`Now It Is Gone'

Geoffrey Hill is dead. He celebrated the treacheries and glories of language. In a fine late poem, "Discourse: For Stanley Rosen," collected in Without Title (2006), Hill writes of language: “its bleak littoral swept by bursts of sunlight.” Another meeting of sun and soil comes in “An Emblem,” from A Treatise of Civil Power (2007):

“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.”