepping into ruin’. This is no ‘accessible’ poet of binge drinking or reality TV but one who observes the physical and mental land of his fathers (‘Severnside blacksmiths and nailers who must have bled’) from his vantaged exile in Boston or Reykjavik. He celebrates and he warns. With the painter Francis Bacon gone, Hill and Harrison Birtwistle are surely the big, mind-altering talents at work in any medium. Hill wrote this book as if it were his last. Buy it, superstitiously, so it may not be.
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