`Dogged Beauty’

Even so fierce and morally stringent a poet as Geoffrey Hill cannot resist the tug of the natural world and its beauties. There’s a passage at the end of section 80 in Speech! Speech! (2000), in which Hill celebrates, if that’s the right word, the English countryside:

“Even today the light
is beautiful – you can hardly avoid
seeing that: shadows – reflections – on reeds
and grasses deepening visibility:
the mind’s invisible cold conflagration.”

This is hardly conventional nature poetry, the mystical sort practiced by too many American poets. There’s no woozy-minded pantheism, no identification with the reputed benignity of other species or kingdoms. A handful of grass may be “the flag of my disposition” for Walt Whitman, but not for Hill. His world is charged not with meaning and communion but peril and perdition. The next passage, at the start of Section 81, continues the change signaled by “conflagration”:

“Again: the saltmarsh in winter. By dawn
drain-mouths grow yellow beards. Old man’s duty,
vigilance so engraved, shabby observance,
dirty habit, wavelets chinning the shore-line.
Rich in decrepit analogues he sees:
archipelagos, collops of sewage,
wormed ribs jutting through rime.”

Hill’s vocabulary is vast and draws enthusiastically upon the sweep of the language’s history. In his lines, no word is archaic. “Collops” in this context is particularly repugnant. It refers to cut up pieces of meat or fat, and even appears in the King James Bible, Job 15:27: “maketh collops of fat on his flanks.” It nicely echoes “dollops.” The entire passage, redolent of Swift’s body-disgust, recalls the final lines of that poet’s “A Description of a City Shower”:

“Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts, and blood,
Drowned puppies, stinking sprats, all drenched in mud,
Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.”

The traditional distinction between urban and rural, man-made and natural, dissolves. Simultaneously, the “poetic” is redefined. “Collops,” indeed. Such moments, when the poet turns from beauty almost in disgust, occur in the work of R.S. Thomas, another of poetry’s prophet-moralizers, another embattled Christian. But Thomas is a more traditional nature poet, in love with birds and rocks, often at the expense of the human. Thomas’ vision is also less radically bitter, more nostalgic than Hill’s. Here’s a quintessential Hill moment, from section 2, verse 25, of Scenes from Comus (2005):

“There is a dogged beauty in the world,
unembarrassing goodness, honesty unfazed.
There’s also the corrupter, the abuser,
the abused corrupted in accepted ways,
the ways of death, the deadliness of life.”