Geoffrey Hill
Clavics
Enitharmon Press, 2011
40 pages
£12.00
ISBN 978-1907587115

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Given Geoffrey Hill’s current reputation as a “difficult” poet, it’s easy to forget how reader-friendly, lucid, and accommodating he could once be. Here are two stanzas from the opening of Hill’s book-length poem The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983), written in memory of the French poet killed in World War I:

Crack of a starting-pistol. Jean Jaurés

Dies in a wine-puddle. Who or what stares

Through the café window crêped in powder smoke?

The bill for the new farce reads Sleepers Awake.
…

Did Péguy kill Juarés? Did he incite

The assassin? Must men stand by what they write

As by their camp-beds or their weaponry

Or shell-shocked comrades while they saga and cry?

And here is the first stanza of Hill’s most recent book-length poem, Clavics (2011), written, a helpful dust-jacket blurb informs us, in memory of “William Lawes the Royalist musician, killed at the battle of Chester”:

Bring torch for Cabbalah brand new treatise

Numerology also makes much sense,

O, Astrea

Watch us conform

To the immense

Lore, hypertense

Attaching to the swarm-

Ing mass the dense fluctuations of the material

Out from which I shall be lucky to twitch

Creative fire.

See where who goes?

Astrea, bitch!—

Suffices what she does

Returning rich

To the low threshold of contemplation

Her servile master subsisting on scraps

Keeping station

As one pursuing ethics perhaps.

Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not. I really can’t say, and I bet you can’t either. The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy began (literally) with a bang, but it also did an admirable job of filling readers in on relevant historical and biographical details without making them feel that they were being lectured, and without resorting to footnotes. Faced with an opening stanza like the one above, readers of Clavics can only hold on for dear life and hope things get clearer as they go along.

And at first it seems there’s reason to hope things might: “Clavics”, according to the mock definition that Hill provides from the “Oxford English Dictionary, 2012,” is “[t]he science or alchemy of keys”, and the poet and critic Ernest Hilbert has suggested that, taken together, the two stanzas of each section (the form of the second stanza in each case is modelled on George Herbert’s “Easter Wings”) are meant to resemble a key, or perhaps a key and keyhole. Perhaps, as door after door is opened, it will become increasingly clear what Hill is talking about. Certainly the second part of Section One is a model of clarity, if only compared to what came before:

Intensive prayer ís intensive care

Herbert says. I take it stress marks

Convey less care than flair

Shewing the works

As here

But if

Distressed attire

Be mere affect of clef

Dump my clavic books in the mire

And yes bid me strut myself off a cliff

One recognises the characteristics of Hill’s late style—the defensive attempt to disarm the reader and critic by defying them, the allusions that are so prevalent as to resemble a nervous tic, and an honest attempt to rehabilitate or redeem the sloganeering of contemporary language. George Herbert’s marvellous sonnet “Prayer” compares its subject to everything under the sun—and beyond the stars—so why not “intensive care”? There’s a formidable intelligence and powerful personality on display in this stanza, and had the poem continued on like this, it might have been worth the effort.

But the bulk of Clavics turns out to be extraordinarily difficult, almost impossible, to parse, and all too many passages that do yield up paraphrasable sense read like implausible headlines or mnemonic devices, as though they had been composed according to an Old-Norse verse form after one too many quaffs of mead: “Erasmus, in Praise of Folly: / Grand antidote no substitute for bling”; “Richard Dadd dab hand at Prize Depiction”; “Straw men in flagrante folk-upbraided”. It’s not that one can’t identify some of the themes to which Hill has dealt with so often throughout his career, particularly the relation between political power (violence) and art. The problem, rather, is that what he says about these topics here so often verges on gibberish.

For the many critics who have regarded Hill’s work since The Triumph of Love (1998) as a descent into grouchy obscurantism, Clavics will read like one more stage in a great poet’s decline. My own baffled incomprehension when faced with the work at hand is a slightly different case. While I’ve found none of Hill’s later works easy, I do think that a reasonably open-minded reader (particularly one sympathetic to high modernist literature) can find much value in them. The critical consensus has rightly regarded Speech! Speech! (2000) as Hill’s most rebarbative and difficult work up until this point, but even in that book, there are passages of great descriptive beauty as well as a spiky rhetorical power:

Reformation woodcuts enscrolled such things

between the lips of magistrates, prophets,

and visionary infants. To me it sounds

like communications breakdown, somebody

promoting his (say her) fanatical

expressionless self-creation on a stuck track.

Our show-host has died many times; the words

of welcome dismiss us.

Anomie is as good a word as any;

so pick any; who on earth will protest?

Whatever is said now I shall believe it

of the unnamed god.

The idea of playing this kind of clenched, fragmentary utterance across an intricate metrical and visual pattern, as Hill has done in Clavics, is an intriguing one. But as much as it pains me to say it, this new work does not contain one successful passage of the same length as the above. Now and then pieces bob up, like flotsam from a wreck, that recall Hill at his best:

Listen to and make music while you can

Pray Mater ora Filium

Cry Spem in Alium

God is made man

Choric

Lyric

Heaven Receives

Impartially these tributes

Creation call it that believes

Even to blasphemy in our ranged throats

On every page there are lines that crackle with intelligence : “Untenable still the timeless values”; “Virtues by will / Without them let us call plunder plenty”; “But one / Candle lit on / The well-iced birthday slab, so be my guest.” However, Clavics is a mistake that few poets now living would have the talent to make, but it is no less a mistake for that.

I can’t help thinking that this new poem is intended to express its own impossibility. Hill seems to be saying: Look, I have taken as my poem’s ostensible subject a musician; I have written said poem in a tightly rhymed form that is also a visual emblem; I have alluded to George Herbert, who was both a gifted musician and the English poet who married form to content more perfectly than any other. Further, I have cast my poem in 32 sections, 32 being the number of paths of wisdom in the Cabbala, as well as being one shy of the Christologically significant 33. None of that will help, though, since I, the poet, am writing in an age of “anarchical plutocracy” (to use William Morris’s term), when language has become so cheapened by politicians and the media that one can scarcely use it honestly without endless qualifications and self-recriminations. If parody and self-parody become indistinguishable, and I end up writing lines that are at once bad poetry and bad ad copy, so be it. Ich kann nicht anders.

The haunting dust-jacket photo for Clavics depicts a barn owl returning to its nest with wings spread wide, a living mouse dangling from its beak. The owl seems to wear a pleased expression on its face. The image would have been an apt emblem for nearly any of Hill’s previous works, obsessed as they have been with power, bloodshed, and sacrifice. Given the owl’s association with learning and scholarship, though, I wonder if the image doesn’t also serve as a warning to the hapless reader. As the book proceeded and my bafflement increased, I increasingly identified with the mouse’s predicament borne up to its dark end.

Bill Coyle is the author of the poetry collection The God of This World to His Prophet (2006) and recipient of a translation grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (2010).

Since graduating from Keble College, Oxford in 1953 Geoffrey Hill has pursued a joint career as academic and poet. From 1988 until retirement in 2006 he taught at Boston University, where he co-founded the Editorial Institute with fellow academic and Oxford’s current Professor of Poetry, Christopher Ricks. Hill’s academic interests are unusually wide-ranging; his recent Collected Critical Writings (OUP, 2008) contains essays across a wide spectrum of poets, critics, theologians, and philosophers from the Reformation to the late 20th century.

His first publication was a pamphlet in the now-celebrated Fantasy Poets series, a joint-venture of the Eynsham-based artist Oscar Mellor and the Oxford University Poetry Society; this appeared at the beginning of his third undergraduate year at Keble, and, like other pamphlets in the series (which included Adrienne Rich and George Steiner), is now a “collector’s item”. Since that time he has published 12 individual books of poetry. A Selected Poems appeared from Penguin in 2006; a Collected Poems is scheduled for 2012. Hill is an honorary fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge (where he taught from 1980 until 1988) and of Keble College, Oxford. He is also a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has honorary doctorates from Leeds and Warwick.

What follows is an edited version of an interview given at Keble on the morning of 27 February. On the previous evening he had addressed the Lord Herbert of Cherbury Society at Jesus College on the theme “Strongholds of the Imagination”.

As a poet and as an academic, what do you think the poet’s place should be within the institution of the university?

I don’t have much faith in creative writing courses such as the Master of Fine Arts programmes so prevalent in the States and increasingly active in the UK. I believe that poets should be self-taught, based on an intensive programme of preferably serendipitous reading. I exempt the Oxford Chair of Poetry and the Christopher Tower Chair at Christ Church; these are currently in very good hands and the emphasis on traditional teaching methods is probably firm. Auden used to hold informal sessions, for those who cared to attend, in a coffee shop in the Broad; that also I find entirely acceptable. I’m sorry to say that among early practitioners of creative writing degree classes in the States were people I greatly respect, such as the poet Allen Tate and the novelist Caroline Gordon. But at the time they were struggling to live by their wits, and were probably at their wit’s end.

Have you ever taught creative writing?

Once only; that was 50 years ago in the States. To teach creative writing well requires a particular kind of self-confidence which I didn’t possess. Looking back over so many years I feel more sorry for the students than for myself. It must have been a dismal experience for them also.

What is the public role of the poet? Are they historians or journalists?

Not quite in the sense that I think you intend. Obviously the poet’s public role is to be first and foremost a poet. But it is not ‘philosophically’ wrong for a poet to be deeply, or heavily, involved with journalism and/or politics; it all turns on the matter of intrinsic quality. The public role of the poem is to be a stronghold of the imagination. I wish in a way that I hadn’t read English at Oxford even though I obtained a first, which I doubt I would have done if I’d read any other school (well, history maybe). If I’d read PPE [Philosophy, Politics, and Economics], in which no doubt I’d have got a lower second or a third, I could have taught myself the necessary contexts for writing English poetry (I virtually did so, anyway).

How do you envisage your own poetry’s readership?

Impossible to say. When I see my half-yearly royalties statements I seem not to have a readership at all. Yet in 2006 when I gave a reading in the Sheldonian the place was packed, chiefly with young people. And at poetry readings I continually meet older people who bring for signing a copy of every book since For the Unfallen (1959). A few even have the frail 1952 Fantasy pamphlet. There are obviously devoted readers, but it’s all rather subterranean, a bit like wartime resistance. When you ask about “public role” you have to take into account this aspect also.

You have said that you admire poetry which creates “strongholds of the imagination” and that is why you tend to write “strong poetry”. Was this the type of writing you had in mind when you first began composing poetry?

No. I became a poet because at the age of ten or thereabouts (and long before concepts like “strong poetry” would have had any meaning) I fell in love with English poetry. I was brought up in a Worcestershire village where my father was the local bobby. I sang in the church choir and attended Sunday school. And that year my good attendance prize was Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Poetry, a Victorian bestseller. I might be impatient, even scornful now of some of its preferences, but to a boy of ten, it was a revelation and an initiation. From then until now there has been no escape. What I say latterly about strong poetry and semantics and the choice that poetry has, either to resist the pressures of the age or be imploded by them, these are my variants of Auden’s “dyer’s hand”; but the first reaction was total unjudgemental love. I should add that at Bromsgrove High School I had, as early even as the second form, a marvellous English teacher, Anne Gledhill, who was showing us Auden’s Look Stranger! poems.

Do you intend to reinvent your writing persona with every new collection?

Anyone reading through my Selected Poems might very well get that impression. The change in style between Mercian Hymns (1971) and Tenebrae (1978) was severe and intentional: from loping prose-poems to reined-back exercises in traditional forms, in particular the English versions of the Della Casan Sonnet (see F.T. Prince’s splendid The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse, 1954). I wrote The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy in rhetorical quatrains modelled on Péguy’s own. Poets who had liked Mercian Hymns—and I was surprisingly popular for a brief while—hated Tenebrae and The Mystery. I have to admit that, in changing about, I’m setting myself formal problems in order to see whether I can solve them, carry them through, to my own satisfaction (which can be pretty demanding). I think that people who in some odd way respect me bear with me; and that those who, for understandable reasons, don’t, don’t.

Is there any kind of unity across your work?

If there is unity it probably resides in a sense of gratitude to past, partly erased, national and international human intelligence and in my desire to celebrate it formally. I’m an in memoriam poet; have been since my earliest days, the days of the Fantasy Pamphlet in 1952. In the English 17th century I admire equally Hobbes and his great opponent Clarendon (and have written critical essays on both). I have learned much of value from a Catholic (Péguy) and a Confucian (Pound). Salman Rushdie says somewhere—I hope my memory serves—that he has always believed that literature should conduct an argument with the world. I’m drawn to writers who seem to me to be brave, beleaguered, and cheerful—like John Dryden.

What motivated you to write your most recent collection A Treatise of Civil Power?

The initial impulse to put together a book may be trivial. In the case of A Treatise I wanted a work that would resemble in appearance a pamphlet by John Milton: the likeness is evident only in the original Clutag Press edition; later printings by Penguin and Yale have lost it. I have summoned the presiding genius of Milton several times: he features in Canaan (1996), in The Triumph of Love (1998), and of course in Scenes From Comus (2005). I greatly admire his political sonnets. I believe that, were he alive now, he would be the people’s champion against plutocratic anarchy.

Until very recently I thought that I had invented the term plutocratic anarchy, but it appears to have originated with William Morris. A few days ago I happened upon the text of a lecture delivered at University College, Oxford in 1883 (“John Ruskin in the Chair”). Morris’s term, to be precise, is “anarchical Plutocracy”.

Anarchical Plutocracy destroys memory and dissipates attention; it is the enemy of everything that is summoned before us in Bishop Butler’s great pronouncement of 1729; “Everything is what it is, and not another thing”. Bad poetry, bad art, also dissipate the sense of things at once exactly and numinously understood. Great poetry is an act of unfailing attention; its frequently cited “music” must so be understood.

Geoffrey Hill
The Orchards of Syon
Counterpoint, 2002
72 pages

Difficult to end joyful starting from here, But I’ll surprise us.

These lines, taken from near the end of The Orchards of Syon (2002), follow one of Geoffrey Hill’s frequent references to some of the less humane moments of history (‘the Berlin Wall… Carthage chemically defoliate’), but they could easily be applied to Hill’s own poetic trajectory over the past seven years. In 1996, the first lines of Canaan, Hill’s first book for more than a decade, announced a significant shift in his conception of the poet’s role. They left behind the highly-wrought, self-involved lyrics for which he had become known, in favour of a mode of public denunciation, as in the poem ‘To the High Court of Parliament’:

Where’s probity in this –the slither-frisk
to lordship of a kind
as rats to a bird-table?