'Evidence on Which a Life Depends'

I always find consolation in T.S. Eliot’s observation in his 1929 essay “Dante” that “genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood.” Put aside for the moment what it means to “understand” a poem. Too often reading poetry is mistaken for a branch of cryptography. Take Geoffrey Hill, dead at age eighty-four in 2016. I think of the last decades of the twentieth and the early years of the twenty-first centuries as the Age of Hill, poetically speaking. For density of sheer linguistic matter and quantity of business going on word by word, line by line, few poets rival Hill. His later work can be baffling to casual readers, but with patience and a touch of faith the beauty of his best work becomes evident. Take “The Peacock at Alderton,” collected in A Treatise of Civil Power (2007):

“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 feathers. 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 luminate 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 stark as a warlock’s cape,

the maharajah-bird that scavenges

close by the stone-troughed, stone terraced, stone-ensurfed

Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.” 

For the moment, no code to crack. Savor the sound: “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.” Language worthy of the peacock’s enchanting gaudiness. 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.”

 

One more poem from the same volume, “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 (1900-67) 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. Late in life, visiting California, he recorded lengthy conversations with his countryman and fellow poet, Czesław Miłosz. The transcripts were translated into English by Richard Lourie and published in 1988 as My Century. To my taste, Wat is a middling poet, a “futurist,” but his oral memoir is an essential document from the bloodiest 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.”

 

To quote another authority among Hill’s enthusiasms, here are the final sentences of Milton’s A Treatise of Civil Power (1659) 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.”