'As in a Deep Mirror, My Wise Men'

Reading A Factotum in the Book in the Book Trade (Biblioasis, 2022) by the poet, travel writer and bookseller Marius Kociejowski has sent me back to Geoffrey Hill, whose work I have hardly read since his death in 2016. I don't understand the reluctance. Few poets have been as central to me as Hill but something kept repelling me. Kociejowski knew Hill and sold him books, and the poet dedicated Odi Barbare (2012) to him and his late friend, Christopher Middleton. In Factotum, Kociejowski writes of Hill:

"I think he began to believe a little too much in his own voice. Old men do. This said, what he had set out to do, he did, and if he confounded our expectations, so be it; I salute him." When reading Hill, verse or prose, we are always kept aware of the past, of our eminent and obscure dead, and of the living tradition. He reminds us that the present is a ditch where refuse collects, a provincial place, and no cause for self-congratulation. To think otherwise is delusion and sentimentality. This is from a late poem by Hill:

“They change perspective as in a deep mirror,

My wise men: Mandelstam who visited

Dante like an angel in his head;

Seraphic Blok born-again commissar;

 

“Musorgsky [sic] rapt in some strange providence,

Pushkin’s, Gogol’s, treading with precision,

As music does, even a Fool’s vision

Or dances for the drunk Ukrainians—”

 

Mandelstam wrote the wonderful “Conversation About Dante.” Blok published The Journey to Italy in 1909. A monument to Pushkin stands in the Villa Borghese gardens in Rome. Gogol lived for years in Rome, where he wrote Dead Souls. Hill visited Italy for the first time in 2007, and in the late poems he often addresses Eugenio Montale, another of his masters.

 

The grammar of the first eleven words in the stanzas quoted above appears to be both transitive and intransitive. The way we look at “[our] wise men” shifts and evolves over time and they in turn alter us. Some of us rank Hill among the wise men, with “a Fool’s vision.” It’s hard to believe he has been dead almost six years. In “Conversation on Dante” (1934-35; trans. Clarence Brown and Robert Hughes, 1971), Mandelstam writes: “A good education is a school of the most rapid associations: you grasp things on the wing, you are sensitive to allusions—this is Dante’s favorite form of praise.” And Hill’s.

 

[The lines from Hill quoted at the top are from the fifty-fourth numbered section of the long poem, or “Daybook,” as Hill called it, Al Tempo De’ Tremuoti. It is collected in Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 (Oxford, 2013).]