`Surrealism Prescient of the Real'

The finest poet working in English has a publisher in the United States again, and Geoffrey Hill is being well served by Yale University Press. His latest, A Treatise of Civil Power, with a title borrowed from John Milton’s 1659 pamphlet attacking the establishment of a state church, was first published in 2005 by the Clutag Press of Thame, in Oxfordshire, England, in an edition of 400 copies. That eight-poem pamphlet must be a valuable collector’s item, as it sold out and went out of print immediately. Penguin then brought out an edition in England. The new Yale edition reproduces the handsome Clutag cover and title page design, and the number of poems, most recast, has grown to 34. The title poem of the Clutag edition, its 42-stanza centerpiece, is gone, though fragments of it now stand as autonomous poems or have been mutated into other forms. Hill, as ever, is a great confounder, a crank of genius. Gone, regrettably, is Stanza XX of “A Treatise of Civil Power”:

“And Berryman – how did he slip through
this trawl of gratitude? The Dream Songs, then,
with other things; their bone-yard vaudeville,
sparkish, morose, multi-voiced monologue,
erratic tenderness to self and lovers.
A gentle courteous man, no-nonsense scholar,
badly transmitted, blarneying on location,
face-fungused wizard in a camp film.”

The love song to John Berryman is touching, though the stanza works well as self-portraiture, down to “face-fungused.” For density of sheer linguistic matter and quantity of business going on word by word, line by line, few poets since Berryman can rival Hill. Here’s “The Peacock at Alderton”:

“Nothing to tell why I cannot write
in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this
latter acknowledgement: the self that counts
words to a line, accountable survivor
pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk,
less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel
to Prospero’s own knowledge. In my room
a vase of peacock feather. I will attempt
to describe them, as if for evidence
on which a life depends. Except for the eyes
they are threadbare: the threads hanging
from some laminate tough weed in February.
But those eyes – like a Greek letter,
omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl;
like a shaved cross-section of living tissue,
the edge metallic blue, the core of jet,
the white of the eye in fact closer to beige,
the whole encircled with a black-fringed green.
The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine
at the garden end, in blustery twilight
his fulgent cloak a gathering of the dark,
the majarajah-bird that scavenges
close by the stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed
Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.”

No fretting, please, about meaning. First, enjoy the music: “some laminate tough weed in February,” “omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl,” “his fulgent cloak a gathering of the dark,” “stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed.” Shades of Hopkins, who wrote his own, rather more conventional peacock poem, “The Peacock’s Eye:

“Mark you how the peacock's eye
Winks away its ring of green,
Barter'd for an azure dye,
And the piece that's like a bean,
The pupil, plays its liquid jet
To win a look of violet.”

The Oxford English Dictionary defines “fulgent,” a word I love, as “Shining brightly; brilliant, glittering, resplendent. Now poet. or rhetorical [read: kept current by Geoffrey Hill].” The OED cites Milton’s use of the word in Paradise Lost: “At last, as from a Cloud, his fulgent head/And shape Starr-bright appeer'd.” Old Hill hands will recognize the poet’s return to the Suffolk shoreline. Hill’s poetic home is often the littoral (from the Latin, litus, “shore”), the coast, shoreline, marsh, estuary or river bank – the amorphous zone between water and land – and he returns there with metronomic regularity. In one of his best poems, “Discourse: For Stanley Rosen,” collected in Without Title, he writes of language: “its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight.” Another meeting of sun and soil comes in “An Emblem,” a stanza from the jettisoned “A Treatise of Civil Power”:

“Among the slag remonstrances of this land
memory reinterprets us, as with
a Heraclitean emblem. On a sudden,
sunslanting rain intensifies, the roses
twitch more rapidly, flights
of invisible wing-roots lift
from the lighter branches; a purple sky
ushering a rainbow. Now it is gone.”

As the web site of the Geoffrey Hill Study Centre reminds us, on its annotations page: “The dust jacket of the American edition of The Orchards of Syon has a `pen-and-wash drawing by [D.H.] Lawrence done after completing his novel The Rainbow’ -- a rainbow over a polluting mining town.” More importantly, read these eight lines aloud, relishing “slag remonstrances,” “sudden/sunslanting rain intensifies,” and the rest. Like lines of Shakespeare, Keats and Hopkins, Hill’s lines lure and pleasure the lips and tongue. Here is another new poem from A Treatise of Civil Power, “In Memoriam: Aleksander Wat”:

“O my brother, you have been well taken,
and by the writing hand most probably:
on photographs it looks to be the left,
the unlucky one. Do nothing to revive me.

“Surrealism prescient of the real;
The unendurable to be assigned
No further, voice or no voice; funérailles,
Songs of reft joy upon another planet.”

Hill adds Wat (1900-1967) to his roll call of poetic heroes, joining Milton and Ben Jonson (“my god,” Hill calls the latter). Wat was a Polish poet and one-time Communist hounded and imprisoned by Nazis and Soviets alike. Late in life, visiting in California, he recorded lengthy conversations with his countryman, Czeslaw Milosz. The transcripts were translated into English and published in 1988 as My Century. Wat, to my taste, is a middling poet, a “futurist,” but his oral memoir is a necessary document from the most bloodthirsty century in history. Hill has resurrected Wat before. In section XV of The Triumph of Love (1998), he writes:

“Flamen I draw darkly out of flame.
Lumen is a measure of light.
Lumens are not luminaries. A great
Polish luminary of our time is the obscure
Aleksander Wat.”

In Aleksander Wat: Life an Art of an Iconoclast, Tomas Venclova quotes an article written by Wat late in his life that sounds a seemingly un-Hill-ian note:

“Now I think that a return to the clear, most simple poem in a traditional form, with a theme, is not just desirable but possible. Yet what a difficult path it is, how many superstitions and small vanities have to be repudiated.”

To quote another authority, also among Hill’s enthusiasms, here are the final sentences of Milton’s A Treatise of Civil Power or, to cite the full title, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes; Showing That it Is Not Lawful For Any Power on Earth to Compel in Matters of Religion:

“Pomp and ostentation of reading is admired among the vulgar, but doubtless, in matters of religion, he is learnedest who is plainest. The brevity I use, not exceeding a small manual, will not therefore, I suppose, be thought the less considerable, unless with them, perhaps, who think that great books only can determine great matters. I rather choose the common rule, not to make much ado where less may serve, which in controversies, and those especially of religion, would make them less tedious, and by consequence read oftener by many more, and with more benefit.”