The last glory of English poetry
Michael Wharton
COLLECTED POEMS by Geoffrey Hill Penguin, £3.95 Aliterary magazine recently published a symposium in which various well-known writers were asked, among other things, which were the most important English poets of the last 30 years and which they thought most likely to survive. All the familiar and fashionable names were there. One name was not: Geoffrey Hill. But I believe that if anybody is still reading English poetry in the next century Hill is one of the very few poets of his generation they will be reading; and that he will be recognised for what he is: one of the glories (perhaps the last) of English poetry.
Little known to the 'general reader', Hill is greatly esteemed by some critics and greatly disliked by others. A proud, aloof man (as I judge), he seems even to attract hatred. This year, in the London Review of Books, a running battle about him and his work has been going on for months, and for all I know is rumbling on still. But things have always been like this; small men instinctively abhor their betters.
I first discovered Geoffrey Hill by way of his Mercian Hymns (published in 1971). Although Mercia, or what is now the Midlands, in particular the 'West Mid- lands', is not my own part of England, it fascinates me because it seems to contain everything which is in England, past and present, industrial and rural, the im- measurably old and the garishly new. It is full of ghosts and ruins. It was the domain of King Offa, he of the Dike, who ruled it in the latter half of the 8th century, when it was the most powerful state in England. Hill is a native of this region (he was born at Bromsgrove in 1932, the son of a policeman) and he celebrates it in 30 short `hymns' or prose poems, contriving with extraordinary skill to interweave the acts and legends of the king with his own childhood and with an all-pervading, magical sense of place:
King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone; overlord of the M5; architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross; guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge; contractor to the desirable new estates; saltmaster; money-changer; commis- sioner for oaths; martyrologist; the friend of Charlemagne . . .
A friend of mine, coming across this, asked me whether it was 'supposed to be funny'. 'Funny' is not the right word; rather a splendid playfulness in which complicated archaisms, ambiguities, anachronisms are combined to produce a haunting work of art. If I have given too much space to Mercian Hymns it is because they are the easiest way of approaching Hill's admittedly 'difficult' poetry. There is not a great deal of it: five 'slim volumes' (an exceptionally inapposite expression) in 25 years, from For the Unfallen (1959) to the long sequence, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy (1984) which elaborates the strange, self-contradicting poet, one of the last-born of Tancienne France' killed on the first day of the Battle of the Marne in September 1914. But if Hill has written comparatively little, every word he writes is in place. With what concentration, effort, agony he must have laboured on these marvellous poems!
How to describe them? Overworked old adjectives throng into the mind: 'dense', 'archaic', 'austere', 'jewelled', 'sculpted', `resonant', 'grand'. All are inadequate; and some, of course, must take account of his defects: a style sometimes too man- nered, cramped and crammed with histor- ical and literary allusion, too much given to intricate word-play. But it is possible to indicate Hill's special qualities and themes: his mastery of traditional forms, particular- ly the sonnet, which he turns to new, original effect; his perpetual struggle with the absence (or possible presence) of God; his eloquence striving against itself; his sense of the English past, particularly the mediaeval past, as in his sequence Funeral Music on the Wars of the Roses, in his own words, 'a florid, grim music, broken by grunts and shrieks . . . a commination and an alleluia':
Prowess, vanity, mutual regard.
It seemed I stared at them, they at me.
That was the gorgon's true and mortal gaze: Averted conscience turned against itself. A hawk and a hawk-shadow. At noon, As the armies met, each mirrored the other; Neither was outshone. So they flashed and vanished And all that survived them was the stark ground Of this pain. I made no sound, but once I stiffened, as though a remote cry Had heralded my name. It was nothing.. . Reddish ice tinged the reeds; dislodged, a few Feathers drifted across; carrion birds Strutted upon the armour of the dead.
That is the Battle of Towton, fought on Palm Sunday, 1461, perhaps the bloodiest ever fought on English ground. In this wonderful poem, with its concentrated imagery of predator and warrior, the 'I' is both witness and participant, above the slaughter yet part of it.
This is unfashionable stuff. It is not `contemporary', nor has it 'social rele- vance'. One thing Hill's literary enemies cannot stand about him, quite apart from his seriousness and integrity, is his seeming lack not merely of the 'right' (that is, left) views, but of any views at all. They rummage in his poems for ammunition to throw at him. One absurd example: in Mercian Hymns, a propos of Offa's visit to Rome, he quotes the same passage from Virgil — 'the Tiber foaming with much blood' — which his fellow-Mercian Enoch Powell once quoted so notoriously; ergo, Hill must have the same views as Powell on all subjects. 'Reactionary! Chthonic nationalist!' they shout at him. These are unwitting words of praise.
Hill's poems are often obscure. I would not say I 'understood' them all; some are about themselves and about the limitations and dangers of language itself; they have to be wrestled with as the poet wrestled to produce them for our wonder and delight. The image on the cover of this book Jacob wrestling with the Angel — is unusually well chosen.
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