55.1.ang

The Bedrock of Gravity: Pondering the Grammar of Fall in GeoffreyHill

Susan Ang

Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Volume 55, Number 1, Spring2013, pp. 1-30 (Article)

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Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Vol. 55, No. 1, Spring 2013 2013 by the University of Texas PressDOI: 10.7560/TSLL55101

The Bedrock of Gravity: Pondering the Grammar of Fall in

Geoffrey Hill

Susan Ang

In a footnote to his Version, as he refers to it, of Ibsens Brand, Geoffrey Hill writes, The best gifts one person can make to another, in this eld of endeavour, are technical details; it is the precise detail, of word or rhythm, which carries the ethical burden; it is technique, rightly understood, which provides the true point of departure for inspiration (Brand xi). As charac-teristic of anything written by Hill, the comment has a density not for the impatient. As it speaks of burdens, it is itself loaded in more ways than one. To use an adjective favored of the poet himself, it is ponderable (Word 146; Envoi (1919) 85): it is to be mulled over, considered, examined; it is also heavy. Among other things, it invites one to think about the relation-ship of ethics to poetics. It raises the question of how, exactly, we are to interpret ethical burden. It also asks us to consider just how words and rhythms may register, or fail to register, ethical issues and how changes in word and rhythm may shift that burden around. We are thus invited to think about the ethics involved in the choice of word or rhythm, and yet again, along a separate trajectory, about whether indeed, and how, and why, precision might be thought of as having an ethical dimension to it. With Hill, one should never assume anything less than an exact and absolute scrupulousness about language, what it both entails and enacts. In The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Pguy, he asks,

Must men stand by what they writeas by their camp-beds or their weaponryor shell-shocked comrades while they sag and cry?1 (183)

The shape of the question admits of only one answer.2 His observation about how the precise detail of word or rhythm carries the ethical bur-den cannot function in good faith except as it functions self-reexively, submitting to be bound by what it legislates. The importance, then, of the phrase resides not merely in the general denotable content with which

Susan Ang2

it is freighted, but also in the precise choices of carries and ethical and burden and in the metaphor formed from their complicity. It is the implications of his words and the ethical considerations that they make available to us that this essay will attempt to trace, along with the place of these in the grammar structuring Hills thinking in some of his earlier works. I will mostly, though not exclusively, be looking at poems from Hills rst collection, For the Unfallen (1959). I have here written grammar because it appears to me that there is a dened structure and set of relations between the elements in Hills writing and thought. The section of Hills grammar this essay sets out to consider concerns the syntax of Fall as it relates to unfallen and also to gravity, heaviness, burdens, and bearing. It might be worth beginning with something seemingly straightforward: the title of the col-lection For the Unfallen. The obvious sense of the unfallen is of survivors, those who did not fall in battle, those who remain standing and are still alive. This is a sense, for instance, identied by Knottenbelt, who describes the poems as coming from one survivor of certain kinds of loss for other survivors of similar and quite different forms of loss, among whom the reader may count himself, depending on the extent to which he under-stands this (8). Knottenbelt and others have also been attuned to that other sense of unfallen, glossable as being in a state of innocence with-out experience or, simply, pre-lapsarian (Knottenbelt 15). We may, though, arrive at a sharper sense of unfallen and the ethical value with which unfallen-ness is burdened by looking at its oppositefallen-nessas it is pondered in Genesis and other poems. Hollander has remarked on the almost Blakean sense of the inherence of the Fall in the very Creation (300301) that is found in Genesis. While there is indeed such an inherence, and while it does, as Hollander says, take the form of nature red in tooth and claw, fallen-ness also manifests as grav-ity, inertia, resistance, struggle,3 and also weight. The emphasis is there in the poems. It is, however, not in For the Unfallen but in a relatively late poem, De Jure Belli ac Pacis (IV) (Canaan) that the connection between two key ideasfallen-ness and gravityis explicitly articulated: Evil is not goods absence but gravitys / everlasting bedrock (33). Recurring in Hills writings is a sense of gravitys dominion; recur-rent, too, is a sense of weightiness and weighted-down-ness as it is found in the world. For example:

Karl Barth remarked that Sin is the specic gravity of human nature as such. I am suggesting that it is at the heart of this heaviness that poetry must do its atoning work, this heaviness which is simulta-neously the density of language and the specic gravity of human nature.4 (Poetry as Menace and Atonement 15)

3The Grammar of Fall in Geoffrey Hill

Or:

An enquiry into the nature of rhythm must rst attempt to account for the inertial drag of speech. Language gravitates and exerts a gravita-tional pull. . . . In Wordsworths Ode: Intimations of Immortality . . . published in 1807, the lineHeavy as frost, and deep almost as life!is a weighed acknowledgement of customs pressure. . . . (Redeem-ing the Time 87)

Or: If Hopkinss words are heavy bodies they are bent down to earth . . . (Word 153). Or: Either way this is the gravamen of the mat-ter, but the matter may of course be an occasion for levity (Word 153). This is only a quick sample; various senses of gravitas and its con-ceptual relatives inhabit both the essays and the poems.5 When a critic like Christopher Ricks says that one does not blithely accuse Geoffrey Hill of being blithe (The Force of Poetry 319) he is likely at some level to be responding to this gravitas. As late as Scenes from Comus (2005), the empha-sis on weight and gravity is still observable, as is evident in Hills sense of the leadenness of things and the reiteration of pondus, glossed by the OED as power to inuence or bias; moral force, and also a weight; chiey g. And in Without Title (2006), we nd the joyous triumph of the jumping boy who is winning / a momentous and just war / with gravity (7). Hill is of course not the rst poet, nor will he be the last, to see heavi-ness and gravity as signs for various metaphysical states. Seamus Heaneys The Redress of Poetry (1990), for example, which like Hills Poetry ad-dresses the question of what it is that poetry does and what it sets itself to accomplish, also presents an apologia formulated in terms of weight and gravity:

Obedience to the force of gravity. The greatest sin. So Simone Weil also writes in Gravity and Grace. Indeed her whole book is informed by the idea of counterweighting, of balancing out the forces, of redresstilting the scales of reality towards some transcendent equi-librium. And in the activity of poetry, too, there is a tendency to place a counter-reality in the scalesa reality which may be only imagined but which nevertheless has weight because it is imagined within the gravitational pull of the actual and can therefore hold its own and bal-ance out against the historical situation . . . In this century, especially, from Wilfred Owen to Irina Ratushinskaya, there have been many poets who from principle, in solitude, and without any guarantee of success, were drawn by the logic of their work to disobey the force of gravity. . . . (34)

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Heaneys redress, however, wears a face quite different from Hills atonement, not least because it is itself imagined within the gravi-tational pull of the actual, while Hills atonement is at once more abstract, more philosophical. This is true also of his gravity, which moves past the secular metaphysics of Heaney to approach Karl Barths and Simone Weils more theological apprehension of the idea. It is likely that Gravity and Grace also informs Hills thinking on the subject. (Weils work has been quoted and alluded to by Hill on more than one occasion, although it is to The Need for Roots and the First and Last Notebooks that he directly refers, rather than to Gravity and Grace). The following are some of Weils propositions:

All the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analo-gous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception.

We must always expect things to happen in conformity with the laws of gravity unless there is supernatural intervention.

Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity. . . .

Lear, a tragedy of gravity. Everything we call base is a phenomenon due to gravity. Moreover the word baseness is an indication of this fact. . . .

Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace and the descending movement of the second degree of grace. (13)

These apothegms nd a strong acceptance in Hills writing, with Weils observation regarding baseness especially resonating with Hills ex-pressed view of evil as gravitys bedrock. That same line in Hill also allies itself with Barths comment, given above, to the effect that [s]in is the specic gravity of human nature as such. All this may help a little to clarify the place of gravity in his thinking: it is the physical symptom or sign of a metaphysical or theological condition. And in the observation about Hopkinss words as heavy bodies quoted above, the meta physical or theological import of the description is immediately made clear by the full context of the commentwhich context was earlier omitted but provided here, Hill quoting Nygren to the effect that in Augustine, the sinful soul is bent down to earth; in Luther it is bent upon itself (Word 15253). Hopkinss words, then, by implication, are weighted down by the consciousness of their sinfulness. A detailed examination of Genesis not only underscores Hollanders observation concerning the inherence of the Fall in the Creation (Knottenbelt 9), but also reveals more of what Hill invests in the


concepts both of fallen-ness and unfallen-ness. There is a cluster of words and ideas in Genesis which may be found to amplify each other: bear, load, heaviness, and, at a short distance from these, fall. We may pause for a second to review some of the possible meanings and as-sociations of bear in order to set them resonating against a second group of words which includes gravitygravitas, grave, even gravid-ity, perhaps gravamen. I began this essay by speaking of the carrying of ethical burdens which is undertaken by the precise detail of word or rhythm, and both carry and burden reverberate markedly with bear and heaviness. Bear is a synonym of carry. Bear can refer to the animal of that name, or it can mean to endure, to gestate and to give birth to something; it can also be used in phrases like to bear down upon someone or something, to bear out in the sense of bearing witness to the truth of a matter. The word can be found in other forms, too, such as to bring to bear or to have a bearing on, both of these last concern-ing themselves with matters of relevance, orientation, connection; to nd ones bearings again invokes orientation, a positioning of oneself in rela-tion to other people or things.6 Unlike bear, which has an actual presence in the poem, gravity and its cognates are present only as noumena rather than phenomena; like the phoenix in Genesis, they are phantom-birdsor rather, phantom-wordsboth bringing to bear an invisible though not impalpable pressure on the poem as well as having a bearing on it. The point here draws on what Peter Robinson astutely recognizes: the words in a poem derive their meanings from continuing relations with other words which are not in the poem, and never were (26). Despite an opening section that tempts the reader initially to approach it as a poem celebrating creation, one which cries the miracles of God, Genesis is a poem less about celebrating the abundance of Creation than about the recognition of, and working out the ethics involved in, an ac-commodation with fallen-ness and the fallen world. While the opening stanza details a Creation on the one hand marked by apparent energythe Poet-Speaker striding against the burly air, the salmon striving, ramming the ebb, in the tides pull to reach the hills above (15), what emerges despiteor perhaps because ofthe energy, is the resistance against which that energy has to be expended. The Death of Shelley (48) ends with the bull and great mute swan strain[ing] into life; the opening line of The White Ship (40) describes the living going with effort. This same sense of straining and of going with effort is exactly what is on display in Genesis. Where the hurl and gliding of Hopkinss wind-hover rebuff[s] the big wind (132), and where Shakespeares Pity, like a naked newborn babe, effortlessly strides the blast, Hills Poet-Speaker both resists, but is also resisted by, the burly air. Man is neither at one nor in harmony with nature, but at odds with, and opposed to, it.

Susan Ang6

The apparent vibrancy of the world in Genesis masks an under lying inertia and heaviness (as pointed to by the dead weight of the land). Essentially, it is gravityin all its senses and associated meaningswhich emerges as the essential and preeminent condition governing things. Grav-ity holds sway even over language, and the sound of language. Resistance is in part registered and heightened by the rhythms and sounds the poem makes (in the precise details of technique meaning is encoded): the hard ds of strode, load, and God mime a slight juddering which slows down the poem as it moves to the end of each line, this resistance continu-ing through brought and bear to dead, weight, and land. It is again encountered in the ramming [of] the ebb, in the tides pull, where the difculties of sound are joined by the awkwardness of uneven or ir-regular rhythms, an awkwardness that, if one looks over the whole of the rst section, has in fact erupted every few lines, crumpling the rhythm and threatening to throw the reader off-stride as the burly air does the Poet-Speaker. Hill has spoken of the inherent inertia of language and of the rare moments in which it seems to have been overcome (Poetry 2);7 here, however, the use he makes of the auditory properties of language shows the inertia threatening to bring what language enacts to a halt. We encounter, incidentally, almost exactly the same sense of hard re-sistance against which energy spends itself to little prot in The Turtle Dove (23), where the opening lines run aground in the hard alveolar stops: Love that drained her drained him shed loved, though each / For the others sake forged passion upon speech. . . . The voicing of the lines allows their point to emerge even more sharply; the effort that is expended in voicing the sequence of hard sounds in drained her drained him shed loved (23) is draining: coordinating with the alveolar stops, the preponderance of stressed syllables makes demands on energy. The comma, which could have made an appearance after her, is postponed, appearing only after loved; and its deferral results in a line with no letup, no place to breathe, accentuating both the sense of draining and also the stiing nature of the relationship. Resistance and energy also come into play elsewhere. The second line of Genesis as it rst appeared in For the Unfallen (the line is omitted in the version of the poem published in the Collected Poems), where the tight ocean heaves its load simultaneously gestures toward bear, burden, and heavy. The ocean carries its load, but does not do so easily. The sea is brought to bear / upon the dead weight of the land, and in being so brought to bear is both oriented and made relevant to the land as well as made a burden for the land to support. Sea and land, formerly separate terms, together engender a fertility that is both semantic and literal, as evident both in the way that the sea is brought to bearto give birthand in the proliferating meanings of the word/phrase, while the gravid


rivers spawning their sand suggests the new life issuing from that conjunction. The sense of plenitude and exuberance in the ourishing waves and the salt and full streams stands in marked contrast to the decorous and emotionally arid relationship hinted at in The Lowlands of Holland (47), where we are called upon to [w]itness earth fertilized, decently drained,8 / The sea decent again behind walls. Not even the airborne predators in the second section of Genesis are immune to gravitys force. They plunge, the metaphorical hooped steel (15) of their bodies adding to the sense of weight and the momen-tum of their fall. To bear has on the second day mutated to its homonym bare, whose meanings, in fact, shift along the spectrum from birth to death, from gravid to the grave: it is living sinew that is laid bare, blood that is feathered along the shore as prey is killed. The sea, brought to bear upon the land, has metamorphosed into the predators forever bent upon9 the kill, displaying an orientation no longer even supercially Edenic, but one more patently fallen. The recognition of that fallen-ness leads to a renunciation, a rejection of the world, which is now apostrophized as unregenerate, suggesting that which is both unrepentant and murderous, as well as that which will neither regenerate nor generatethat which will no longer bear fruit or give birth. Both unregenerate clay and ashy sea (16) are eschewed. The image of the albatross mutates into that of the even more solitary phoe-nix brooding over its own immortality. [B]rooding immortality (16) suggests the heaviness with which immortality weighs on one. This is a heaviness equal to that with which mortality presses down on Jane Fraser, who is depicted as brooding over death / Like a strong bird above its prey (22), or that intimated in the pregnant silence of the tongue broody in the jaw (42) in Elegiac Stanzas.10 Brooding, according to the OED, is to meditate moodily, or with strong feeling, on or over; to dwell closely upon in the mind; to nurse or foster the feeling of. To brood, however, is also to sit on eggs in order to hatch them. Thus are we returned to notions of reproduction and bearing. The slightly grim point, however, is that what the phoenixthe incarnation of the Poet-Speaker in sections 3 and 4 of Genesisbroods over is not a clutch. Depending on which mythology one consults, when the phoenix self-immolates, the new phoenix either emerges as a worm from the ashes (no egg is involved) or, in another version of events, hatches from the sin-gle egg that exists at any one time. The brooding immortality is thus either an eternity spent in moody contemplation or a solipsistic meditation upon ones immortality. The phoenixs brooding immortality, its isolation a distasted response to the fallen world bent on its kill, stands in marked contrast to Hopkinss Holy Ghost, who, in Gods Grandeur (128), over the bent world broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

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In the nal section of Genesis the speaker, having reentered the world, now rides, rather than strides, about the works of God, the resistances and friction of section 1 ameliorated but not wholly overcome by the lubricant of blood. The syntax and wording of the nal section register a precarious balance between the redemptiveness of blood and that which is in need of redemptionfallen-ness is not to be facilely erased or eradicated.

And by Christs blood are men made freeThough in close shrouds their bodies lieUnder the rough pelt of the sea; Though Earth has rolled beneath her weightThe bones that cannot bear the light. (16)

While the meaning of this could roughly translate as a fairly orthodox pronouncementthough we are otherwise dead, Christs blood frees usthe syntax of this nal sentence, by issuing the manumitting clause rst and the grave condition from which we are freed after, in fact leaves us with a less triumphal sense than would have been the case had the syntax followed a more standard progression. Given Hills scrupulousness about the precise detail, the syntax here has to be treated as making a deliber-ate point, drawing the sentence and poem to a close with a reminder of the weight and inertia with which it began and afrming that we escape. The bones that cannot bear the light, rolled over by the weight of Earth, give a nal twist to bear, here meaning endure; except that this is exactly what they are unable to do. Man, here inferred through the image of the broken and incomplete bodybody and bones skinless but for that supplied by the sea, blood-less but for that supplied by Christcannot endure the light, which is a metaphor for both the light of Christ (salvation) and enlightenment (knowl-edge or awareness). This despairing acknowledgment is heightened by the pun on light which ends the poem. Light is both that which is not dark and that which is not heavythe second sense is brought into play by the word weight in the line above, with which it strives to rhyme, and fails. There is no levity in the play of language, only the deep gravity which marks the fallen condition. The sea and earth each bear their tight loads and dead weights, and man is unable to bear his light burden of awareness, nor perhaps even the burden of a bestowed salvation. This nal section, then, afrms both the bloodiness of the fallen world and the redemptiveness of blood. It stops short, however, of condent cel-ebration, offering a rough comfort not unmixed with a little despair. The image of the seas rough pelt suggests the idea of being swaddled in fur; the pelt, however, is rough, not smooth, and pelt, moreover, attests to a death. Rough pelt could also suggest, alternatively, being stoned or hit;


Arnolds pebbles, which the waves draw back and ing up the high shore in Dover Beach (211) come to mind. It might be useful, at this point, to pause and attempt to draw the threads of the discussion together. As noted earlier, unfallen may designate either the survivors or the innocent, those who have not yet fallenaccording to Christian theology, into a state of sin or guilt. While in some sense an obvious point, it may yet be worth noting that despite the orthodox theological view of it as calamity, there is nonetheless a line of thought concerning the Fall that resolves as Aquinass felix culpa, the fortunate arc of whose logic culminates in redemption and Christs second coming. There is, however, in addition to the theologically rationalized Fall of the felix culpa, a more secular and humanistone is tempted to say Romanticinterpretation of the Fall as, if not exactly fortunate, then at least as an event bringing with it certain important compensations: awareness and a human understanding enriched by small graces won out of struggle, a knowledge of difculty, sorrow, death. It is this sense of Fall which is being worked through in Hills work. In Genesis, and in other poems in For the Unfallen, Hill muses over fallen-ness, revisiting, as he does so, the innocence versus experience debate. Fallen-ness may bring with it gravity and weight, may neces-sitate blood, but Eden and the state of innocence or purity nonetheless emerge as being staticor at least a little barren, a little airless. Eden, in one of its manifestations, is the Midas feast in which one encounters the unsatised stony hunger of the dispossessed / Locked into Eden by their own demand (The Masque of Blackness 146). This ironic Eden, incidentally, discovers an equally ironic Canaan in the un peopled region of Funeral Music IV (King Log 73). Addressing the Arabic philosopher/ jurisprudist Averroes (112698), Hills poem contemplates the metaphorical and metaphysical utopia which would ensue under the rule of Intellects absolute law, the images speaking for themselves:

Our lives could be a myth of captivityWhich we might enter: an unpeopled regionOf ever new-fallen snow, a palace blazingWith perpetual silence as with torches.

Unpeopled suggests not only the attractiveness of the quiet and the spa-cious but also that which is empty and isolated. Ever new-fallen snow again manages the dual implications of an ever-renewable pristineness, a tabula ever rasa, and a vista of eternal winter, while the palace blazing / With perpetual silence as with torches is a monument bowing both be-fore the grandeur of the ercely absolute11 intellect that blazes out, and the equally ercely absolute silence which is its sole companion.

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In Holy Thursday (18), Eden is represented by the hollow grove in which the passage or sad remove of the seasons is ignored, and in Genesis by the place where Capricorn and Zero cross, the place of the charmed phoenix in the unwithering tree. Here, having renounced the fallen world, the Poet-Speaker, in his persona as the phoenix, moves to retreat into a prelapsarian Eden into which he attempts to lock himself, striving to achieve (to borrow a description applied elsewhere by Hill), an Archimedean ec-stasis, a station above and beyond the worlds grav-ity and folly, a place of serenely measured hypotheses (Word 144). The value Hill ascribes to these various Edens, however, is clear. The grove is hollow, the ocean pointless, and the phoenix scouring the ashes of the sea is a phantom-bird, a legendary ghost that goes wild and lost, / Upon a pointless ocean tossed (16). Pointless subtly rejoins to bear: to be on a pointless ocean is both to be in a place without refer-ence points, to be without the benet of compass bearings, and to be lost, to endure without meaning. A different, but possibly related, sense of compass(es) and point may also perhaps be found in the description of Creation in Paradise Lost, in which God takes his golden Compasses in order to circumscribe the Universe, and all created things (Paradise Lost 7: 22527). If we were to read Genesis through Milton, Hills pointless ocean would be that which has symbolically seceded from that Universe to place itself outside the circumscription of the divine compasses, to exist where compass direc-tions do not obtainpresumably in some imagined corner of the round earth. The place of the phoenix is given out as lying where Capricorn and Zero crossin theory a locatable place; but after all, both are imaginary lines.12 The inhabitant of the pointless ocean has become un-encompass-able in all the senses and associations of the word, unknowable and also immortal, no longer coming within the bending sickles compass. Eden is unmappable because it is not subject to the gravitational pull of the actual, not part of the real, mappable world;13 the terms of resi-dence there consign one to a ghostly existence, a half-life. In The White Ship (40), creatures passed through the wet sieve of the sea do so with-out enrichment or decay, a description not without appropriateness to those attempting to live an unfallen, Edenic existencethe corollary of unfallen-ness is stasis; the corollary of decay warded off is the absence of enrichment. The phoenix in Genesis, then, in its unwithering, un-decaying tree, has not achieved a transcendent ec-stasis14 so much as an impoverished stasis. We may in fact nd the converse but complementary side to the argu-ment in which unfallen = undecaying/immortal = static, unregenerate/ungenerating in the poem Merlin, where what was once rich seed has decayed to husks, the erstwhile site of Logres being now covered by the


pinnacled corn (19). This is no static Eden. Hills brief Merlin makes its bow to Tennysons dying Arthur, who tells Bedivere: The old order chan-geth, yielding place to new / And God fullls himself in many ways / Lest one good custom should corrupt the world (Morte dArthur 67). Here, that which is rich decays in order to enrich something else, as is sug-gested in the image of rich seed turning to husks replenished in time by new corn. The something else that is enriched is history, legend, myth. All this suggests, then, that decay and death, as aspects of the Fall and fallen-ness, are, perhaps paradoxically, necessary to enrichment and re-generation, and argues for the necessity of the Fall. There is no bloodless myth will hold (16) recalls for us vegetation and other myths of renewal dependent on blood sacrice, willing or unwilling. However, a caveat. While it is true that decay and death as manifestations of the Fall have an importance in Hills philosophy, it is also true that Hills poetry cautions against an over-readiness to subscribe to the notion that death or blood offers a facile redemption. If we revisit the conclusion of Genesis briey, we may in fact begin to experience a faint sense of disquiet at the apparent artlessness of its credo, its docile chime, its dutiful rhythms:

By blood we live, the hot, the coldTo ravage and redeem the worldThere is no bloodless myth will hold.And by Christs blood are men made free. . . . (16)

One should not, however, mistake for actual navete the attempt to aban-don agon for the relatively restful simplicity of blood myth, whose efcacy in redemptive terms is, in any case, made to sound a little doubtful by the syntax of the closing lines, as discussed above. Nor does redemption through blood offer a quick x in Canticle for Good Friday, where Christs death leaves Thomas not transgured (38). And in the rst of the Two Formal Elegies, subtitled For the Jews in Europe, we read:

Arrogant acceptance from which song derivesIs bedded with their blood, makes ourish youngRoots in ashes. The wilderness revives. (30)

This is not quite as straightforward as it might seem. The notion of the wasteland revived through blood is made ironic by the very glibness with which the mythic paradigm presents itself. The deaths of those who are subdued under rubble, water, in sand graves (30) could be argued as being given meaning but only by being appropriated into the structures of vegetation myth. In fact, such an appropriation represents an atrocity of

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another kind, for it attempts to smooth over or subdue the atrociousness of those deaths. The seductive sweetness of the mythic paradigm which offers to redeem the meaning of the deaths is deceptive because it seeks to obscure the true harshness of those deaths. A similar irony is at work in the closing lines of the second of the two elegies:

To put up stones ensures some sacrice.Sufcient men confer, carry their weight.(At whose door does the sacrice stand or start?) (31)

The irony comes from the imbalance or incommensurateness between the long death of the Jews on the one hand, and on the other, the some sacrice undertaken by sufcient men, in which phrasing is audible the rather pharisaical patting of ones own virtuous back. What is described in these lines reverberates ironically with what we nd elsewhere: the tak-ing up of the burden of fallen-ness is contrasted with the failure of true ethical response represented in the actions of the sufcient men who carry the weight of the stones that will go into the constructed monument memorializing the dead. Sufcient here means neither enough nor an adequate number of men; these men are neither morally adequate nor enough when weighed in the balance; sufcient here translates as smugly self-sufcient. What they carry are merely stones which again are used to cover over, or subdue, the atrocity of the Holocaust.15 The stones represent, if you like, an unethical burden as opposed to an ethical one. Given the associations of Edenic and undecaying spaces, unfallen-ness becomes a suspect or at least ironic term. To be unfallen marks a survival, but a survival on terms that begin to look suspiciously empty, a little selsh. The speaker of The Bidden Guest, who afrms the spurred ame, / Those racing tongues, yet is unable to come out of his hearts unbroken room, is such a survivor, an inhabitant of such an Eden, stand-ing apart from and contrasted to the broken mouths spilling their hoard of prayer during the breaking of the bread (20). The echoing, in a rela-tively short space of lines, of unbroken, broken, breaking draws attention to the hermeticism of Eden (I use hermetic here in a differ-ent sense from Vincent Sherrys sense of the alchemical in The Uncommon Tongue), represented by the hearts unbroken room. The hermeticand hermiticexistence is untouched by the pain implied in broken mouths, but the value that we are invited to assign to it is similar to that which implicitly accrues to the man who stands sealed against the [. . .] injury of the injured and brave who crawl in scorched vistas (44) in Little Apocalypse.16 To be unfallen, or to remain within the hearts un broken room, loses a certain validity when juxtaposed with the breaking of the


bread, which commemorates the presence of Christ, who himself left heaven to dwell among fallen men. Other poems contain similar hermetic images: the poet shut with wads of sound into a sudden quiet (17) in Gods Little Mountain; the damp curtains glued against the pane which seal time away (22) in In Memory of Jane Fraser; the house that kept storms in and storms out (27) in Asmodeus; the [h]ermetic radiance of great suns kept in (44) in Little Apocalypse; the sea decent again behind walls (47) in The Lowlands of Holland; the saint in his window in In Piam Memo-riam, whose stained glass lters out the cruder light of the world, the common, puddled substance (56) beneath. None of these images is rendered approvingly. In each that hermeti-cism is empty, sterile, lonely, ethically questionable. The unrestrained conjunction of sea and earth in Genesis has become, in The Lowlands of Holland, a bloodless, and, if not literally (earth is, after all, fertilized), then at least emotionally a sterile thing; to appropriate a line from The Distant Fury of Battle, they are not past conceiving but past care (26). This sterility is intimated as, post-encounter, sea and earth become decent again in private, returning to their separate and unmating, sealed-off, Apollonianized (one is tempted to say stodgily Dutch) ex-istences. Nor is the sealed environment in any case truly inviolate, as In Piam Memoriam makes clear: the punning description of the saint, [o]f wordly purity the stained archetype (56) both establishes his separate lily-and-gold- coloured stained-glass existence while pointing to how even this existence is ironically already stained, already impure. We may recall how in Our Word Is Our Bond the word infect is repeatedly given proximity to tincture (141, 145), coloring that stains, a meaning which its double relationship both to taint and tint helps to draw out. Hill has written of how we are shaken out of our self-containment, our passionate attachment to those forms of hermetic mastery which must be so rebuked by life (Poetry 3).17 While there is some ambiguity about which sense of hermetic he inclines toward, one suspects a double invo-cation. Self-containment is both self-sufciency as well as solipsism; the rebuke it merits from life presumably comes from its refusal to engage with it, to participate in both the common weal as well as the common woe. If to be unfallen is at one level to be self-contained, to fall is to enter the world of esh and blood, and the bloods pain (Genesis 16), or to nd the world again (Gods Little Mountain 17), which is established as the only valid place to be. To remain unfallen is to remain unbloodied, untouched, unaware, but this is also to refuse to take up the burden of a broken humanityto refuse to bear the light. In Canticle for Good Friday, which considers the crucixion via Thomass (hypothetical) response to it and Thomas through his response to the crucixion, we read:

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The cross staggered him. At the cliff-topThomas, beneath its burden, stoodWhile the dulled woodSpat on the stones each dropOf deliberate blood.A clamping cold-gured dayThomas (not transgured) stamped, crouched,WatchedSmelt vinegar and blood. He,As yet unsearched, unscratchedAnd suffered to remainAt such near distance. . . . (38)

The poems meaning is generated by the ambiguities set into the lines. The opening sentence fails to clarify immediately who the he is who is staggered by the cross; the instinctive interpretation one (wrongly, as it turns out) jumps to is that he must refer to Christ, staggering under the weight of the cross. The following line, which describes Thomas be-neath its burden, undoes the initial assumption, but only, potentially, to institute a new misconception in its place. The phrasing, which has led the unwary reader to picture Thomas staggering beneath the burden of the cross, causes that reader now to mistake for a moment Thomas as the man who had to carry Christs cross for him when it became too much for Christ to bear. This is of course wrong: that man was Simon of Cyrene. With that awareness, the meaning of the poem rearranges itself and the mind comprehends that the sentences need to be understood in a differ-ent way. Thomas is staggered by the cross not because he is under it but merely because he is shocked by it, put off his stride. He is beneath its burden not because he is carrying it, but because he is standing under-neath the burden which the cross is bearing, namely Christ. The dulled wood gathers in not just the cross which it metonymizes, but also subtly implicates Thomas, the dulled watcher, who though staggered is not transgured; dulled wood also perhaps implicates the reader, who has not been as alive to slipperinesses of meaning as he should. However, the lines are not just registering the capacity of language to deceive or the multiplicity of language; the point is a more incisive one, comprehensible only through the process of misreading or imperfect read-ing that allows the wrong interpretation to lie juxtaposed beside the correct one and the distance between them to be measured. Hill could have written the poetic equivalent of Thomas stood, looking at Christ on the cross, shocked; but this would not have articulated the same point, dramatized by the act of reading, which rst places Thomas in the posi-tion of the burden-bearer, only to have to remove him from that role and


reassign him as watcher, not actor.18 The point, then, is not simply that he is observing Christ on the cross, but that he is not staggering under the burden of the crossit is not what he is doing, but what he is not doing that is important. Thomas is suffered to remain / At such near distance, but the point again is not that he is suffered to remain near the cross, but that he does not himself suffer on it, remaining instead at a (near) distance from it. Again, it is the not that matters; it does not matter how short a distance there is between the sufferer and the observer. That short distance yields all the difference in meaning. The way, as the eleventh section of The Pentecost Castle (Tenebrae) says, may be so short (142), but as long as it is untraversed, held back from, the distance continues to remain. Ricks has pointed out (and at some length) what can be done with brackets (and other marks of punctuation) and what it is that Hill does with these things in The Tongues Atrocities (Force 285318). Concluding his essay with Canticle, Ricks observes how the brackets simulta neously mediate attachments and detachment (Force 318). Thomas (not transgured) is detached; and this brings us round to the point that, effectively, Thomas is like the Bidden Guest and other sufcient in-dividuals who reside, detached, disengaged, unfallen, within unbroken rooms, or unbreached parentheses. Ricks says, of the words in brackets in September Song (King Log), that it is their bracketed-ness that gives them that unique feeling of being at once a crux and an aside (Force 300). His comment would almost have been more pertinent to Canticle, where the bracketed Thomas stands aside from the crux, or cross, un-searched, unscratched, the second word marking his unmarkedness as well as recording his distance from the crown of thorns and his failure to take up the (ethical) burden of the cross. Where Christs body is twisted by our skill / Into a patience proper for redress (145) (Lachrimae Verae; Tenebrae), there is no ethical consciousness, no echo of suffering in Thomas, effectively, no mete compassion attuned to the patience of Christ. Falling thus, paradoxically, in Hills poems, becomes recongured as ethical action, bringing with it compensations for the losses borne. Only by suffer[ing] innocence to fall, by cleav[ing] the res peril, as the speaker of Holy Thursday says, and exiting the Edenic hollow grove, can the speaker front the she-wolfs lair (18). And only in essaying the she-wolf can he (re)discover innocence and nd sleep under the har-bouring fur (18). Here the earlier rough pelt of the sea of Genesis is resurrected and transgured, becoming the harbouring fur, the dead made alive, the ship come out of attritive seas to protective harbor. The she-wolf fronted is found not to affront; as with the wolf, so with falling. So far what has emerged is a sense of the way in which fallen-ness and the bearing of burdens are related. The state of fallen-ness has brought with it the inertia, the heaviness, the gravity that man has

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to contend with. However, fallen-ness cannot be reversed, eradicated, withdrawn from, or ignored; it can only be acknowledged and shoul-dered as burden and perhaps atoned for. The German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to whom Hills Christmas Trees (171) pays homage, wrote, in Ethics,

This love of God does not withdraw from reality into noble souls se-cluded from the world. It experiences and suffers the reality of the world in all its hardness. The world exhausts its fury against the body of Christ. But, tormented, He forgives the world its sin. That is how the reconciliation is accomplished. Ecce homo! (72)

This is effectively echoed by Hill in his comment, cited earlier, that it is at the heart of this heaviness that poetry must do its atoning work, this heaviness which is simultaneously the density of language and the specic gravity of human nature (Poetry 15). It is clear, then, that, to both Hill and Bonhoeffer, atonement is accomplished through an engage-ment with, not a withdrawal from, the heart of heaviness that marks the fallen state. Hills summary of T. H. Greens argument in The Philosophy of Aristotle may perhaps also be apposite here: . . . to place ourselves outside the process by which our knowledge is developed is to conceive of an untenable ecstasy, whereas to recognize our being within the pro-cess is to accept our true condition (Word 149). But if the fallen-ness of the world requires atonement, the question is what form that atonement might take. The answer would appear to be ready-made, coming almost over-easily to hand, lying in the title of Hills lecture Poetry. To Hill atonement is at one level the technical perfec-tion that is won out of the struggle with languages density (Poetry 2). And in a sense which the OED lists as Obs., or obsolete, but which Hill treats seriously, it means at-one-menta being at one, hence betoken-ing a reconciliation. As he says, the technical perfecting of a poem is an act of atonement, in the radical etymological sensean act of at-one-ment, a setting at one, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a uniting in har-mony . . . (Poetry 2). It might be hypothesized that by presenting poetry as atonement, Hill means that poetry functions to atone, to effect a reconciliation, rst by lodging itself within the fallen world and partaking of its condition, and second by bringing into line things formerly at one which have become disjointed, separate, things that have lost sight of one another. This is to treat poetry as redemptive and salvic, though a less reverent restatement might read: poetry-as-superglue. All this is attractive, but it should be noted that it does not come with-out problems both specic and general. By specic I mean that Hills poems, especially in For the Unfallen, more usually attest to an intransi-gence, a failure of reconciliation, than they do the contrary; I will come to


the general shortly. The Bidden Guest may be thought to revisit George Herberts Love bade me welcome, but unlike Herberts speaker, Hills refuses the invitation to taste the meat that Love says it will serve (192); Hills poem ends with the hearts tough shell . . . still to crack and the altar spent of all its bread and wine. And if there is reconciliation in The Turtle Dove (whose title precisely bears witness to separateness) between the estranged couple, it only comes in the heavily ambivalent [s]he went to him, plied therea plying (23) to which there is no answering reply; another estranged couple, or perhaps the same one, is described in The Troublesome Reign. Near distance is the closest, perhaps, that one can, in For the Unfallen, come to reconciliation. The general problems with Hill and poetry as atonement, or as at-one-ment, are, however, more subtle than a supercial survey of poetic content might indicate. Ricks asserts that a reconciliation of atonement and at-one-ment is an impossibility, for reasons which are philosophical, aural, punctuational (Force 32123). The sounding aloud of the two words gives away the fact of their continuing separateness: the fact that they are not at one. The hyphens may function as signs of connection; they are also, however, simultaneously lines of fracture which cannot be erased; as the point might be poetically rephrased, they are signs of . . . pacts made, [but] not peace (The Distant Fury of Battle 26). A further, though not necessarily irresolvable, question, however, has to be raised. If poetry is an atonement, as Hill suggests, and if poetry is something crafted out of the medium of language, and if language is itself a fallen medium, it may be worth asking how something which is heir to the properties of its medium can be argued to have the potential to redeem it or to constitute a form of reparation for it. Hill has commented that the arts which use language are the most impure of arts (Poetry 2) and muses in Our Word Is Our Bond the notion of infection with regard to language. While he is in the main musing upon semantic contamination, the way in which words over changing times and contexts come to signify differently and more amply through, for instance, association or connota-tion, the idea of infection, I suggest, also carries for Hill a sense of that which is fallen.19 If we may return, briey, to an extract quoted earlier:

Karl Barth remarked that Sin is the specic gravity of human nature as such. I am suggesting that it is at the heart of this heaviness that poetry must do its atoning work, this heaviness which is simulta-neously the density of language and the specic gravity of human nature. . . . (Poetry 15)

Here we nd Hill tacitly assenting to Barths use of gravity as an apt metaphor for Sin, and going on to suggest an equivalence between the heaviness in language which manifests as density and the heaviness

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in human nature that manifests as sin. Implicitly, then, languages den-sity becomes readable in terms of a theological fallen-ness. The converse would presumably also be true. And in Our Word Is Our Bond, Hill writes: [w]hat also makes sense is Ransoms the density or connota-tiveness of poetic language reects the worlds density, an observation which Austin might also dismiss as metaphysical fantasy (151). This is useful because it offers a possible means by which to clarify in part what Hill means by density of language, which he has in the earlier extract correlated to sin. If density here is indexed to connotativeness of po-etic language, we would appear to be returning full circle, albeit a trie obliquely, to the idea of how language has picked up, somewhere along the way, additional layers of meaning from that which it has come into contact and been associated with. We are, in other words, returned to the notion of contamination, of infection. In Our Word Is Our Bond Hill asks, rhetorically, Once you have released such a word as infect how is it to be contained? (139). He then proceeds, performatively, to demonstrate the truth of the matter: which is that it in fact it cannot. The word infect spreads its contagion through the essay, but the point is that each re-use of it (Word 139, 141, 145, 146, 148, 149, etc.) is not just a re-sounding of the word for ironic effect; it is a re-tuning or re-pitching of the word to demonstrate not the versatility of language for its own sake, but the fact that all language is already infected. Its very potency, however, arises out of impurity and its polysemousness, its energy coming from the contaminations of meaning which it has been, and continues to be, subjected to. I will come back to this. There is another sense as well in which languages fallen-ness may be understood as constituting something it would be neither ethical nor de-sirable to elide. Alan Walls essay, Geoffrey Hills Canaan points out that

[w]e cannot describe anything outside of language, and the language is fraught with the monuments and terrors of our history. Anyone who would theorise that there is an epistemological escape from this dilemma can do so only on the basis that there is a potentially Edenic language, which can rinse itself free of history. (37)

Walls excellent point both recognizes that language cannot rinse it-self free of history, cannot evacuate [. . .] its dead (Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings 29), without simultaneously evacuating itself of meaning. Language is at the very least palimpsestic, and Walls point also manages to suggest that even if language could so cleanse itself of the past, could be scraped clean of its old price20 (The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian 51), to act thus could only result in the ultimate impov-erishment of language and blunting of moral sensibility. Such a cleansing would effectively be a disremembering which, as Hill has pointed out,


is, in Hopkinss Spelt from Sibyls Leaves, not just a failure to remem-ber, or forgetting, but also a dismembering [of] the memory (Common Weal, Common Woe 3). Furthermore, language, as Knottenbelt and others have pointed out, does not merely passively record, but is complicit in the atrocities it has super vised, the political falsehoods, massive distortions of history it has aided (36). To exculpate language by purifying it of his-tory is to dishonor the past. To reiterate, then: how does poetry, which is wrought out of a medium which is culpable, infected or fallen, claim to be able to effect an atone-ment, and can it, does it, make good on that claim? Hills essay suggests that atonement is effected through the technical perfecting of a poem, made in the moment in which a poem comes right like the click of a clos-ing box (qtd. in Poetry 2). At one level he is talking about something internal to the poem, about what we might call an aesthetic rightness ex-perienced when every component of a poemmeter, sound, diction, and so onall fall into place. One gets the sense that for Hill, there is almost a Platonically ideal version of the poem that the poet is straining to approxi-mate; no other form of words could exist but this one. Atonement, in this sense, is also an attunement: the poet works to tune words to one another, striving to key the poem to the ideal form of itself. It is one of the reasons why precision matters. The atoning/attuning also enters another dimension, however, this being an attuning of the poem to that which it seeks to represent, whether a nuance of feeling, a state of affairs, or a historical truth. When Hill quotes Pound as saying that [t]he poets job is to dene and yet again dene till the detail of surface is in accord with the root in justice (qtd. in Po-etry 23), he is describing the process of attuning. Hills motto might be effectively summarized in a phrase found in Te Lucis Ante Terminum (Tenebrae): BE FAITHFUL, which, as the poem says, grows upon the mind / As lichen glimmers on the wood (166), the analogy itself enacting, through the correspondence it establishes/nds, the relationship between word and world that Hills poetry continually meditates upon and seeks to return to at-one-ment. The poem atones, then, when the poet and his words are perfectly attuned to what they record. I really, however, cannot put it better than Wall does when he says, The menace poetry offers is the bite of truth, and its atonement is an alignment of language with the true manner of things (46). Again, it is why precision matters, and it is where the potency of lan-guage, a potency acquired precisely by virtue of its fallen-ness, comes into play. Only infected language possesses the ability to speak with forked tongue. The truths one attempts to do justice to require what only contaminated language can provide: the simultaneous presence of mul-tiple meanings able to register the full complexity of those truths. Yet at the same time, this identical ability to signify in multiple ways is also that

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which permits and enables languages slipperinesses; the same capacity represents languages ability to function both ethically and unethically; it is both poison and cure. Two instances, which many critics have already noted (Hooker 23; McDonald 194; Robinson 116), but are particularly apt here, will quickly serve to illustrate the point. Requiem for the Planta-genet Kings contains the image of the kings:

At home, under caved chantries, set in trust,With well-dressed alabaster and proved spursThey lie; they lie; secure in the decayOf blood. . . . (29)

They lie is repeated, but differently intoned, the same words register-ing both the sense of lying prone and untruth. The same words register the slipperiness of language, the way it can mean more than one thing, enabling language to lie, while simultaneously registering languages ability to tell the truth by disclosing its untruthfulness. A second and not dissimilar point is made in a later volume, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Pguy: To dispense, with justice; or, to dispense / With justice . . . (190). The words, identical but for the placement of a comma, again point to the capacity of the same phrase to mean completely opposite things. Language can dispense, with justice or dispense with it. A troubled awareness of languages power both to dispense justly and to lie may be responsible for the poets slowness to speak. Before the poetic plenitude of recent years, Hills slim volumes were wont to emerge only at long intervals, and in For the Unfallen there are already signs of the struggle involved in giving birth to words. One is heavy with all that one wants to say, that needs to be said; one becomes inchoate under the burden of its saying, the despair at the impossibility of ever truly doing justice to a thing, the fear of bearing false witness through either saying too much or saying too little. From Gods Little Mountain, where the speaker is shut with wads of sound into a sudden quiet (17), waits for the word that was not given, and nds that though the head frames words the tongue has none, to the broken mouths and thick-lipped wounds of The Bid-den Guest (20), and from the tongue broody in the jaw (42) in Elegiac Stanzas to the mouthy caves and dumb grottoes of After Cumae (43), we nd images attesting to the difculties of speaking. And in the fth of the poems making up the short sequence Of Commerce and Society, Ode on the Loss of the Titanic, we nd Hill making his ironic bow to the terse gods (50). As Hart has pointed out, the poem is a taking of arms against the sea of rhetoric: the fresh enemy which Hill argues is partly responsible for the Titanic disaster (77). Such an enemy can only be fought, however, not by taking up that enemys tools, not, in other words, by indulging in a magnicent rhetorical display of ones own, as Hart


would have it,21 but by a steady refusal to do so, by playing Cordelia rather than Goneril. Hence the terse poem offered as appeasement or atonement to the terse gods. There are many dangers lying in wait for the poet who would take for his material such subjects as the cunning passages and contrived corridors of history, betrayal, loss, suffering, and atrocity. How do you as a poet bear responsible and sober witness to these things? And how do you do so without falling prey to various rhetorics: the sentimentalizing or the vulgarizing, the overcivilizing or the aggrandizing? To the impulse to aestheticize? How do you not falsify? There are, moreover, further pit-falls. An overscrupulous avoidance of one kind of sin may well leave one vulnerable to the opposite; the fear of romanticizing may, for instance, lead one into overdoing the gritty. To avoid Scylla, one falls into Charybdis. To make atonement involves a proper attunement of the poem to its subject, which can be especially difcult in the case of certain subjects for the reasons given above. Atrocity is a particularly difcult poetic subject given that real atrocities committed demand atonement, while no atone-ment that is made can ever be truly adequate, and the poem (sometimes to the poets shamed awareness) can, in any case, only ever offer restitution in a metaphorical sense. Some might even argue that the writing of the atrocity in poetry can only represent a trivialization of it, hence deepen-ing the offense. More than one critic, eager to cite Adorno in connection to Hill, has trotted out the famous observation: Nach Auschwitz noch ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch.22 Poetry after Auschwitz? After such knowledge, what forgiveness? After such atrocity, what possible lyricism? Hooker and others have offered illuminating comment on Hills aware-ness of the corruptive potential of art (2829; Rowland 62), especially where art attempts to embrace atrocity. As suggested earlier, to remain innocent of such corruption is difcult; there are simply too many traps. To aestheticize atrocity is to denature it, to fail to register its atrociousness. In that failure, poetry fails to atone. The allegory of the aestheticizing poet is perhaps the allegory one may read into Orpheus and Eurydice, which opens with a description of a world not in tune with itself, its dissonances manifest in the disparity be-tween the wild dogs / Infesting the road and the recitals, catalogues / Of protected birds (55). The absolute civility of art, represented by recitals and catalogues, has nothing in common with the savagery of the wild dogs infesting the roads. The gure of the poet/lyrist whose function it is to at-tune is portrayed with some ambivalence. Compassion is carried to the newly stung, the still-moist dead, the rawly difcult, but Orpheus, with [h]is countenance, his hands motion / Serene even to a fault (55), is in this allegory the artist whose serene and lyric art fails properly to take account of and do justice to the raw difculty of suffering and death. Read as an allegory of poetic endeavor, Orpheus and Eurydice is the

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story of the poet failing to respect the intransigent savagery surround-ing him, instead transmuting it into elegant recital, neat catalogues, and protected birdsand so falsifying it. Shostakovich is rendered as Marais. Tinkle tinkle. In the allegory here, the poet and his art, in their failure to be properly attuned to their subject, fail in their project of at-one-ment; we may recall that in the myth, Orpheus and Eurydice are not reunited. Aestheticizing atrocity is one of the traps. Another is to overstate the horror while claiming to confront it starkly; to understate it, the poet (modestly) calling to attention his integrity and artistic good taste; or yet again, to stand complacently contemplating ones honest self contemplat-ing the unspeakable. I am of course speaking of the forms that artistic disingenuousness can take. Hill is sharply conscious of these traps, spring-ing them all in the second of the Three Baroque Meditations from his second volume, King Log:

Anguish bloated by the replete scream.Flesh of abnegation: the poemMoves grudgingly to its extreme form.Vulnerable, to the lamps erce headOf well-trimmed light. In darkness outside,Foxes and rain-sleeked stones and the deadAliens of such a themeendureUntil I could cry Death! Death! as thoughTo exacerbate that suave power;But refrain. For I am circumspect,Lifting the spicy lid of my tactTo sniff at the myrrh. It is perfectIn its impalpable bitterness,Scent of a further country, where worseFuries promenade and bask their claws. (90)

The rst type of inauthenticity that Hill ironizes is represented by the commodication of suffering pointed in the opening line, where anguish is depicted as unhealthily bloated, unnaturally puffed out by the replete scream. This is both gross and grotesque. Anguish has become consumer and consumable, the poet or reader banqueting on screams, licking his chops, replete and bloated. It is gross, but it is also silly; the replete scream is a bleated afterthought, a small after-dinner hiccup. The line both reso-nates with a line from The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in which history is described as engrossed in the cold blood of sacrice (51) and picks up on that oft-discussed image of Auschwitz, that fable / Unbelievable in fatted marble (Of Commerce and Society 49). The last-mentioned is a line brilliant in its economy, suggesting the fatted calf; the fattening-up of the narrative of Auschwitz; the texture of the metaphorical marble out


of which is hewn the atoning memorial to the victims of Auschwitz; the complacent piety of those erecting the monument, those offering up the fatted calf; the way in which those at Auschwitz were treated like animals; the utter indecency of fatted marble when juxtaposed with the emaciated fallen and unfallen of Auschwitz. The rst version of inauthentic response, represented by the bloated and replete scream, is replaced by esh of abnegation in line 2. But this second image is also problematic, that which is symbolized by the ab-negated esh being just as inauthentic as that which is represented by the bloated scream. What Ricks notes about atrocity that can both be fat-tened and attened is apposite here (Force 285).23 The opening lines function self-reexively: what the poem is describing is therefore itself. It considers the process of its own making, noting its own responses to a hypothetical horror. From the indulgent, the poem shifts to the ascetic as its chosen mode, voyeuristically watching itself [move] grudgingly to its extreme form (90). The inauthenticity here is exposed both by the poems narcissism and by its unhealthy interest in aestheticizing anguish. The rhymes scream/poem/form are an argument in small for what the poem is attempting to do: the fact of their being half rather than full rhymes suggests that the strings may be false. The images that succeed thisnamely, the lamps erce head of well-trimmed light, the foxes, and the rain-sleeked stonesare all indicative of a third type of inauthenticity: a slickness masquerading as rugged, uncompromising, intense honesty. The head of light, however, owes the erceness of its look to skillful trimming, and the rain-sleeked stones con-tinue with the hair metaphor, suggesting slicked-back hair, someone/something sleek and well fed, well groomed. Read still as part of a poem contemplating itself, this confesses, with the same charming candor as found in Yeatss A line will take us hours maybe; / Yet if it does not seem a moments thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught (Adams Curse 78), to the artice behind its artistry. (The artlessness of this is of course part of a larger artfulness.) The erce head of light, well trimmed, and the rain-sleeked stones are images of suave power, whose suavity, however, the poet deliberately ruins by his revelation of the studiedness of the effect, the way in which it labors to be beautifulor suaverather than being effortlessly and carelessly so. The studiedness is, to put it simply, uncool (certainly unsuave) and we are meant to be convincedfurther, disarmedby the straightforwardness with which it appears to make us a present of its own techniques, dismantling its own suavity and so apparently disempowering itself. We could go on in this way playing games of innite regress innitely. In case it is not clear, I am not saying that Hill is playing games of this sort with us; he is, if anything, desirous of escape from them, while bitterly conscious that all escapes to further countries merely cause the

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poet to encounter worse Furies, more lethal games. But we have been shown the futility of escape all along. To escape the inauthentic response represented by Death! Death! in all its calculated throbbing, the poet refrains. His decorous restraint, however, is an equally calculated effect, as this self-congratulatory tercet demonstrates:

For I am circumspect,Lifting the spicy lid of my tactTo sniff at the myrrh. It is perfectIn its impalpable bitterness. (90)

This time the rhymes crow their well-bred manners, their nely adjusted and attuned sense of occasion. The poem is delighted by the elegance of its image of itself as Regency dandy and proceeds to get high on tact-snifng. This tactfulness, however, becomes merely another type of inauthenticity when there as an effect rather than as a naturalness. The sublimated merged images of the snuff-box/myrrh-pomander, fastidiously sniffed at in order to obscure the offensive smell of death, is also a sign both of af-fectation and aesthetic escapism. This is indeed perfect in its impalpable bitterness, in more than one sense. At the level of aesthetic game-playing, the hint of bitterness is an elegance, a grace note, a sophistication. Its inclu-sion adds a fugitive spiciness attering to the palate of the gourmet, lost on the gourmand of the replete scream. At another level, the level upon which Hill is considering the subtle motivations of his own tactfulness, the bit-terness comes from the sense of recognition of the narcissistic aestheticism which is in play, and which, it seems, one cannot escape. This second Baroque meditation could be seen as a more polished version of Doctor Faustus (5253), which also presents the poet with his choice of damnations. If the alluded-to Marlovian gure of the doctor is a type of the poet, then the poem, perhaps, becomes readable as a fable whose moral is a warning to poets, especially those poets glutted now with learnings golden gifts (Marlowe 1.24) and predisposed to take his-tory as their subject, surfeit[ing] upon cursed necromancy (1.26). Such poets are reminded, by way of Marlowe, of Icaruss fall while swoln with cunning, of a self-conceit, / His waxen wings mount[ing] above his reach (2.2021), his overthrow conspired at by heaven. Hills choice of epigraph suggests the poet in a dream untroubled of hope: For it must needs be that offences come; but woe to that man by whom the offence cometh. It may be worth remembering, however, that what in the end damns Marlowes Faustus is not his pact with the devil but despair, the absence of faith: his inability to believe that in spite of the pact, he can still stake claim to Christs blood, which he sees, streaming in the rmament. The fall may be inevitable; poetic atonement is still possible.


Hart has suggested that Doctor Faustus can be read as a tracing of the short downward arc of the poets fall from an original undistracted, innocently self-involved writing, through painful self-consciousness and guilt, to a nal ambivalent afrmation of poetic vision (120). There is much to salute in this observation, though I beg to differ on the reading of the three parts of the poem as an arc, and on the claim that there is a nal (ambivalent) afrmation. I would argue, rather, for a triptych portraying the various paths to poetic perdition, via one or other of the deadly sins. The poet of the rst part of the poem, entitled The Emperors Clothes, Hart suggests, is the unfallen poet, Icarus in ight, the king in Andersens tale (120). This, again, is the poet of aestheticized violence, he who spirals in the pure steam of blood. Despite Harts claim that the poets substanceless garments are rent off the soaring poet (121), however, the poet here remains in solipsistic unawareness of his own nakedness, given the absence of an awakening voice:

There is no-oneAfraid or overheard, no loudVoice (though innocently loud). (52)

The second panel, The Harpies, depicts a second part of the fable:

Having stood hungrily apartFrom the gods politic banquet,Of all possible false godsI fall to these gristled shadesThat show everything, without lust;And stumble upon their dead feastBy the torn Warning to BathersBy the torn waters. (52)

Again, the swerving to avoid Scylla topples one into Charybdis: the at-tempt to stand abstemiously aside from the gods politic banquet only exacerbates hunger, a hunger that causes one to fall to gristled shades exposing everything, without lust. One can fall in with the gods and their highbrow banquets or fall among trippers and their grotty picnics. The poet falling ravenously upon, falling to, with gusto on the gristled shades, falls prey to the false gods, whom he falls down and worships. The poet here is harpy, lthy and rapacious, strident, polluting, corrupting. By the torn waters, a torn-off, vandalized version of By the torn Warn-ing to Bathers, contains the moral to this part of the fable. The resonances are many and one could drown in them: Psalm 137; The Tempests Ferdi-nand sitting upon a bank, weeping again the king [his] fathers wreck while music crept by him upon the waters; The Wastelands appropriation

Susan Ang26

of both. The poet in harpy-mode,24 harping and carping, produces only a desolated music of abrupted cadences descending into silence. Behind this, a fragmentary echo of an older lamentation: By the waters of Baby-lon, we sat down and wept; on the willows we hung up our harps25; if I forget thee O Jerusalem may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, my right hand wither (King James Bible, Psalm 137.16). The nal panel of the triptych, tellingly entitled Another Part of the Fable, revisits damnation in the form of absent awareness and mis-representation:

The Innocents have not own;Too legendary, they laugh;The lewd, uproarious wolfBrings their house down. (52)

Tragic theater distorts to ribald pantomime, is infantilized, the lewd, up-roarious wolf bearing no resemblance to the starkly sinister beast of the second stanza. But this is a point whose full measure we have per-haps so far failed to take: the references hidden and overt to childrens fairy-tales, childrens pantomimes, childrens fables that frame the poem suggest treatments of the tragic that distort, simplify, and reduce. These too are failures of attunement for which a brief atonement is offered in the nal stanza, which recuperates the tragic and the sinister:

A beast is slain, a beast thrives.Fat blood squeaks on the sand.A blinded god believesThat he is not blind. (53)

Hill, then, emerges in these early poems as a poet whose concerns are commitment to the fallen state, which he attempts to redeem through the ethicalities of representation, by being faithful, by being attuned. In the words he uses to describe Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Christmas Trees: his words are quiet but not too quiet. / We hear too late or not too late (171).

National University of SingaporeSingapore

NOTES

1. All page numbers for poems from For the Unfallen up to The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Pguy (1985) are from the Collected Poems.

2. The question shifts from the relatively unimportant (to stand by ones camp-bed for inspection is a matter of tradition and protocol, not ethics or law) through the legally incumbent (losing, or not standing by your weapon involves the


small matter of a court-martial) to something owed only on grounds of personal honor and human compassion, these claims being, however, perhaps the most persuasive and binding.

3. Vincent Sherry uses the word agonistic (40). 4. The page numbers for this and the quotes that follow are from Hills Lords of

Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas (London: Andr Deutsch, 1984). 5. Hills essay Dividing Legacies begins by musing over the metaphor cen-

tre of gravity as it is used by T. S. Eliot. 6. See Wallace Martin, who mentions a few of these: By naming, the poet

creates: the sea is relevant to (bears upon) the land because he speaks. . . . The sea presses down on the land and brings forth life there (two other senses of to bear); . . . Those who cannot bear the light are those who cannot endure apparent or transcendent truths . . . (11).

7. Peter Walton observes that . . . there is often a reluctant, almost muscle-bound quality which forces the reader to decelerate in order to take in the depth of what is happening. You cannot read Geoffrey Hill quickly (Towards Stasis 68). Referring to a BBC Third Programme in which Hill took part, Walton writes, I can still hear his emphasis: slow down (69). This is worth thinking about; where the forced deceleration could be argued to mark resistance (as I have been argu-ing), Waltons observation suggests that there is a positive aspect to the resistance as well. Also worth keeping in mind is Hills own view that a poets words and rhythms are not his utterance so much as his resistance (The Enemys Country 5), which William Bedford has interpreted in terms of a resistance offered to the ethos of the context into which one writes (16).

8. Drained here also draws on the sense of the word used earlier in The Tur-tle Dove, just as the literal sense of draineddrywhich is in play here is also put to work in that other poem, whose only moisture is hinted at in the phrase her secreting heart, which is both that which salts away secrets as well as that which secretes. One, however, nds oneself shying away slightly from actually naming what the secretions of the heart might be; tears is simply too crude, lacking in nu-ance; the point perhaps of secreting lies in the privacy that the word safeguards.

9. It may be worth keeping in mind Hills quotation, earlier discussed, of Nygrens comment that in Augustine, the sinful soul is bent down to earth; in Luther it is bent upon itself (Word 15253).

10. The full weight and ungainliness of the image becomes clear if one thinks of its lighter cousin, tongue-in-cheek.

11. Blazing has a quality of incandescence about it, a erceness both heart-stopping and shattering; the effects of such incandescence appear in the . . . dead / priests, soldiers and kings; / Blazed-out, stripped-out things of Solomons Mines (25). The incandescence uses one up; humankind cannot sustain it. As the poet writes in Gods Little Mountain (17), Pent up into a region of pure force, / Made subject to the pressure of the stars;/ I saw the angels lifted like pale straws; / I could not stand before those winnowing eyes / And fell until I found the world again. . . . Or as Rilke says of the Angel in Die Erste Elegie (150), und gesetzt selbst, es nhme / einer mich pltzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem / strkeren Dasein (and even if one of them pressed me / suddenly against his heart: I would be consumed / in that overwhelming existence).

Susan Ang28

12. The line, incidentally, nds an echo in Donnes Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward (330), where the speaker, attempting to escape and ride in the opposite direction from Christs Cross, asks, Could I behold that endless height which is / Zenith to us, and toour antipodes, / Humbled below us? Donnes line implies that no matter where one ishere, or the other side of the earth, the endless height (God, the cross) is still the zenith, and that therefore, riding westward is not going to aid escape. There is an obvious parallel with Genesis: the phoenixs escape into pointless or unencompassed space is doomed to failure.

13. See Jeremy Hooker, who comments, At the beginning of Genesis, the poet, or the I of the poem, is located in the metaphorical geography that will recur throughout the book (25).

14. Usually given as ekstasiswhich is not meant to designate ecstasy as it is commonly used, but also invokes the sense of being out of the state of stasis.

15. This is obviously meant to stand in ironic contrast to the women who expect life earlier in the same poem, the childbearing and stone bearing serving to com-ment on each other.

16. See Vincent Sherry (7172), who reads Little Apocalypse as a poem about artistic shaping; the hermetic radiance is the alchemists re, in which, presumably, the poem is rened. I wonder if this is not to miss the point. I read this poem as be-ing a great deal more ironic than Sherry gives it credit for being, given Hlderlins own rejection of solipsism. Mans common nature suddenly too rare suggests both an absence and an absenting of commonality, that which man shares with other men, while also suggesting, ironically, that that nature has been rareedpuried, but also thinned out. To seal off, then, or to lead a sealed-off existence is questionable; the man sealed against external injury may also refer to Hlderlin himself, sealed by (or because of) his madness in a tower during his last years. I therefore nd it hard to read this as a poem about the alchemy of poetic transfor-mation, transguration, and miraculous changes.

17. Ricks, incidentally, speaks in his essay on Hill of how parentheses create forms of self-containedness (318).

18. Knottenbelt says that the brackets mime Thomass physical and emotional condition of being untouched by the drama of suffering, of suffering only vicari-ously (49). I agree with the general point, but as to the question of the vicarious sufferingI am not sure there is even this.

19. Jeremy Hooker comments that For the Unfallen embodies a keen awareness of the fallen nature of its words and devices . . . and the way he perceives words to be fallen and art corrupting (28).

20. The metaphor here in fact does suggest the palimpsestparchment scraped clean in order to be overwritten.

21. Knottenbelt, I think, is closer when she speaks of the nal line as this most tight-lipped of lines (58).

22. See Wall 35; Bromwich; Huk; Bayley, The Tongues Satisfactions 9.23. David Antoine Willims, in Defending Poetry, offers a useful elaboration of the

ethical Scyllas and Charybdises that wait on both sides of the unwary: prurience and blitheness, Rickss fatness and atness, hubris and blasphemy, the consum-ing word and the word that consumes (197).


24. One is reminded of those who attend to ddle or to harp / For betterment in the rst of the Annunciation poems (King Log 62).

25. Most translations of Psalm 137 use lyres rather than harps: harps is the choice of the KJV, and perhaps more apposite here, in a poem entitled The Harpies.

WORKS CITED

Bayley, John. A Retreat or Seclusion. Geoffrey Hill Special Issue. Agenda 17.1 (1979): 3842. Print.

. The Tongues Satisfactions. Geoffrey Hill Sixtieth Birthday Issue. Special issue, Agenda 30.1 (1992): 923. Print.

Bedford, William. True Sequences of Pain. Geoffrey Hill Sixtieth Birthday Issue. Special issue, Agenda 30.12 (1992): 1523. Print.

Bonhoeffer, Dietrich. Ethics. Trans. Neville Horton Smith. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. Print.

Bromwich, David. Skeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Print.

Donne, John. Good Friday, 1813. Riding Westward. The Complete English Poems. Ed. A. J. Smith. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1982. Print.

Hart, Henry. The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986. Print.

Heaney, Seamus. The Redress of Poetry. London: Faber and Faber, 1995. Print.Herbert, George. Love bade me welcome. The English Poems of George Herbert.

Ed. C. A. Patrides. Melbourne and London: Dent, 1974. Print.Hill, Geoffrey. Canaan. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifin, 1997. Print.. Collected Poems. London: Penguin, 1985. Print.. Common Weal, Common Woe. Style and Faith. New York: Counterpoint,

2003. 120. Print.. Dividing Legacies. Style and Faith. New York: Counterpoint, 2003. 141

59. Print.. The Enemys Country. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.. Envoi (1919). The Enemys Country. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991. 83102. Print.. The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas. London: Andr Deutsch,

1984.. Our Word Is Our Bond. The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas.

London: Andr Deutsch, 1984. 13859. Print. . Poetry as Menace and Atonement. The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature

and Ideas. London: Andr Deutsch, 1984. 118. Print.. Redeeming the Time. The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas.

London: Andr Deutsch, 1984. 84103. Print.. Scenes from Comus. London: Penguin, 2005.. Unhappy Circumstances. The Enemys Country. Oxford: Clarendon, 1991.

119. Print.. Without Title. London: Penguin, 2006.Hollander, John. The Work of Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Print.

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The Holy Bible: King James Version. Iowa Falls: World Bible, 1986. Print.Hooker, Jeremy. For the Unfallen: a sounding. Geoffrey Hill: Essays on His Work.

Ed. Peter Robinson. Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985. 2030. Print.Huk, Romana. Poetry of the Committed Individual: John Silkin, Tony Harrison,

Geoffrey Hill, and the Poets of Postwar Leeds. Contemporary British Poetry: Es-says in Theory and Criticism. Ed. James Acheson and Romana Huk. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. 175219. Print.

Ibsen, Henrik. Brand. Writ. Geoffrey Hill. 3rd ed. London: Penguin, 1986. Print.Knottenbelt, E. M. Passionate Intelligence. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1990. Print.Marlowe, Christopher. Doctor Faustus. The Plays of Christopher Marlowe. Ed.

Roma Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. 331400. Print.Martin, Wallace. Beyond Modernism. Geoffrey Hill: Modern Critical Views. Ed.

Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea, 1986. 1116. Print.McDonald, Peter. Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill. Oxford:

Clarendon, 2002. Print.Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.Phillips, Catherine, ed. Gerald Manley Hopkins. Oxford: Oxford University Press,

1986. Print. Ricks, Christopher. The Force of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. Print.Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Trans. Stephen

Mitchell. London: Picador, 1987. Print.Robinson, Peter. In the Circumstances: About Poems and Poets. Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1992. Print.Rowland, Antony. Holocaust Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005.

Print.Sherry, Vincent. The Uncommon Tongue. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press,

1987. Print.Tennyson, Alfred. Morte dArthur. Tennyson: Poems and Plays. Ed. T. Herbert

Warren. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971. 6468. Print.Tinker, C. B., and H. F. Lowry, eds. The Poetical Works of Matthew Arnold. London:

Oxford University Press, 1950. Print.Wall, Alan. Geoffrey Hills Canaan. Agenda: A Tribute to Geoffrey Hill. Special is-

sue, Agenda 34.2 (1996): 2948. Print.Walton, Peter. Towards Stasis. Agenda: A Tribute to Geoffrey Hill. Special issue,

Agenda 34.2 (1996): 6675. Print.Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Trans. Emma Craufurd. London: Routledge and

Kegan Paul, 1972. Print.Williams, David Antoine. Defending Poetry: Art and Ethics in Joseph Brodsky, Seamus

Heaney and Geoffrey Hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Print.Yeats, W. B. Adams Curse. The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats. Vol. 1. Ed. Richard J.

Finneran. New York: Scribner, 1997. 7879. Print.

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Documents

ethical burden

ethical considerations

ethical issues

ethical dimension

grammar of fall

ethical burden

ponderable word

choice of word