'A Way of Reading the World'

“Poetry gives us a way of reading the world. Through its cadences, through its different ways of simultaneously conveying reason and feeling and the human senses, poetry makes it possible for people to express thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” 

Almost a decade has passed since the death of Geoffrey Hill. The Age of Hill is over, assuming it ever started. He was the dominant English poet after the deaths of Auden and Larkin. He died June 30, 2016, at age eighty-four. For his final twenty years, a prolific time for Hill, I read him expectantly, waiting for his next volume. He was never a member of the Mary Oliver School of Poetry Niceness and possessed an Old Testament ferocity.  The words above were spoken by his widow, Alice Goodman, a librettist and Anglican priest, months after her husband’s death. She writes:

 

“‘How does this line sound?’ ‘Have a look at this,’ we said to each other over and over again. We played with words. We argued accents and stresses, and the dovetailed enjambments of line-breaks. We scribbled on paper napkins at the dinner table. ‘You can’t do that!’ ‘Why can’t I?’ ‘It doesn’t work.’ ‘Oh, that’s lovely. I wish I’d written that.’ ‘If you’re going to write in bed, please use a pencil.’”

 

I return periodically to all of his books but find The Triumph of Love (1998) most rewarding. An excerpt from CXLVIII:

 

                                                            “I ask you:  

what are poems for? They are to console us

with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.  

Let us commit that to our dust. What

ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad  

and angry consolation. What is  

the poem? What figures? Say,  

a sad and angry consolation. That’s  

beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry  

consolation.”

 

Collected in Without Title (2006) is an elegy—perhaps Hill’s defining mode—“Offertorium: December 2002”:

 

“For rain-sprigged yew trees, blockish as they guard

admonitory sparse berries, atrorubent

stone holt of darkness, no, of claustral light:

 

“for late distortions lodged by first mistakes;

for all departing, as our selves, from time;

for random justice held with things half-known,

 

“with restitution if things come to that.” 

 

An elegy—for the departing year, for the self and its failings—and a prayer of thanks in a time of darkness. The yew berry is toxic and medicinal. “Atrorubent” means dark red. Darkness mingles with light. “Claustral” is cloistered, with a suggestion of monasticism (and of Dickinson: “There’s a certain slant of light / On winter afternoons”). The poem comes as close to conventional consolation as Hill ever gets, and the descent of the conclusion into the colloquial is typical of Hill. The rare appearance of the demotic in his poetry usually signifies the comic, however mirthless it may seem. In 2009 I reviewed Hill’s Selected Poems for the now-defunct Quarterly Conversation and concluded:

 

“Hill is not for the faint-of-heart. His rudeness is often savage, and he is seldom afraid to skirt absurdity. He once wrote: ‘An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent.’”