Geoffrey Hill: A Brief Introduction

A glance through Geoffrey Hill’s Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 will show the reader that his work is vast, varied, ambitious, and, at least occasionally, difficult. Critics have been eager to apply T.S. Eliot’s theories about difficulty and the dislocation of language to Hill, and they fit, to an extent: Eliot’s poetic impersonality shapes much of Hill’s early verse, and the two share a commitment to examining the way Christianity has shaped the English language, and the English speaking world. But Hill is a poet of manifold, and sometimes dazzlingly various interests: these account, to an extent, for some of the perceived “difficulty” of his writing.

At the opening of 2001’s Speech! Speech!, we’re given a few tendrils of historical reference, tied up by, of all things, a crossword:

Here’s an awkward
question, | going spáre to be asked: dó
you, as Í do, sit late by the Aga
with clues received from the sputtering
agents of Marconi, from Imre Nagy;
from Scott of the Antarctic frozen in time
before the first crossword?

Guglielmo Marconi was given credit for his work on long distance radio transmission, resulting in the first transatlantic transmission on 17 December 1902; Imre Nagy, born 1896, was the leader of the Hungarian government which rebelled against the Soviets in 1956; and Robert Falcon Scott perished around March 29, 1912, having successfully navigated to the South Pole. These people are in the same vague historical area, but the verse draws the fragments of their existence together, receiving their clues and constructing that perfect riddle-writ-large out of them-- the first crossword. There is a wry glance at the fact that a cryptic poem like this could well be compared to a cryptic crossword; even at its most difficult, Hill’s poetry contains humor and self-criticism.

An interesting feature of Speech! Speech! is the markup on the text: there are diacritical accents on “spáre”, “dó” and “Í”, as well as a dividing bar between “question” and “going”. They show a poet very particular about the way his writing is to be incanted-- there is still room for individual interpretation, of course, it’s just that those particular syllables need stressing-- which is an important characteristic across Hill’s poetry.

It’s in Mercian Hymns, from 1971 (the collection is usually categorized as being an “early” opus, and therefore more accessible) that we hear Hill’s attention to the sonic qualities of language most strikingly. The lines in Mercian Hymns don’t look like lines of verse, nor quite like prose; the term “prose poem” is pretty well meaningless, and Hill wisely avoids it. The hymns are written in versets, a kind of short sentence which has its origin in the Psalms. The OED adds that they are usually “of a precatory nature.” Hill would remark to John Haffenden “They're versets of rhythmical prose. The rhythm and cadence are far more of tuned chant than I think one normally associates with the prose poem. I designed the appearance on the page in the form of versets.”

I think “tuned chant” is exactly right; the sounds of the words, and their arrangement, pushes them into the grey area between song and speech. Take Hymn IV, for instance:

I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots and endings. Child’s-play. I
abode there, bided my time: where the mole

shouldered the clogged wheel, his gold solidus; where dry-dust badgers thronged
the Roman flues, the long-unlooked-for mansions of our tribe.

Seamus Heaney, in an essay called “Englands of the Mind” classifies Hill as a poet whose diction is peppered with Latinisms, direct borrowings usually from liturgical Latin. It is, but they’re carefully woven with very precisely chosen Anglo-Saxon words, giving us a flavor of the richness of the language. In this passage, “abode” is the most conspicuously-deployed word, the play on the idiom “to bide one’s time” hinting at its etymology as a derivation from “abide”. It’s held in tension with the Latin-derived “mansion” and “crypt” as different ways of describing home territory, and what it means to call a place home. Abode, crypt, mansion: these are contrasts which are brought out as much on a sonic level as on a semantic one.

Hill is often a poet of profound moral seriousness. The devastating “September Song” has the poet writing an elegy for himself in addition to one for a victim of Nazi deportation (“born 19.6.32”, one day after Hill): “Undesirable you may have been, untouchable / you were not. Not forgotten / or passed over at the proper time.” The slender lyric ends with “This is plenty. This is more than enough.”, which rends the word “plenty” into unrecognizable pieces by switching its undertones from plenty of the good to plenty of the extremely bad. It’s a testament to his poetic force to be able to offer a response to such an unspeakable episode in history.

Ethics, especially the ethics of language, are of great importance to Hill. Reservations about when, and how, a poet should speak partially account for his scarce early-career output. (90% of Broken Hierarchies consists of poems written after 1995.) We can see this concern depicted visually on the uncanny cover for Speech! Speech!:

Colin Burrow, in his review of Broken Hierarchies, suggests that “Hill’s prophetic register has irritated some readers too, who see it as a self-aggrandising fantasy that a poet should hold forth to the nation about the corruption of its tongue.”, before affirming “But there is nothing holier than thou or superior about Hill.” He’s right, I think: Hill struggles alongside all of us to speak and write ethically.

I don’t think there is a contemporary poet blessed with the perception of the gamut of powers language that Hill has, and, so, there probably aren’t many as well qualified to explore the possible uses and misuses of these powers. Reading some of the Mercian Hymns aloud for Poetry Genius Audio II, I felt they had the rhythmic throb of a boa constrictor, their sound patterning powerful enough to tie up motorways and medieval martyrs in a forcible exposure to the relentlessness of the past.