Geoffrey

Modern Poetry
Geoffrey Hill is one of the most significant poets currently at work in

the English language. The essays gathered in this book present a number
of new contexts in which to explore a wide range of his writings, from
Pennington and Sperling (eds) • Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts

the poems he wrote as an undergraduate to the recent volumes A Treatise
of Civil Power (2007) and Collected Critical Writings (2008). Connections
are made between the early and the later poetry, and between the poetry
and the criticism, and archival materials are considered along with the
published texts. The essays also make comparisons across disciplines,
discussing Hill’s work in relation to theology, philosophy and intellec
tual history, to literature from other languages, and to the other arts.
In doing so, they cast fresh light upon Hill’s dense, original and some
times challenging writings, opening them up in new ways for all readers
of his work.
Geoffrey Hill
Piers Pennington is completing a doctoral thesis on modern poetry at
Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
and his Contexts
Matthew Sperling is Fellow by Special Election in Modern English
Literature at Keble College, Oxford. He is at work on a monograph
on Geoffrey Hill, etymological thinking and the history of linguistic
thought, and has published essays on the work of Roy Fisher and J.H.
Prynne.
Edited by Piers Pennington
and Matthew Sperling
ISBN 978-3-0343-0185-5
www.peterlang.com
Peter Lang
Modern Poetry
Geoffrey Hill is one of the most significant poets currently at work in
the English language. The essays gathered in this book present a number
of new contexts in which to explore a wide range of his writings, from
Pennington and Sperling (eds) • Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts

the poems he wrote as an undergraduate to the recent volumes A Treatise
of Civil Power (2007) and Collected Critical Writings (2008). Connections
are made between the early and the later poetry, and between the poetry
and the criticism, and archival materials are considered along with the
published texts. The essays also make comparisons across disciplines,
discussing Hill’s work in relation to theology, philosophy and intellec
tual history, to literature from other languages, and to the other arts.
In doing so, they cast fresh light upon Hill’s dense, original and some
times challenging writings, opening them up in new ways for all readers
of his work.
Geoffrey Hill
Piers Pennington is completing a doctoral thesis on modern poetry at
Corpus Christi College, Oxford.
and his Contexts
Literature at Keble College, Oxford. He is at work on a monograph
on Geoffrey Hill, etymological thinking and the history of linguistic
thought, and has published essays on the work of Roy Fisher and J.H.
Prynne.
Edited by Piers Pennington
and Matthew Sperling
www.peterlang.com
Peter Lang
Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts
Modern Poetry
Series editors:
David Ayers, David Herd & Jan Montefiore, University of Kent
Volume 6
Peter Lang
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
l l l l l l
Piers Pennington and
Matthew Sperling (eds)
Geoffrey Hill
and his Contexts
Peter Lang
Oxford Bern Berlin Bruxelles Frankfurt am Main New York Wien
l l l l l l
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Die Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data is available on the
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Geoffrey Hill and his contexts / Piers Pennington and Matthew Sperling,
editors.
p. cm. -- (Modern poetry ; 6)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-3-0343-0185-5 (alk. paper)
1. Hill, Geoffrey--Criticism and interpretation. I. Pennington,
Piers. II. Sperling, Matthew, 1982-
PR6015.I4735Z677 2011
821’.914--dc23
2011029011
Cover image: Christopher Wood, The Jumping Boy, Arundel (1929).

Courtesy of Museums Sheffield.
ISSN 1661-2744
ISBN 978-3-0343-0185-5 E‐ISBN 978‐3‐0353‐0232‐5
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Printed in Germany
Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Abbreviations ix
Introduction 1
Steven Matthews
Hill’s Uncollected Oxford Poems 5
Piers Pennington
The Manuscripts and Composition of ‘Genesis’ 25
Charles Lock
Beside the Point: A Diligence of Accidentals 43
Kathryn Murphy
Hill’s Conversions 61
Michael Molan
Milton and Eliot in the Work of Geof frey Hill 81
Matthew Sperling
Hill and Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought 107
Marcus Waithe
Hill, Ruskin, and Intrinsic Value 133
vi
Sheridan Burnside
The ‘Tenebrae’ Poems of Paul Celan and Geof frey Hill 151
Matthew Paskins
Hill and Gillian Rose 171
Hugh Haughton
‘Music’s Invocation’: Music and History in Geof frey Hill 187
Kenneth Haynes
‘Perplexed Persistence’: The Criticism of Geof frey Hill 213
Geof frey Hill
from Odi Barbare, XXI–XXIII 227
Afterword 231
Bibliography 235
Notes on Contributors 247
Index 251
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to a number of institutions and individuals for making the

conference and the proceedings documented in this book possible. We
should like to thank all those involved at Keble College, Oxford, and, for
their generous awards of funding, the British Academy, the English Faculty,
Oxford, the Keble Association, and Oxford University Press. We should
like to thank the college’s then Warden, Averil Cameron, for her whole-
hearted support of the project, from beginning to end, and Janet Betts,
the Domestic Bursar, for her assistance with the practical elements of its
organisation. We are grateful to Ruth Cowan, the college’s Development
Of ficer, and to Robert Petre, the archivist, for his curation of the exhibi-
tion which included the manuscripts of ‘Genesis’, among other items. We
remain deeply grateful to Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury,
for his presence at the conference and his contribution to it. We should
also like to thank Kenneth Haynes, Peter McDonald, and John Lyon for
their keynote talks, and, more generally, all those who made the confer-
ence such a memorable occasion, by chairing sessions, presenting papers, or
simply coming along – from across the globe. We should especially like to
thank Christopher Ricks, Valentine Cunningham, and Andrew McNeil-
lie. We should also both like to acknowledge the support of the Arts and
Humanities Research Council, for funding our graduate studies in Oxford.
We are grateful to Hannah Godfrey, our editor, for believing in the book
from such an early stage, and to all those at Peter Lang, and particularly
Gemma Lewis, for their support in its production. Finally we should like
to thank Geof frey Hill, for being closely involved with the conference and
for contributing to this volume.
The following materials are reproduced by kind permission of the copy-
right holders:
viii Acknowledgements
Excerpts from Geof frey Hill’s published and unpublished writings and

from his conversation with Rowan Williams are used by permission of the
author. Many thanks to Kenneth Haynes for his assistance in this matter.
Excerpts from Collected Poems, The Orchards of Syon and Scenes from Comus
by Geof frey Hill, © 1985, 2002, 2005 by Geof frey Hill. Reprinted by per-
mission of Penguin Books Ltd. Excerpts from New and Collected Poems
1952–1992 by Geof frey Hill, © 1994 by Geof frey Hill. Used by permission
of Houghton Mif f lin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from Canaan and The Triumph of Love by Geof frey Hill, © 1996,
1998 by Geof frey Hill. Used by permission of Penguin Books Ltd and
Houghton Mif f lin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
Excerpts from Without Title and A Treatise of Civil Power by Geof frey
Hill, © 2006, 2007 by Geof frey Hill. Reprinted by permission of Penguin
Books Ltd and Yale University Press. The typescript of ‘Genesis’ is repro-
duced by kind permission of the Warden and Fellows of Keble College,
Oxford. Quotations from ‘Pensées’ appear with the kind permission of
the Brotherton Collection, Leeds University Library. Ezra Pound, ‘In a
Station of the Metro’, from Personae, © 1926 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by
permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. Paul Celan, ‘Tenebrae’
is taken from Poems of Paul Celan, translated by Michael Hamburger.
Translation © 1972, 1980, 1988, 2002 by Michael Hamburger. Reprinted
by permission of Persea Books, Inc., New York, and Anvil Press Poetry.
Third edition published by Anvil Press Poetry in 2007.
The cover image, Christopher Wood’s The Jumping Boy, Arundel (1929),
is reproduced here by permission of Museums Shef field. Thanks to Julie
Taylor for her generous help.
Every ef fort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their
permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologises for
any errors or omissions in the above list and would be grateful for notifi-
cation of any corrections that should be incorporated in future reprints
or editions of this book.
Abbreviations
References to the following books by Geof frey Hill are incorporated par-

enthetically into the text, using the following abbreviations:
C Canaan (London: Penguin, 1996)

CCW Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008)
CP Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)
OS Orchards of Syon (London: Penguin, 2002)
SC Scenes from Comus (London: Penguin, 2005)
SS Speech! Speech! (London: Penguin, 2001)
TCP A Treatise of Civil Power (London: Penguin, 2007)
TL The Triumph of Love (London: Penguin, 1998)
WT Without Title (London: Penguin, 2006)
Where poems have been collected into the Collected Poems and essays into
the Collected Critical Writings, reference is made to these later editions,
except in a small number of instances where specific reference is made to
a feature of the first edition not preserved in the later one. These are indi-
cated in footnotes.
For the sequences The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech! and The
Orchards of Syon references are given to the sections numbered within
the books, in either Arabic or Roman numerals. For Scenes from Comus,
references are given to part and to poem, so that, for instance, poem ten in
part one is 1.10. All other references are given to page number.
x Abbreviations
References to the Oxford English Dictionary are also incorporated

parenthetically into the text, using the abbreviation OED and naming the
lemma under which the definition cited is to be found. All references are
made to the online edition at <http://www.oed.com>.
All quotations from the Bible are taken from the King James Version,
unless otherwise indicated.
Introduction
The majority of the essays collected here began life as papers delivered at
the conference ‘Geof frey Hill and his Contexts’, which was held at Keble
College, Oxford, early in July 2008. That conference came at a significant
moment in Hill’s career – only a few months after the publication of his
Collected Critical Writings, a book of some 750 pages, and almost a year after
the revised and expanded edition of A Treatise of Civil Power became the
seventh collection of poetry to appear since Canaan (1996). This volume
of essays comes at another significant moment. Not only is the archive of
Hill’s literary papers and correspondence housed in the Brotherton Col-
lection at Leeds now open for scholarly business, but in June 2010 Hill was
elected as the forty-fourth Professor of Poetry in the University of Oxford.
What is more, a new Collected Poems is to be published in 2013: five new
volumes, collectively titled ‘The Daybooks’, will be brought together with
the five volumes published in the Collected Poems of 1985 – the ‘Hymns to
Our Lady of Chartres’ included there also being much expanded – and the
run of later collections beginning with Canaan. Two of these new volumes
have recently been published independently, Oraclau | Oracles appearing
in 2010 and Clavics in 2011, and three sections from another of the new
sequences, Odi Barbare, are presented as the final item here.
The two days of the conference opened with Geof frey Hill in con-
versation with Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury. Much of the
discussion touched on questions raised by the Collected Critical Writings
and the essay ‘Civil Polity and the Confessing State’, but Hill also spoke
memorably of the relation between dif ficulty and success in poetry:
What I see ideally in the poem – in a dif ficult poem – is dif ficulties on the way, lead-
ing up to a kind of semantic epiphany, or a semantic annunciation, which will incan-
descently take up into itself the dif ficulties en route and burn of f any impurities, and
present them in a kind of final seraphic light. That is why I am impatient with those
passages in Eliot’s Four Quartets which, in a kind of formal and sophisticated mumble,
2 Introduction
proclaim dif ficulties in a manner which, in a rather low-grade way, is extremely f luent

nonetheless. To me the dif ficulty and the resolution have to be much more a thing
encountered within the semantic body. I don’t like pensées. I don’t think poetry has
much to do properly with pensées, and Four Quartets is full of pensées about things,
but I don’t find that it engages me with the real struggle in the way that much less
well-known poetry does. I have a great admiration for the American poet Richard
Eberhart, and those Kierkegaardian poems that Eberhart wrote. There’s a poem of
Eberhart’s which ends with a sudden line: ‘Where stays / The abrupt essence and the
final shield?’ And, to me, that last, wonderfully luminous, clarifying line – when I
say ‘luminous’ and ‘clarifying’, I’d be hard put to say what are ‘the abrupt essence and
the final shield’, except I know ‘the abrupt essence and the final shield’ is something
that the semantic and metrical issues of the poem had inevitably to arrive at – and
the epiphany, so to speak, is in that wonderful, mysterious last line which doesn’t,
at one level, connect with what has gone before, but which, at a deeper level, is the
only thing he could have said after the Kierkegaardian paradoxes which he has hith-
erto engaged in.1
Hill went on to quote a statement of R. P. Blackmur’s – as versified by John

Berryman – and to discuss its significance for him:
‘The art of poetry

is amply distinguished from the manufacture of verse
by the animating presence in the poetry
of a fresh idiom: language
so twisted & posed in a form

that it not only expresses the matter in hand
but adds to the stock of available reality.’2
Now, for me, a true poem has got to end by adding to the stock of available reality.
And, what is more, it seems to me a distinction which could give one an inroad into
all the distinctions one needs to make between things of intrinsic value and things
of intrinsic importance. That is to say, I can think of quite a number of twentieth-
1 Richard Eberhart, ‘“Where Are Those High and Haunting Skies”’, Collected Poems
1930–1976 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1976), p. 17.
2 John Berryman, ‘Olympus’, Collected Poems 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury
(London: Faber and Faber, 1990), p. 179; compare also R. P. Blackmur, Form and
Value in Modern Poetry (New York: Doubleday, 1952), p. 337.
Introduction 3
century poets who add to the stock of available actuality – that is to say that their
poems, having been written, become part of the pile-up of that plethora of actual
things with which our culture is virtually submerged. ‘The stock of available reality’
means that once this thing has been written, everything else in one’s comprehension
has to adjust itself slightly around it.
The essays collected into this volume consider Hill’s own additions to
the stock of available reality in a number of contexts, ranging from his
very earliest writing through to A Treatise of Civil Power and the Collected
Critical Writings.
Steven Matthews’s essay ‘Hill’s Uncollected Oxford Poems’ of fers a
timely reconsideration of the poems which Hill wrote and published as
an undergraduate, but ultimately decided not to collect, while Piers Pen-
nington’s essay provides a description and discussion of the manuscripts
of ‘Genesis’, the earliest of the poems written at Keble College to be pre-
served in For the Unfallen. Charles Lock’s essay ‘Beside the Point: A Dili-
gence of Accidentals’ then broadens the focus, building on the pioneering
scholarship of Christopher Ricks to consider Hill’s use of punctuation and
typography from Tenebrae to more recent volumes. The two essays which
follow this each have their roots in the sixteenth and seventeenth centu-
ries. Kathryn Murphy’s discussion of Hill’s turns and returns starts with
William Tyndale and Thomas More before proceeding to an expansive
consideration of the linguistic, ethical, and theological meanings of such
devices, while Michael Molan tracks the important phrase ‘simple, sensu-
ous and passionate’ through Hill’s later writing in order to think about
the inf luence of Milton as mediated through the poetics and politics of
another important inf luence, T. S. Eliot.
Matthew Sperling’s essay discusses Hill’s writing in relation to three key
tendencies in nineteenth-century linguistic thought – historicism, organi-
cism, and the inf luence of geological metaphors on historical understanding
– as exemplified in Coleridge and R. C. Trench. There then follow three
essays which each consider Hill’s engagement with an individual writer.
Marcus Waithe traces Hill’s confrontations with John Ruskin, moving from
Mercian Hymns to the chapters in the Collected Critical Writings which
explore Ruskin’s arguments about the nature of intrinsic value; Sheridan
4 Introduction
Burnside’s essay on ‘The “Tenebrae” Poems of Paul Celan and Geof frey
Hill’ presents close readings of these two important poems, discussing their
separate relations to questions of confession and responsibility; while the
essay by Matthew Paskins of fers a detailed consideration of Hill’s engage-
ment with Gillian Rose through a sustained reading of Hill’s elegy for her
and its sources in her writings. Hugh Haughton’s essay on music approaches
one of Hill’s most abiding passions and reveals the acutely historicised
nature of his responses to twentieth-century music, in particular. The last
of the essays is contributed by Kenneth Haynes, a scholar who has worked
closely with Geof frey Hill for a number of years now and who edited the
Collected Critical Writings – this concluding piece traces longstanding
lines of engagement through the substantial body of Hill’s prose, centred
on understandings of ‘resistance’.
The word ‘context’ and its sibling ‘contexture’ have long been key to
Hill’s critical language, and the critical approaches variously at work in this
volume each feel the force of ‘context’ and ‘contexture’ in their attempts
to sketch in and draw out relations between linguistic and other circum-
stances. Hill’s work, and the critical discourse surrounding it, will broaden
and deepen over the next few years in ways which at present can only begin
to be imagined. We of fer this book and its essays in the hope that it will
not only stimulate fresh attention to Hill’s work to date, but also provide
new contexts of reference and departure for starting to understand the
writing which is to come.
Steven Matthews
Hill’s Uncollected Oxford Poems
Geof frey Hill’s first collection, For the Unfallen: Poems 1952–1958, fol-
lowed the model of Allen Tate’s Poems 1922–1947 by ordering its contents
chronologically, with ‘Genesis’, the earliest poem he wished to collect,
placed first. The poems were followed by their date of completion in the
book’s first edition, and from this we can ascertain that the first six poems
had been finished while Hill was a student at Oxford, and the remainder
once he had moved to work at the University of Leeds in the autumn
of 1954. Both the tone and the themes of the poems in For the Unfallen
were to some extent established by the time Hill left Oxford, then; they
are ref lected in the various uncollected poems and pieces of prose which
he published while he was there, and this chapter will discuss selected key
pieces chronologically.1
Hill established a considerable presence in Oxford periodicals and
journals from 1951 onwards. Several examples of his work featured in the
Keble College magazine, The Clock Tower; in the university student newspa-
per, The Isis; and in the annual Oxford Poetry magazine, which Hill himself
1 My selection here is intended partly to fill the gaps left in the pioneering work by
Henry Hart, and partly to provide more context for Hart’s readings. His chapter
on the ‘Early Poems: Journeys, Meditations, and Elegies’, in Peter Robinson (ed.),
Geof frey Hill: Essays on his Work (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985),
pp. 2–19, and later collected into his book The Poetry of Geof frey Hill (Carbondale,
IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1986), is invaluable for its discussion of these
early works and their sources.
6 Steven Matthews
co-edited with Donald Hall, in 1953, the year in which the magazine started
to be published with the Fantasy Press. In the same year he co-edited with
Jonathan Price an issue of the Fantasy Press’s anthology New Poems, and
the press had published a pamphlet of his work, The Fantasy Poets Number
Eleven: Geof frey Hill, the previous year. The pamphlet contained, alongside
several important uncollected pieces, the first printing of ‘Genesis’ (then
subtitled ‘a ballad of Christopher Smart’), ‘God’s Little Mountain’, and
‘Holy Thursday’ (subtitled ‘of William Blake’). These were to be the first
three poems of For the Unfallen.
The various Oxford journals of 1951–4 also contain several uncollected
poems by Hill, as well as some early prose reviews and articles which give
helpful indication of his initial ideas about some of the precursors behind
his poetry – precursors who inform the poems of For the Unfallen as a
whole, as well as subsequent work. Many of the themes of that collection
had first been explored in these early poems, including the dif ficulty for the
poet writing and living out of a condition of perceived separateness from
the rest of society, and therefore from the poems’ audience; the inability
to share in common rites and habits; the hesitation to share in a fulfilled
love; the challenge of accepting religious mystery into life; and, tellingly,
the awkward but necessary engagement with the forces of history.
These early works also show Hill to be very much engaged with some
of the poetic presences which continued across his career: the metaphysi-
cal poets, in particular John Donne and Henry Vaughan; William Blake,
Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot; the contemporary American poets
Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, and Richard Eberhart; and Hill’s ‘fellow towns-
man’ A. E. Housman, whose example acted as a spur to write a dif ferent
kind of local poetry. Hill’s interests were even at this stage tellingly eclec-
tic, and set him apart from his peers. In an article of recollection, Alan
Brownjohn, one of the poets whose work figured alongside Hill’s in many
of the student journals, claimed that the predominant tenor of the Oxford
poetry of the time was that of a ‘subdued romanticism’. This romanticism
led to cautiousness towards the recent work of Dylan Thomas and George
Barker, but was also open to the ‘modern metaphysical poetry’ of ‘wit and
emotional intensity’ being displayed in the work of William Empson. In
Brownjohn’s memory,
Modernism in any form, whether the modernism of Pound, or Eliot, or the French
Surrealists who had inf luenced David Gascoyne, had seemingly passed by these
young English poets.2
Yet a review of the Oxford journals of these years, and the example of Hill’s
own work, ref lects the fact that a rigorous and enquiring debate about the
lessons to be drawn from the major modernist figures continued – and
these figures were, after all, still alive and writing new work at this time.
Hill’s first Oxford publication, in the Oxford Guardian of 24 February
1951, immediately followed a piece by Simon Broadbent, the last of a series
in which student poets considered the impact of Eliot upon their work.
Broadbent finds Eliot’s writing frustratingly blurred and unresolved in
terms of its morality, and his admiration for the senior poet rests upon
Eliot’s feats as technician and imagist. Hill’s ‘Late Autumn’, which appears
on the same page as Broadbent’s piece, as though placed there by the editor
in confirmation of its view of Eliot’s technical significance, displays some
of those imagist traits, concluding with these lines:
…each late afternoon

The out-at-elbow moon
Walks shivering through the sky.3
The poem seems a deliberately uncongenial echo of various modernist

recollections of the moon, including T. E. Hulme’s genial ‘Autumn’.4
Even at this initial stage, Hill’s deployment of modernist personifica-
tion as one mode for establishing the disillusion of the modern world cor-
relates with a strong feeling in his work for the costs endured by those who
2 Alan Brownjohn, ‘A Preference for Poetry: Oxford Undergraduate Writing of the
Early 1950s’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 17: British Poetry since 1945 Special
Number (1987), 64–72 (72).
3 Geof frey Hill, ‘Late Autumn’, Oxford Guardian Fortnightly Review, incorporating
the University Liberal, 13:3 (Saturday, 4 February 1951), 5.
4 Ezra Pound appended the ‘Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme’ at the end of
his own Ripostes in 1912. See Ezra Pound, Personae, revised edition prepared by Lea
Baechler and A. Walton Litz (New York: New Directions, 1990), p. 267.
8 Steven Matthews
have special insight into the situation of things – as registered in ‘Jordan’ and
‘Good Friday’, respectively the second and the last of the poems included
in the Oxford Guardian in early 1951. ‘Jordan’ records a prophet stalking
out of the wilderness and addressing the ‘doubtful folk’ who have ‘little
choice’ but to hear his ‘bitter voice’, but who then ignore the stringencies
of his command to them:
For when rain breaks

On fields forlorn
The lean-to thorn
Some shelter makes.5
Already Hill was attuned to the harsh demands of quotidian survival across
history, and to the small voice which poetry might raise. Like ‘Jordan’,
‘Late Autumn’ displays both the lack of consolation which might be won
through death, and the dif ficulty involved in purposefully unearthing the
dead, as we hear that ‘Deep though the dead men lie / Their bones are grim
with frost’. As another of these early uncollected poems, ‘Summer Night’,
of 1952, has it, ‘the tense stars’ are currently ‘stripping of f such disguise /
As “this will be” and “this was”’; but the lack of such cosmological reassur-
ance only exacerbates the business of modern humanity, as ‘There is not
another moment to lose.’6
A comedic sense of the fatedness of those blessed (or damned) with
insight takes on cruel inf lection again in Hill’s next published Oxford work.
In ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’ (which first appeared in The Isis in February 1952,
and which was then included in the 1952 Fantasy Poets pamphlet), ‘prob-
ing Hamlet’ is cast as being particularly aware that ‘Death in a worn body
lay’. This is an awareness which is concentrated in Hamlet’s mind by his
discovery of the decaying corpse of Polonius behind the arras. But then:
It followed, with ironic sense

That he himself, who ever saw
Beneath the skin of all pretence,
Should have been borne of f from the f loor…
5 Geof frey Hill, ‘Jordan’, Oxford Guardian Fortnightly Review, incorporating the

University Liberal, 13:3 (Saturday, 4 February 1951), 5.
6 Geof frey Hill, ‘Summer Night’, The Isis, 1188 (19 November 1952), 33.
The poem’s ending is replete with its own ironies, berating ‘us’, who – unlike
this Hamlet, with his vision consonant to Eliot’s in ‘Whispers of Immor-
tality’ – make life ‘neat’, as life is actually a ‘symbol of defeat: / A worm in
its own winding-sheet’.7 ‘We’, the readers, the body politic, are rendered as
living amid that ‘amorphous sleep’ to which vivid Helen is seen to have been
lured by the worm in Rosenberg’s 1916 poem ‘A worm fed on the heart of
Corinth’.8 Yet Hamlet, who sees beneath the skin into our true mortality,
is inevitably ‘borne of f from the f loor’. We are unable to escape into full
expression; as earlier lines of the poem tell us, traditional obsequies for
those mourned leave ‘much carefully unsaid’.
When expressiveness becomes the central concern of Hill’s first contri-
bution to Oxford Poetry 1952, it does so in ways that both further the sense
of tradition and confirm its constancy, even when challenged by sudden
and miraculous illumination. The opening stanza of ‘Pentecost’ sets the
theme for the whole poem:
The sudden putting-on of grace

Though fresh, new-nerved, is all the more
Dependent on its neutral base
That, root-secure through commonplace,
Has stood the test of strength before.9
As Hill was to put it in a later essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘There

are ways of of fering up commonplace to the greater glory of God’ (CCW,
p. 524). In this early poem, ‘commonplace’ forms the ground upon which
God himself performs his act of inspiration, his ‘test of strength’ against
those gifted with tongues. The accompanying poem by Hill in this volume
of Oxford Poetry, ‘Saint Cuthbert on Farne Island’, again counts the human
cost of such tests. Cuthbert’s example is set in contrast to that of his envied
rival, Aidan, who moves easily among the people, turning ‘The hearts of
7 Geof frey Hill, ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’, The Isis, 1170 (20 February 1952), 20; Geof frey
Hill, The Fantasy Poets, number 11 (Oxford: The Fantasy Press, 1952), n.p.
8 This poem by Rosenberg would later form the clinching point of Hill’s argument in
the essay ‘Isaac Rosenberg, 1890–1918’ (CCW, pp. 457–8).
9 Geof frey Hill, ‘Pentecost’, Oxford Poetry 1952, ed. Derwent May and James Price
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1952), p. 18.
10 Steven Matthews
the hard countrymen to God.’10 Understanding that there is ‘no new way
without its new remorse’, we learn in the final lines that Cuthbert ‘drew his
mind beneath a solemn hood / And stopped the stars in their unthinking
course’. The isolated persona can only contemplate his own exceptionality;
these final lines are both a defence of the intellect in these circumstances,
and also a register of the deluded absurdity of this kind of vision.
The intransigently dual possibilities of Cuthbert’s struggle are mirrored
in ‘Flower and No Flower’, where a dialogue between body and soul fails
to distinguish between their opposing potentials. In ‘Body’, ‘the unborn,
burdening child / Lies prone to every harm / In the defenceless womb’. In
‘Soul’, the envisioned light ‘may grapple with the dark’ only ‘because the
walls are thin’. The struggle, and the ‘inevitable wars’, continue to break
through on all sides.11 It is impossible, given Hill’s later concerns about
solipsism and its relation to modernist poetics, not to read such persist-
ent early registering of the isolation and self-involvement of speakers who
are yet subject to the demands of their contexts as both a response to the
inheritance garnered from such romantics as Wordsworth and Blake, and
an integral part of Hill’s understanding of his immediate modernist fore-
bears. His mixed and eclectic relation to his poetic precursors is consistently
dramatised in his early work, as it would be across his later career.
The visiting American scholar and poet Adrienne Cecile Rich (as she then
styled herself ) complained in a review of Oxford Poetry 1952 about the
faux-modernism of many contributions, the ‘sense of forcing, of unwar-
ranted thickness and perversity of diction’, judging that ‘A kind of easy
dif ficulty is the pitfall.’12 It is true that many of these poems betray a forcing,
10 Geof frey Hill, ‘St Cuthbert on Farne Island’, ibid. p. 19.

11 Geof frey Hill, ‘Flower and No Flower’, New Poems, A Fantasy Press Publication, ed.
Donald Hall, 1:2 (Winter 1952), 5.
12 Adrienne Cecile Rich, ‘Faucetless’, The Isis, 1198 (11 March 1953), 26.
a favouring of the over-complicated, thickened phrase over the shape of
the poem as a whole. Hill has a greater awareness and subtlety in this area,
however: an ease with modernist procedures, but also a sense of continu-
ing possibility which owes something to the example of Oscar Williams’s
A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry English and American, which his father
bought him when he was fifteen, and which he later claimed to have known
almost by heart.13 Williams’s anthology, which includes work by Tate, de
la Mare, Eberhart, Housman, Hopkins, Eliot, Pound, and Sidney Keyes,
and with which Hill has engaged in his criticism early and late, presents
a remarkably varied resource for a young poet. Williams’s introduction
makes a sophisticated and prescient defence of eclecticism, aware of the
necessity of confronting certain preconceptions about modern work. He
goes against the grain of contemporary opinion when advocating works
such as The Waste Land:
Some people object to the notion that the intellect should be called into operation at
all during the reading of a poem. They have somehow acquired the idea that feeling
and intellect are opposites. A little ref lection will show that, on the contrary, emotion
deepens when the intellect is aroused to action simultaneously with the feeling…14
Williams’s case, against those ‘in the popular press’ who impugn much
modern work for its ‘obscurity’, turns to a defence predicated upon an
Eliotic or Yeatsian combination of intellect and emotion – a combination
also celebrated by Hill from early on, through such figures as Saint Cuth-
bert. Williams is exhilarated by the imaginative realisation of what Hill
will later advocate as the measure of true poetry, ‘the sensuous intellect’,
or ‘sensuous intelligence’ (although Williams, like Hill, seems to favour
the ‘admixture of intelligence with fully expressed emotion’ in Hopkins to
that of Pound and Eliot).15
13 John Haf fenden, ‘Geof frey Hill’, in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John

Haf fenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), pp. 76–99 (78).
14 Oscar Williams, A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry English and American (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1947), pp. 29–30.
15 Ibid. p. 32.
12 Steven Matthews
A poem which carried the date ‘1950’ at its first publication, but which
appeared in the Oxford summer term of 1952, shows that Hill was already
aware of the uncertain balance between the sensuous and the intellec-
tual, especially in that love poetry which would form a generic keystone
throughout his career. ‘Merciles Beaute’, which appeared in The Clock Tower,
also carries Hill’s first use of a device which was to become increasingly
important to the structuring of his work – the epigraph. ‘Yowre eyen two
wol slee me sodenly’ is the first line of the first part of the ‘Triple Roundel’
which forms Chaucer’s ‘Merciles Beaute’, the title of which Hill takes for
his own poem. Chaucer’s poem is addressed to a resistant lover; her eyes
kill through their beauty, and also through their revelation of her intran-
sigence. The line had been given renewed currency only two years before
Hill’s poem, in the ‘libretto’ of Ezra Pound’s Canto LXXXI – from The
Pisan Cantos (1948) – in which he sought a live tradition associated with
the envisaged re-appearance of a goddess.16 Hill’s poem operates at a sec-
ular-philosophical level, but, like Pound’s, posits an internal and personal
sense of order and understanding against the overwhelming force of beauty
understood to operate in the world. Its speaker discovers the decisiveness
of mind before vision:
And yet so delicate a system fails
In its most crucial testing, when the mind,
Out-thrusting from its secret parts, assails,
And overthrows the barriers from behind.
The ‘fatal slip’ in this imposition of mind upon perception is the inadequacy
of the mind’s expectations when confronted by the world’s possibilities:
The all-too-small expectancy of grace

In structure or in movement of a form,
That the unlooked-for strength within a face
Can take possession of the mind by storm.
16 Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), p. 520.
The final stanzas are an admonition to the loved one, who is so capable of
‘storming’ the speaker’s mind’s ‘fort’. She can readily ‘scorn my sight’, a well-
managed and painfully ambiguous conclusion.17 Yet the poem is fascinat-
ing in its harnessing of a traditional conceit to rehearse a modern dilemma
about the inevitable war between interior thought and perception.
Such a complex of forces around vision and modernity had already been
united with a set of radical displacements in ‘To William Dunbar’, the first
poem in Hill’s 1952 Fantasy Press pamphlet, which had originally appeared
the previous autumn in The Clock Tower. Watching a group of swans, the
speaker of Hill’s poem is reminded of the Scots medieval poet’s eulogy to
London and its river ‘Where many a swanne doth swymme with wyngis
fare’.18 The swans in Hill’s poem form one of those images of coherent sepa-
rateness which recur throughout the early work: ‘Their grace and wisdom
are impregnable’. Although they remind the modern speaker of the earlier
poem’s transcendent image of the city, they also, in their isolation, represent
a further measure of unattainability, and the impossibility of such transcend-
ence through visionary experience now. As Hill’s poem concludes:
To such a mercy few of us attain:

Swans dwell apart like Troilus in his sphere,
And not by suf ferings, even, do we gain
Power, such as theirs, to bring the heavens near,
But win our faith from all who know the clear
Fulness of vision. Here, on Bewdley Bridge,
I think of you, as of my heritage.19
The undergraduate Hill borrows from Chaucer his concluding sense that
moral vision and perspective upon the human situation must be derived
from a paradoxical remoteness. After the tragic end of his love, the hero of
17 Geof frey Hill, ‘Merciles Beaute’, The Clock Tower, 13:3 (Trinity Term, 1952), 13.
18 William Dunbar, ‘To the City of London’, The Poems of William Dunbar, ed. David
Laing (Edinburgh: William Paterson, 1865), pp. 277–9 (278). Recent editions of
Dunbar contest the attribution of this poem.
19 Geof frey Hill, ‘To William Dunbar’, The Clock Tower, 13:1 (Michaelmas Term, 1951),
14.
14 Steven Matthews
Chaucer’s epic ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ is killed by Achilles and is relieved

of his travails on earth: ‘His lighte goost ful blisfully is went / Up to the
holughnesse of the eighthe spere / In convers letyng everich element’.20
Now, in his sphere, Troilus laughs at the vanities and lusts of the world to
which he was subject.
The speaker in Hill’s poem also seems to take this understanding that
human suf ferings lead to no necessary enlightenment as his message. As
a belated speaker, he can only gain such understanding from earlier writ-
ings, not from life itself. The crass final couplet sets that speaker at an even
further remove, not only remote in time from the earlier poem’s vision,
but also, by situating these ref lections at a place local to the poet’s own
district (‘Here, on Bewdley Bridge’), remote from the Thames by which
Dunbar had stood. The speaker of Hill’s poem casts himself instead as a
determinedly local poet in contrast to the grand separateness of the swans,
and also to that of the poets of ‘my heritage’.
A piece in the Spring 1953 anthology New Poems, an ‘Epithalamion’,
took the issues of tradition and isolation (even in this celebratory context)
to a dif ferent intensity. It carries an epigraph from William Blake: ‘The soul
of sweet delight can never be defil’d.’ Blake deploys the phrase twice in his
early work, both times with revolutionary purpose. As one of the ‘Proverbs
of Hell’, from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the phrase forms part of a
satiric litany aimed at over-turning established presumption; and as a line
from Plate 8 of America, the sentiment is uttered by ‘Orc’, Blake’s spirit of
freedom, prophesying the rise of America against its imprisoning bonds:
‘For everything that lives is holy, life delights in life, / Because the soul of
sweet delight can never be defiled.’21 The lovers in Hill’s ‘Epithalamion’
seem set, then, to enjoy liberty from the past.
The celebration of married love in the poem indeed posits what ini-
tially seems to be emergence into a freer atmosphere, but that freedom is
20 Geof frey Chaucer, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson, third edition (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 584.
21 William Blake, The Complete Poems, ed. Alicia Ostriker (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1977), pp. 185, 213.
not untrammelled. The wedded couple ‘from the burning grove / May
walk untouched by any hand of f lame’. Hill’s allusion is to the lines directly
following those celebrating the ‘soul of sweet delight’ in Blake’s America:
‘Fires enwrap the earthly globe, yet man is not consumed; / Amidst the
lusty fires he walks…’ Blake’s lines themselves refer to the Book of Daniel,
a text favoured in Hill’s later work, particularly The Triumph of Love, for
its ‘mastery’ (TL, XI). As though taking up the impetus of these complex
liberations, the lovers in Hill’s early ‘Epithalamion’ discover a personal
freedom through each other; they are compact in their unity.
But ‘they’ are not Orc or Daniel, and their liberty is one which leaves
others amidst the fire. A final feeling of ambivalence towards such libera-
tion seems confirmed in the final couplet, which takes up the burden of
the endings of Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and Paradise Lost in one:
See, beyond driven boundaries they move

To meet the first of Mornings by its name.22
While this seems to respond to the freshness of the singer-swain’s exit from
‘Lycidas’ (‘To-morrow to fresh woods, and pastures new’),23 its reference
to those ‘driven boundaries’ picks up something of the uncertain choice
of Adam and Eve’s expulsion at the end of Milton’s epic: ‘They, hand in
hand, with wandering steps and slow, / Through Eden took their solitary
way.’24 ‘To meet the first of Mornings by its name’ suggests that the couple
will achieve an original and new relation to language and the world, but
to move ‘beyond’ boundaries carries an element of risk and sadness. Even
in ‘Epithalamion’, this early paean to love, the complex resonances behind
his allusiveness show that Hill was aware of the potential excess of a senti-
ment which claims, however appropriately, eternal purity and delight in
mutuality.
22 Geof frey Hill, ‘Epithalamion’, New Poems, ed. Donald Hall, 1:3 (Spring 1953), 5.
23 John Milton, The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, revised second edition
(Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), p. 256.
24 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, second edition (Harlow: Pearson
Longman, 2007), p. 678.
16 Steven Matthews
‘Epithalamion’ shows Hill already able to compact an array of poetic

inf luences within a tight form, and to be ambitious in appropriating some
of the major forces of poetry in English to his purpose. His work in these
early years displays a variety of verse forms, although the rhymed quatrain
largely predominates. Several of Hill’s poems in this period operate in
quatrains with lines of four stresses, such as ‘In Memory of Jane Fraser’,
‘Summer Night’, ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’, and ‘Flower and No Flower’. ‘Gen-
esis’ incorporates this form and varies it. These poems of Hill’s, like Hous-
man’s, draw on a tradition of song and ballad, but the seeming simplicity
of form and rhetoric already contains a complex interplay of tensions. And
the troubling figure of William Blake – whose work, in particular the Songs
of Innocence and Experience, which came into prominence in Hill’s thought
in 1952 – also lies behind this early formal choice.25
At a round-table discussion of student poets which was reproduced
in the magazine Trio in June 1953, Hill is reported as saying:
My own approach has been called visionary, but it’s only by a long and arduous process
of fashioning that I’m able to justify a poem in my own eyes, and I hope in the eyes
of anyone else who cares to read it. If you look at Blake’s ‘The Tyger’, for instance,
you can see that it must have been written under great pressure, but it seems from
the swift deletions and revisions that Blake’s critical intellect was as much responsible
for the fashioned work of art as his natural genius.26
He emphasises the poet’s necessary labour over the drafts for a poem before
it can be released for publication. With Blake as his example, it would seem
that Hill at this stage saw these questions to be governed by particular
formal choices. In March 1953, Hill discussed these matters in a review of
25 The MS sheet mischievously headed ‘Pensées’ in the Brotherton Collection at Leeds

makes the significance of the Songs clear (Literary Papers and Correspondence of
Geof frey Hill, Brotherton Collection, MS 20c Hill/4/1).
26 Alan Brownjohn et al., ‘Symposium between Alan Brownjohn, Alistair Elliott,
Geof frey Hill and Jonathan Price, with Anthony Thwaite in the Chair’, Trio, 3, ed.
John Bingham, George MacBeth, and Anthony Thwaite ( June 1953), 4–6 (6).
an edition of Blake’s late illuminated poem, Jerusalem. Hill declared his
admiration for the political engagement and drive of Blake’s work – in
terms which look forward to his citation of a passage from Jerusalem as
an epigraph for ‘Churchill’s Funeral’ in Canaan. Something of the con-
catenation between Blake and the later collection inheres in this, the first
of Hill’s published reviews:
[Blake] was conscious only of his great task…Now, in ‘Jerusalem’, he was to open the
f loodgates, pour down upon ‘the land of snares and traps and wheels and pit-falls’,
‘chartered streets’ and ‘dark satanic mills’; sweep away, cleanse and make new, until
in a vision of light:
‘above Albion’s land was seen the Heavenly Canaan’.
Although he wonders at the illuminated plates of Jerusalem, Hill ultimately

says that he prefers the ‘imagination shackled’, the ‘confining form, gaining
power from its simplicity and brevity’, of Blake’s Songs, which share the
themes of the longer works, but which relay them more intensely.27
Hill’s poems published towards the end of his time at Oxford seem
purposely situated to further the political, social, and poetic stance outlined
in his early reviews and recorded remarks. The two works by him in the
same issue of Trio as the round-table discussion – ‘I See the Crocus Armies
Spread…’28 and ‘Merlin’ (which was later included in For the Unfallen) –
record the obliteration of the anonymous many through history, in a poetry
of involuted syntax which builds pressure against the strict form. The first
of these two poems begins:
The crocus, narrow-helmeted,

Sprung from a dragon’s tooth, renews
The battle it was born to lose
Though from its face the snows have f led.
The earth labours with the dead

To bring their buried strength to light.29
27 Geof frey Hill, review of Blake’s Jerusalem, The Isis, 1197 (4 March 1953), 22.
28 This poem was reworked much later as ‘Veni Coronaberis’, in Tenebrae (CP, p. 169).
29 Geof frey Hill, ‘I See the Crocus Armies Spread…’, Trio, 3 ( June 1953), 12.
18 Steven Matthews
The whole story of Cadmus raising an army from scattered dragon’s teeth,
fighting a battle, and founding Thebes with his five surviving soldiers, is
compacted into Hill’s twelve lines. The final two lines here predict the later
labours of Hill’s poetry to resurrect those, amongst the dead, whose strong
example drives the work on. And yet ‘I See the Crocus Armies Spread…’ is
also an early exploration of the ways in which such foundational energies
are thwarted and self-thwarting. The natural energy of the f lowers in turn-
ing towards the sun finds their inevitable ‘fall, / With spears broken’, their
striving towards expression, to be an impossibility. ‘Imagination shackled’,
with its contained energies unable to break free, is borne through in these
and related quatrains.30
The wider dissemination of Hill’s work at this time is ref lected in the
fact that both the summer and winter 1953 numbers of The Paris Review
contain several poems which had earlier appeared in Oxford journals. A
new work in the winter issue, ‘Gideon at the Well’, appeared simultaneously
in Hill’s college magazine, The Clock Tower. Gideon finds himself in a place
of judgement, at the well of Harod, in Judges 7. As God’s chosen leader of
armies to rid Israel of the false god Baal, Gideon has sought ratifying signs
from God (including the wetting then drying of a f leece, mentioned in Hill’s
poem as ‘the sign I craved’). But God fears that the Israelites will take all
of the praise for their military success upon themselves, rather than seeing
it as his doing. Therefore, at the well, Gideon is asked to divide those men
‘that lappeth at the water…as a dog lappeth’ from those who ‘bow down’
to drink ( Judges 7:5). Surprisingly, those who lap like dogs are the troops
selected to carry out God’s will. ‘Gideon at the Well’, which carries the
dedication ‘For Janice’ in its Paris Review printing, transposes the Biblical
story towards a sexual implication:
30 My reading here, as in other of these early poems, dif fers from Henry Hart’s, who
finds in this poem ‘the artificial world broached and invigorated by new feeling.’
Hart’s framing of these works as ‘spiritual exercises’ fused with ‘the myth of the
heroic quest’, along with the predominance he gives to ‘An Ark on the Flood’, skews
the eclectic intensity and the negotiations with modernism which the works also
everywhere display. See Hart, ‘Early poems’, pp. 3–4, 10.
Nudging and thrusting to the light

Crocuses snif f the air. The sun
Melts with his breath the frost of night.
The speaker seems pinned amid arid sexual despair, inconsolable, and him-
self unable to lap the waters of election: ‘my tongued heart, rough and dry’,
‘the bruised lips of this well’, ‘No brimming of the springs can quell / My
crackling wounds’. Although relief, when it arrives in the poem’s final lines,
is a recognition of the uniqueness of individual destiny, it smacks of ona-
nistic despair as much as liberation: ‘Being sealed and chosen, / I raise my
staf f ; the armies move’.31 ‘Gideon at the Well’ is a remarkable early instance
of Hill’s readiness to appropriate and transpose found narrative to other
idioms and registers, whilst also perhaps carrying over from the original
story the animalistic shame (‘as a dog lappeth’) of male desires.
Hill’s work published in 1954 finds him further weighing the relation
between the personal and the literary, and the translation of the one into
the other, while acknowledging the tortured thwartings not only of the self
but also of the self-as-poet. Writing about Housman in a piece in The Isis,
Hill makes much of his familiarity with the landscape of his precursor: ‘I
have breathed the same air as Terence Hearsay…[d]uring the seventeen years
my father was a police-constable at Fairfield’. The distant Shropshire hills
formed for him as for Housman the ‘“guarded pale” that bordered my own
half-mythical “lost land”’. But it is primarily Housman’s craftsmanship that
Hill admires, the way in which the inevitability of his rhythms can some-
times give way to the ‘dogged insistence’ of the local storyteller.32 Locale
and utterance, the contained voice which has a greater reach because of its
containment and focus, speak purposefully here, alongside the weighing
of personal experience against broader address.33
31 Geof frey Hill, ‘Gideon at the Well (for Janice)’, The Clock Tower, 15:1 (Michaelmas
Term, 1953), 15; The Paris Review, 4 (Winter 1953), 85.
32 Geof frey Hill, ‘Personal Choice – 4’, The Isis, 1218 (10 February 1954), 31.
33 Christopher Ricks has several eloquent pages on ‘containment’ in Hill’s vocalisations
in ‘Geof frey Hill 1: “The Tongue’s Atrocities”’, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1984), pp. 312–13.
20 Steven Matthews
When in 1954 he came to work on ‘An Ark on the Flood’, the most sus-
tained of his Oxford poems, Hill was adept at deploying conceit and allu-
sion as ways of expressing the deepest fears, beliefs, and desires, of the self.
The original double-page printing of the 100-line poem in The Isis – it was
also included in Oxford Poetry that year – dramatises most clearly the con-
text out of which it developed. Across the bottom of both pages, in large
type, appears the work’s epigraph from Genesis 8:21: ‘And the Lord said
in His heart I will not again curse the ground any more for man’s sake; for
the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth…’ God’s vengeance
upon man, the earth, and living creatures, turns in the phrase cited by Hill
into acceptance that this is so, and a resolution never to seek to destroy
humankind again. Hill’s epigraph forms a remarkable early indication
of his belief in original sin, but here it is an instance confirmed from the
mouth of God himself.
The poem’s most immediate precursors are Milton’s ‘Lycidas’ and
Robert Lowell’s ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’. In its contrasts
between the steadfast seaman Ishmael and the visionary strangeness of
Ahab, it refers also to one source of Lowell’s elegy, Melville’s Moby Dick.
Yet Hill’s ‘An Ark on the Flood’ is unique in taking up the impetus of
recent work like ‘Gideon at the Well’, and framing the work’s central Bibli-
cal f lood with images of barrenness. As in Eliot’s The Waste Land, there is
either unrelieved aridity or death by water. The opening stanza’s phrase ‘The
orchards blackened and began to rot’ is later picked up by ‘The orchards
thicken…The soil lies rich – though round a barren well / From whose dry
lips the herds may drink no more’ in the last. The creators of this Ark, like
artists from later in Hill’s oeuvre, suf fer from the sin of pride – it is, after
all, ‘man’s imagination’ which God identifies as the root of his evil. As it
is delusionally held:
The Ocean’s belly, soon, shall ease our drouth;
For we have built the ark, whose untried keel,

Loosed from the sloughed skin of the river mud,
Roughs out its passage through this glistering tide…
Have we, then, cast of f mortal for divine?
These anonymous creators then find their words inf lected by this new
element, the Ocean, as ‘we have caught the utterance of its mouth’. Under
Ishmael/Noah’s stewardship, the Ark attains ‘the sleeping crater of the
storm’, and the pastoral vision, concomitant with Milton’s reminiscence
of Edward King in his elegy ‘Lycidas’, is sustained, as the Ark basks ‘Graz-
ing this mountain-valley of the seas / Where whales and herds of billowy
narwhal pass / In silence’. Yet Hill immediately counts the cost of this
‘vision’; Ahab, who ‘once sang of Beauty and of Youth’, drowns and is sub-
sumed beyond the reach of music. God’s covenant, when finally it appears,
merely confirms the bereftness of mankind and the purposelessness of
such sacrifice:
This hollow bow,

New-sprung in heaven, bends upon us all,
And we are stunned by light as by a blow.
The wind has gleaned the waters; their slow fall,
Our fall from Paradise,
Commits us to the world from which we came.
No word, no dove, descends…
For these isolated and inward-looking singers, the Ark itself is Paradise.
The world beyond the f lood yields no further freshness or insight. ‘Now
Ahab is himself ’: it is in death that ‘we’ are most truly ourselves. Ishmael,
like Noah, multiplies himself as God commands, he ‘sits amid his spread-
ing sons’ to re-people the earth. But he has simply become of that earth,
nothing more, ‘For the gross vines have knuckled to his bones.’34
34 Geof frey Hill, ‘An Ark on the Flood’, The Isis, 1222 (10 March 1954), 18–19; Oxford
Poetry 1954, ed. Jonathan Price and Anthony Thwaite (Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1954),
pp. 14–17.
22 Steven Matthews
Unlike the poet in Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, with his frequent apostrophes to

the muses both to witness his loss and to inspire his song, or the speaker
who invokes ‘Our Lady of Walsingham’ in Lowell’s ‘Quaker Graveyard’,35
the creators in Hill’s poem have no recourse to compensatory presences
beyond the text, which simply confirms the condemnation of its underwrit-
ten biblical epigraph. Henry Hart has found the literary ambition of Hill’s
poem ‘to a certain extent drowning’ it; this is ‘elegiac magniloquence which,
paradoxically, regards the dependence on magniloquence paralysing.’36 But
this ignores the fact that Hill is adopting an appropriately historical rhetoric
in the poem in order, contrary to his sources, to dramatise a simultaneously
ancient and modern sense of the irredeemability of the human condition,
and of the isolated plight of its poets. As Hill was later to write of Lowell’s
similarly allusive ‘Quaker Graveyard’, the original emotion is ‘redefined by
a fine management of technique. The writing is deeply-felt and strongly-
mannered: the feeling is embodied in the mannerism.’37 To that extent, ‘An
Ark on the Flood’, like Hill’s later exercises in deliberately (because histori-
cally) mannered language, transforms understanding of both the original
context and the modern speaker’s situation in response.
In the ‘Letter from Oxford’ published in May 1954, soon before Hill
left the city, he registered the impact of his enquiries into the self-enclosed,
‘shackled’ imagination, which had driven his work for the past two years.
The letter features an anonymous but familiar poet on a bus on the Ban-
bury Road, a poet who ‘sits apart from the crowd,’ ‘following in the wake
of a vision of life that goes before him.’ While he might know a ‘small tight
shell of people’, he exists in a ‘world in which [a] neighbour has little part
or place’. He can be ‘very lonely and very unhappy’, while only ‘with the
most strength and the most courage’ is he likely to ‘get to the end’ of any
artistic achievement. In contrast to this urban solitude, in the final para-
graphs Hill reminds us of the fact that the Oxford poet is at Oxford for
35 Robert Lowell, ‘The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket’, in Collected Poems, ed. Frank
Bidart and David Geweiner (London: Faber and Faber, 2003), p. 17.
36 Hart, ‘Early poems’, p. 12.
37 Geof frey Hill, ‘Robert Lowell: “Contrasts and Repetitions”’, Essays in Criticism, 13:2
(April 1963), 188–97 (190).
only six months of the year, that he remains ‘to all intents a local boy’, as
‘his roots still ache for their soil’.38
Hill would wrestle with such matters of locale in the last article which
he contributed to an Oxford journal, a piece on the French novelist François
Mauriac. Hill sees in Mauriac’s work a struggle between the Catholic and the
artist, worked out ‘in a cramped environment of small-town gossip’. Mauriac’s
writing tries to negotiate between realism and redemptive grace, as sexual
desire competes with ‘a realisation of the essential loneliness of each human
being.’ Hill also invokes the American poet Richard Eberhart, to underline the
‘unf linching consciousness’ of Mauriac’s work, as it records ‘the separateness
of each man in his lair.’ Mauriac’s Catholicism cannot allow this to be so, to
accept that for some realisation of ‘the love of God’ ‘is never achieved’.39 There
is an immediate echo of Eberhart’s realisation in ‘Prospero and Ariel’, a poem
included in Oxford Poetry 1954, and a further variant on Hill’s poems figuring
crocuses, emblems of the spring. ‘Now the beaked crocus breaks its shell’,
But still
In stubborn seams the light is bound
That striking out from its chill lair
Blazed high above me.
This is a Prospero ‘numb and wise’, but content to remain contained and
confined underground, not envious of his Ariel, who ‘shrills and beats the
air’.40
Hill’s Oxford poetry and prose show him establishing a stance, a terri-
tory, and a set of co-ordinates within literary tradition, to which he would
often return in his later writing: weighing his situation as a literary artist
in constraining circumstance, a ‘local boy’ assailing and assailed by the
voices of the past, his own urgings, and consensual opinion; and adapting
vernacular forms alongside literary ones to contain his dissentient voice,
while discovering the personal and metaphysical costs of a modernist poetic
which sets itself at odds and which relishes doing so.
38 Geof frey Hill, ‘Letter from Oxford’, London Magazine, 1:4 (May 1954), 71–5 (72).
39 Geof frey Hill, ‘Contemporary Novelists: 4 – François Mauriac’, The Isis, 1230 (16 June
1954), 22.
40 Geof frey Hill, ‘Prospero and Ariel’, Oxford Poetry 1954, p. 18.
Piers Pennington
The Manuscripts and Composition of ‘Genesis’
Geof frey Hill introduced his poem ‘Genesis’ during a reading of his work
in the chapel of Keble College, Oxford, with a recollection of what he
believed to be its earliest stirrings – the young poet in his second year of
undergraduate study, a handful of poems in various university magazines
to his name, is looking out of the window of his room in college, with its
view over Liddon Quad:
I can see myself…I was standing looking out and there was somebody I knew walking
along the far side of Liddon…and as I looked, in a kind of vacant mood, a line and a
half came into my head, and I didn’t know what to do with that line and a half. And
then later, during vacations back in Worcestershire, I began to shape the poem that
was ‘Genesis,’ and it appeared in an Oxford pamphlet, one of the Fantasy pamphlets,
in the October or November of that same year, 1952.1
‘Genesis’ would be published in The Paris Review the following year (where
it was read by Allen Tate, who would write to Hill from Paris to congratulate
him on the poem),2 and it would also be included in a number of antholo-
gies before being preserved as the first poem in Hill’s first book of poems,
1959’s For the Unfallen – a position which it would occupy again in the
Collected Poems of 1985.3 Hill in recent years has described the poem as
1 Hill’s reading was given on 3 July 2008, bringing the conference ‘Geof frey Hill and
his Contexts’ to its close. See pp. 3–4 of Hill’s pamphlet for ‘Genesis: a ballad of
Christopher Smart’.
2 See The Paris Review, 1:2 (Summer 1953), 31–2; Allen Tate, letter of 5 September 1953,
Literary Papers and Correspondence of Geof frey Hill, Brotherton Collection, MS
20c Hill/6/TAT.
3 The anthologies are: Oxford Poetry 1953, ed. Donald Hall and Geof frey Hill; Poetry
Now, ed. G. S. Fraser (1956); New Poets of England and America, ed. Donald Hall,
26 Piers Pennington
one of his ‘Keble poems’,4 and the link for him between the poem and the
college has remained such that he donated the surviving manuscripts of the
poem’s drafts to the college’s archive.5 This essay describes and discusses in
a necessarily selective way these pages of drafting, tracking through them
the various stages of the poem’s composition, and following more generally
the movements of the young poet’s creative imagination.
Three dif ferent stages in the poem’s drafting can be suggested: an ini-
tial, exploratory stage, comprising two leaves and one part (approximately
a third) of a leaf from a small notebook, which sees individual lines and
fuller passages towards the poem’s beginning recorded and developed by
hand, in blue ink;6 a second stage of sustained ef fort, spanning four sides of
ruled paper (over three sheets of foolscap), which sees these early gestures
developed towards their final form, and fuller passages towards the later
parts of the poem recorded and developed, again by hand, in black ink;7
and then a final stage of refinement, comprising three sides of unruled paper
(three sheets, again foolscap) which finds Hill typing the poem out and
making revisions, in black ink, the process being repeated until the poem
arrives at its more or less final form with the few changes made to the last
of the typescripts.8 It is possible to suggest with some confidence a definite
ordering to these typescripts alone; and, in consequence, impossible to say
Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson (1957). The poem was collected into For the Unfallen:
Poems 1952–1958 (London: André Deutsch, 1959), pp. 15–16, and CP, pp. 15–16.
4 As stated, for instance, on the Clutag Press recording of the poetry reading given by
Geof frey Hill at the Sheldonian Theatre, Oxford, on 1 February 2006.
5 The manuscripts are now catalogued as AD 64/1/1 (they were previously catalogued
as 2004/20), having been donated by Hill in 2000. I am grateful to the college’s
archivist, Robert Petre, for his generous assistance during the writing of this essay.
6 A full leaf from the notebook measures 164 mm x 102 mm.
7 There are no watermarks or any other distinguishing features to these sheets.
8 The first two of these sheets are watermarked ‘Duplicator’, an ‘H’ centrally beneath
this, while the third is watermarked ‘Strathesk’. On the reverse of this third sheet is a
note in pencil, in the hand of another, informing the poet ‘Have taken Melancholy’.
This refers to the draft of a talk on Jacobean melancholy, which Hill was preparing
to deliver to one of the college’s societies, and which, as a postscript notes, was later
returned: ‘Have brought it back’.
whether or not these surviving leaves and sheets, nine in total, provide a
complete record of the poem’s material drafting. Taking into account the
fact that two sides of foolscap from the second stage have notes towards
university work on their reverse, along with various other jottings,9 and
taking also into account the comparatively sparse gestures towards some of
the later parts of the poem, it seems not unreasonable to conclude that some
passages or pages are not likely to have survived (perhaps being more closely
worked in with other pages of university work). It could however be the
case that these parts were worked out in the mind, and not on paper. Hill
looked back on these very early days in his Paris Review interview, which
he gave almost fifty years after ‘Genesis’ had been published in its pages. ‘I
finished things in my head before I set them down’, he said there: ‘because
I was writing so sparsely, so infrequently, one poem wasn’t crowding out
another, I had time to concentrate on the things that came’, meaning that
‘very few drafts have survived of early stuf f ’.10
As stated in his introductory recollection, it was not until he was back
at home in Worcestershire that he started the work of creating the poem,
and the first stage of its drafting was done in one of his father’s policeman’s
notebooks.11 Thin margins were inked in black to mark out each page’s left
hand side (though little attention would in the end be paid to these), and
the three leaves appear at some point to have been torn out of the notebook,
one jaggedly so.12 The partial leaf has on each of its sides a single line written
in blue ink: on the verso is written ‘The big [,?] pig-headed salmon mate’, a
line which will make its way into the published poem, in altered form, and
on the recto is written ‘That sets its seal upon the day’. It is not clear, given
9 These notes appear to be translating histories of the Anglo Saxons, featuring Hengist
(on the verso of the first sheet) and Vortigern (on the verso of the third).
10 Carl Phillips, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXX: an interview with Geof frey Hill’, Paris
Review, 154 (Spring 2000), pp. 272–99 (295).
11 As mentioned by Geof frey Hill, in conversation.
12 The sheets may have been torn out of the notebook by Hill when he was collecting
together the pages of drafting to donate to the archive; it could also have been the
case that they were torn out at an earlier date, perhaps when Hill moved from draft-
ing the poem in the notebook to drafting it on the sheets of foolscap.
28 Piers Pennington
the lack of material context, whether this is another singular line which
came to the poet in isolation, or whether it was intended for ‘Genesis’ or
for another poem; it is impossible to conjecture what, if anything, might
have been noted on the missing part of the leaf, and impossible to know,
given the lack of surviving pagination, where this leaf fitted into the note-
book and what was its relation to the two other surviving leaves (whose
relation in the notebook also remains uncertain). That it was intended for
another poem remains very much a possibility, since passages towards such
another poem are also to be found here, suggesting that dif ferent poems
were drafted in the notebook one alongside the other rather than one after
the other. One of the two full leaves has passages towards ‘Genesis’ on both
of its sides, but the other has passages on the recto alone; on the verso are
passages towards the poem which would appear in print (also in 1952) as
‘Flower and No Flower’ – two complete stanzas (numbered ‘1’ and ‘3’) and
the beginnings of a third stanza (numbered ‘4’) are written in pencil, and
two lines of revision, at the very bottom of the page, are written in black
ink.13 Henry Hart has pointed out the amalgamation of the human with
the natural in Hill’s early poetry,14 and this isolated line’s choice of verb
13 New Poems, ed. Donald Hall, 1:2 (Winter 1952), 5. Stanza ‘1’ of Hill’s draft corresponds
to the first stanza of the published poem, spoken by Body; stanza ‘3’ corresponds
to the second stanza of the published poem, again spoken by Body, although Hill
would revise the lines initially drafted in pencil to include the two lines of replace-
ment written in black ink at the very bottom of the page (‘Whose waters cannot
shield / Him from the drought to come’ becomes ‘Whose waters are no shield /
From the long drought to come’), making a further change (not recorded here) by
setting them apart in parentheses in the published poem; and the three lines towards
stanza ‘4’ of Hill’s draft were an early gesture towards the third stanza of the published
poem, once more spoken by Body, as ‘She who survives the birth / Feels him renew
[those?] scars / That had been sealed for years’ eventually becomes ‘And staggering
from birth / Re-opens the old scars / That had been sealed for years’. Hill, in the
notebook, had intended this stanza to end on the word ‘fears’, which is written in a
terminal position on the fifth line; but in the published poem the stanza ends with
the words ‘Inevitable wars’.
14 Henry Hart, The Poetry of Geof frey Hill (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1986), pp. 12, 23.
anticipates two passages of drafting under the title ‘Genesis’, which both
describe spring setting ‘a [cunning?] bail / For us’, as well as the passage
immediately preceding these, which describes ‘Remorseless Spring that sets
the bail / For those whom creeping Winter kills’ – the movement between
‘those whom creeping Winter kills’ and ‘us’ betraying even here the poet’s
early anxiety about the use of the first person.15
In his Paris Review interview, Hill said that his dif ficulty with emerg-
ing phrases was ‘to discover where they might be leading or going’,16 and he
seems at this early stage to be searching for a setting in which to situate the
line and a half which came to him in his room in college – if, indeed, he
had it in mind for this new poem. ‘Against the burly air I strode, / Where
the tight ocean heaves its load’, the published poem begins, situating its
speaker on the shore, between land and sea. But Hill had originally wanted
to start the poem with the sea: four separate attempts at its beginning
are recorded on these pages from the notebook, and each of these begins
with the words ‘The sea moves first’. What the sea did next proved to be
the problem, though: ‘The sea moves first & swiftly fills / The rivers [sic]
belly with a spate / Of salt’ was tried in one quatrain; ‘The sea moves first,
& reaching, fills / The waiting rivers with its spate’ was tried at the begin-
ning of another; ‘The sea moves first &, reaching, fills / The poised rivers
with its spate’ was tried in a passage of three lines; and a further passage
attempts to negotiate this problem of beginning by focusing the poem’s
attention onto something other than the sea, as ‘The sea moves first, & then
the great / Pig-headed salmon’ – but there the line breaks of f, incomplete,
perhaps because the drama of containment enacted by the sea’s meeting the
river is now absent.17 The salmon here, like the sea, have their own agency
15 Hill discussed the inf luence of T. S. Eliot’s essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’
in his Paris Review interview; and as Andrew Michael Roberts writes, ‘In much of
Hill’s poetry up to and including Canaan the word “I” does not appear, or if it does
it clearly refers to someone other than the poet’ (Geof frey Hill (Tavistock: Northcote
House, 2004), p. 8).
16 Phillips, ‘Art of Poetry LXXX’, 290.
17 Hill crosses through individual words and whole lines throughout the poem’s drafting,
sometimes writing words of replacement immediately above the cancelled passages;
30 Piers Pennington
(something reinforced by the epithet, ‘pig-headed’, which remains constant

through all of the early iterations), and many of the modulations in these
four attempts at beginning are modulations between degrees of activity
and passivity: ‘waiting’, for instance, makes the rivers far more passive
than does ‘poised’, which suggests an active readiness, while the revision
(done later, in pencil) which crosses through ‘reaching’ and replaces it with
‘charging’ similarly suggests a fuller and more determined action than had
previously been the case.
Hill would try a dif ferent and ultimately more successful line of
approach on what appears to be the first page in the second stage of the
poem’s drafting. There survive three sheets of foolscap paper – which have
no margins, printed or inked, but which do have two holes for binding in
files (allowing recto and verso to be identified) – four of whose sides record
this substantial attempt at the poem’s creation. Although there may have
been some overlap between the two stages, the new line of approach sug-
gests a new start on the poem, perhaps undertaken at a later date; indeed,
it may even have been the case that Hill in the notebook had begun work
on a poem titled ‘Genesis’ which was originally to have remained separate
from another poem titled ‘Christopher Smart’. It is again impossible to sug-
gest with any surety a definite ordering to these four pages; but, assuming
Hill to have worked on the poem in a broadly chronological movement
through the poem’s days, from beginning to end, a sequence can cautiously
be suggested. There is, to begin with, the likely first page (a recto, with notes
towards university work on its verso), which is initially titled ‘Christopher
Smart’ and which records passages of drafting for days one to three; there is
then a sheet whose two pages (recto and verso) both record a more extensive
attempt at the poem’s drafting, moving in a discontinuous way from days
these deletions and revisions have not been recorded in the transcriptions cited in the
text, which present the poet’s first attempt at a particular line on a particular page –
deletions and revisions are sometimes discussed in the text, though. Hill often uses
a plus sign in place of the word ‘and’, which has been rendered as an ampersand in
the transcriptions. On ‘containment’ in Hill’s poetry more generally see Christopher
Ricks, ‘Geof frey Hill 1: “The Tongue’s Atrocities”’, The Force of Poetry (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 285–318.
one to six; and there is finally a fourth page (another recto, again with notes
towards university work on its verso), which appears to have functioned as
a sort of miscellany, a page for gathering passages of revision (going all the
way back to the poem’s first day) and for noting lines towards the poem’s
conclusion. As with the pages from the notebook, these four sheets record
much that would not make its way into the published poem; but it is gen-
erally the case that most of the lines and passages recorded here would in
some way be developed into lines and passages which do survive into the
published poem, suggesting that Hill at this second stage of the drafting
was able to focus his thoughts towards the poem more surely than before,
the very exploratory work having been done in the notebook.
The new line of approach still involved the sea, but Hill found his way
past the earlier impasse by introducing a new element into the poem: ‘First,
then I bring the sea to bear / Upon the dead weight of the land’, he writes
at the top of this first page. The ‘I’ of the poem’s speaking self had been
absent from all of the notebook’s passages, though ‘us’ had been tried; and
if that first stage of drafting had found Hill weighing degrees of activity
and passivity, then he resolves that negotiation in this new beginning by
focusing the poem’s agency into its speaking self – there is only ‘the dead
weight of the land’ here, nothing ‘waiting’ or ‘poised’. These two lines begin
a quatrain which dif fers very little from its appearance in the published
poem, its actions being in the present and not, as there, in the past: ‘And
the waves f lourish at my prayer’, runs the third line, ‘And the rivers spawn
their sand’, the fourth, although ‘And’ would be crossed through to begin
the line with ‘The’. Having made a breakthrough by working the speaking
self into the poem, Hill then introduces the inspiring line and a half in what
will prove to be the successful attempt at the poem’s beginning: ‘Out in the
crying world I strode / Where the tight sea heaves its load / And worked
the miracles of God’. He made no substantive revisions to this tercet, but
he did write the present participle ‘Working’ at the end of the third line,
and this suggestion would be incorporated into the only other drafting of
this passage in this second stage, which now, on the second page, begins
the poem: ‘Along the burly air I strode – / Where the tight ocean heaves its
load – / Crying the miracles of God’, the parenthetical dashes here seeming
to indicate an early unease about the second line (which Hill would finally
32 Piers Pennington
resolve more than twenty years later, with his revisions for the Collected
Poems).18 More immediately, though, ‘Along’ would be crossed through, as
would ‘strode’, and, at the very top of the page, Hill would record the new
line ‘Against the burly air I rode’, where ‘rode’ is underlined. A composite
of these early possibilities would at some point cohere in the poet’s mind
to form the line which begins the published poem (and which appears
only in the first typescript), while the underlined ‘rode’ would ultimately
be transferred to the poem’s conclusion.
The presence of a title seems to have been important to Hill for the
purposes of drafting, but the work of the second page is done under one
which appears to have been added as something of an afterthought, being
written into the margin at the top of the page and not onto the page’s top
line. Indeed, this top margin is rather crowded: ‘Against the burly air I
rode’ is there, and under this is written ‘Genesis’, and under this ‘A Song
of Christopher Smart’. There is no suggestion at this stage of any formal
connection between the two titular elements, other than their proximity
and their both being (variously) indented: there is no point of punctuation
following ‘Genesis’, for instance, and if the words ‘A Song of Christopher
Smart’ could be forming a subtitle then they could equally be forming an
equivalent. One of the full pages from the notebook was drafted under
the title ‘Genesis’ (there were no surviving titles for the other two),19 but,
as already mentioned, the first page of foolscap drafting was initially done
under the title ‘Christopher Smart’, which was underlined. If this was
Hill’s first thought, then he would later note a second thought above this:
‘“Genesis” a Song of Christopher Smart’ anticipates the title which the
poem would take for its publication in the Fantasy pamphlet, though this
particular iteration marks the only appearance of the quotation marks
around ‘“Genesis”’.20 The latter two pages of foolscap are not written under
18 See the proofs of the Collected Poems for this revision: Literary Papers and
Correspondence of Geof frey Hill, Brotherton Collection, MS 20c Hill/1/8/2.
19 The top margin of one of the leaves has been cut away, though, as have parts of the
other.
20 Hill would later use quotation marks in a similar way in the sequence ‘Of Commerce
and Society’, as the epigraph to the sixth and final poem in the sequence, ‘The
Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian’, makes a point of using them where they do not
titles, nor are there any further notes towards a title on either of these
pages, Hill seeming for the time being to be content with the presence
of these two elements. When he was ready to type the poem out for the
first time, though, he was faced with the problem of finding its title once
and for all; in the first typescript (for which see the illustration on p. 40),
‘Genesis’ is indented and written in capital letters, the explanatory line
‘A ballad of Christopher Smart’ appearing underneath, hard to the page’s
left. This subtitle, with its change from the ‘song’ of the earlier drafts to the
newly introduced ‘ballad’, would in the following typescript be brought
back alongside ‘Genesis’ to find the title which the poem would take for its
publication in the pamphlet, before finally being dropped for the poem’s
publication in For the Unfallen.
Hill mentions Christopher Smart in an unpublished piece of early
prose, which is written under the title ‘Pensées’. The piece is not dated,
but judging from the similarity of its handwriting with these manuscripts
of ‘Genesis’ (1952) and with the manuscripts of the ‘Letter from Oxford’
(1954), it can fairly be said to belong to this early period. Discussing the
‘visionary’ quality which others have seen in his poetry, Hill writes ‘I have
always thought that the “visionary gleam” of the mind’s eye of someone
like a Blake or a Smart was its own justification’, before going on to describe
with regard to his own experience of composition the relation between
inspiration and craftsmanship:
However strong the first ‘urge’ to create the poem, it is only by a long and arduous
process of fashioning that I am able to justify the final poem in my own eyes, and
myself in the eyes of anyone who cares to read it. To borrow someone’s phrase: ‘what
began as inspiration ends as entity.’ 21
need to be used: ‘“But then face to face”’ (CP, p. 51). Later still, he would use them
for the title of Tenebrae’s ‘“Christmas Trees”’ (CP, p. 171), as discussed by Charles
Lock in this volume.
21 Although the words ‘the poem’ were at some point struck through. The piece is held
in the Literary Papers and Correspondence of Geof frey Hill (Brotherton Collection,
MS 20c Hill/4/1), and it displays interesting similarities with the round-table dis-
cussion published in Trio, 3 ( June 1953); it may have been the case that Hill’s piece
developed out of his contributions to the discussion, or vice versa. The manuscripts
of the ‘Letter from Oxford’ are also grouped with it (MS 20c Hill/4/1).
34 Piers Pennington
This ‘long and arduous process of fashioning’ is most clearly in evidence in

this second stage of the poem’s drafting – though its opening stanzas, fol-
lowing the explorations in the notebook, came to Hill without too much
struggle. Having found a means of incorporating the inspiring line and a
half, he also introduced into the first page another early line which had yet
to find its final place: ‘And where the streams were salt & full / The great,
pig-headed salmon strove’ successfully negotiates one of the notebook’s chal-
lenges, as what had initially been recorded as a solitary line is worked into
its lasting position. These two lines survived into the published poem, but
Hill would revise the two lines which complete this drafting of the quatrain;
the salmon strove ‘To mount in to the hills above’, and there then follows a
general statement as ‘All then was vigour without soul’, the presence of the
words ‘vigour’ and ‘soul’ recalling the ‘Body’ and ‘Soul’ of ‘Flower and No
Flower’, which Hill is likely to have been composing or to have finished com-
posing at about this time. This general statement fractures the poem’s focus
on presentation with a gesture of explanation, and Hill crosses it through,
writing ‘Curbing the tide’s pull’ underneath, also noting ‘Checking’ as a
possible alternative. These suggestions will form the basis of the two later
attempts at these lines. On the second page, Hill writes ‘To climb in to the
hills, above / The griping ebb, & the tides [sic] pull’, and on the final page he
reverses their order and finds another participle, one which is again more
neutrally descriptive than had previously been the case: ‘Fighting the ebb,
& the tide’s pull – / To climb into the hills above’, though the dash here, like
the earlier parenthetical dashes, would later be altered to a comma, and he
would also return to ‘Curbing’ when he was revising the first typescript.
Hill’s first attempt at the quatrain which describes the poem’s second day
again dif fers very little from the one which appears in the published poem:
Upon the second day I saw

The osprey plunge with triggered claws
Upon the frail gulls of the shore[.?]
feathering blood along the shore
The dif ference between Hill’s commas and full stops is at times slight – plus
there are further dots either side of ‘claws’, suggesting uncertainty – and it
remains unclear whether the fourth line is in fact being suggested as a pos-
sible alternative to the third; Hill certainly favours the quatrain in much
of his early poetry, but he has already experimented with the tercet in his
earlier gestures towards this poem, and no overall pattern will ultimately be
established in it. If these two lines are intended to complement one another,
then the repetition of ‘shore’ creates a sense of finality, and something similar
will be suggested in the second drafting of this second day, on the second
page of foolscap. Hill deletes the third line from his first attempt, resolving
the quatrain with the lines ‘Feathering blood along the shore, / To lay the
living sinew bare’, which replaces the distant generality of the ‘frail gulls’
with the closer particularity of the ‘living sinew’, and which focuses this
part of the poem onto the osprey and its actions by removing from view the
object of its attack. Hill also makes some changes to the line which begins
the quatrain: as well as cancelling the opening ‘Upon’, he further describes
his speaker by introducing the word ‘stood’. The poem’s speaker only ‘saw’
in the first drafting of this day, but here he ‘stood & saw’, and this second
verb better defines his relation to his world: not only does his passive stand-
ing contrast with the defiant walking of the poem’s opening line (though
Hill may not have had this opening line finally in mind at this stage), but
‘stood’ is also an intransitive verb, one which requires no object and which,
as such, establishes distance – something which Hill emphasises by break-
ing the line on ‘saw’, lingering that verb on its suggestion of intransitivity
before the osprey becomes its object in the following line.
This intransitive mood will in the published poem be continued into
its third day, with the speaker’s crying seemingly to himself. Hill’s initial
thoughts towards this third day were very dif ferent, though, and there are
again two passages of drafting towards it, on the first and second pages. The
first sees the speaker interacting with the world as ‘The third day moved me
to [Impale?] / A lark hunch-backed against the Gale’, an image which will
later be reworked into the poem’s fourth day. The second passage of draft-
ing is much closer to the final version: the first and third of its lines survive
into the published poem, the latter returning to the notebook’s pages to
find ‘The hawk’s deliberate stoop in air’, while the second line presents ‘The
grinning stoat so full of guile’. Hill seems to replace ‘stoat’ with ‘weasel’, and
in his revisions to the first typescript he would bring two dif ferent creatures
into the poem at this point (‘The soft-voiced owl’ and ‘the ferret’s smile’).
The fourth and fifth lines in this second passage are again similar to the
final version: ‘Their eyes are glass, limbs hooped in steel, / Their bodies bent
36 Piers Pennington
upon the kill.”’ Hill cancelled these lines, and at the top of the fourth page
are to be found the two lines of replacement, ‘Cold eyes, & bodies hooped
in steel / Forever bent upon the kill,”’ the closing quotation mark indicat-
ing that these words (as in the earlier drafting) are to be set apart as speech
within the poem. If the later introduction of the albatross cannot but call
Coleridge to mind, then the speaker’s crying the word ‘Beware!’ is sugges-
tive of ‘Kubla Khan’ and the lines ‘Beware! Beware! / His f lashing eyes, his
f loating hair!’22 Hill’s debt to this passage is most obviously marked in his
initial drafting, as ‘Their eyes are glass, limbs hooped in steel’ catches at the
rhythm of Coleridge’s lines, the glass eyes also being closer to his ‘f lashing
eyes’ than the ‘cold eyes’ of the published poem. And, along with the allu-
sion to Hamlet in ‘hooped in steel’, these eyes of glass also make a further
allusion, one which will remain important to Hill throughout his career:
‘For now we see through a glass darkly, but then face to face: now I know
in part; but I shall know even as I am known’ (1 Corinthians 13:12).
Hill was able to complete his drafting of the poem’s second and third
days comparatively quickly, each in only a couple of attempts, but the poem’s
fourth day proved far more problematic. The first page of foolscap comes to
its close with a couplet which makes an initial gesture towards the poem’s
conclusion (discussed below), while the passage extending from the second
page onto the third mixes explorations of the poem’s fourth day with further
gestures towards a conclusion (again discussed below). The drafting and
redrafting of the poem’s second and third days had focused on the speaker’s
relation to his world, and this extended passage returns him to a fuller action
than the previous day’s crying, even though this is an action of negation:
‘And after that I turned away / From fierce and unregenerate clay’, though
Hill would later have his speaker ‘renounce’ rather than ‘turn away’, making
the perspective internal rather than external. He then reworks his earlier
drafting of the poem’s third day into this fourth day, as the albatross – rather
than the lark of the earlier attempt – is introduced into these lines. He strug-
gles throughout this second stage of the drafting, though, to find suitable
22 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Poetical Works, ed. J. C. C. Mays, in The Collected Works of
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer, 16 vols (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1969–2002), XVI: I (Reading Text), p. 514; I am indebted
to Kathryn Murphy for this observation.
adjectives to describe this and the phoenix, the other bird present in this part
of the poem: he tries ‘quiet’ and ‘[grey-gloved?]’ and ‘frigid’ before settling
on ‘glove-winged’, for the albatross, and he tries ‘unwrinkled’ and ‘signal’ and
‘crouching’ and ‘fire-couched’ for the phoenix, before trying ‘stony’ in the
first two typescripts, only to settle on ‘charmed’ in the final typescript. If find-
ing the word to introduce the albatross was dif ficult, then establishing the
speaker’s relation to it was similarly not straightforward. In Hill’s first gesture
towards the image, on the first page, his speaker was moved ‘to [Impale?]
/ A lark hunch-backed against the Gale’, where the relation of opposition
between lark and gale anticipates the relation of opposition between speaker
and burly air (which will appear for the first time in the first typescript, along
with two other instances of ‘Against’). In his second attempt, on the second
page, Hill has his speaker ‘Poising the quiet albatross / To sift the ashes of
the sea’, returning to a word which he had used in the notebook’s pages in a
gesture towards beginning (‘the poised rivers’). The word in that very early
drafting was used to suggest a state of active readiness, but here it is used to
give the speaker a greater degree of control over the albatross than would be
the case with its two subsequent revisions: to ‘set’, on the second and third
pages, and to ‘made’, also on the third page, a verb which refuses to specify
a particular action.
This extended passage, as mentioned above, is interspersed with spo-
radic gestures towards the poem’s conclusion. Hill’s first grasping towards
this is to be found at the bottom of the first page of foolscap, where an
isolated couplet reads ‘And then I cried: “Here is no soul / Only great
strength, here is no love!”’23 He would incorporate his speaker’s crying into
his later revision of the poem’s third day, while his use of the word ‘soul’
recalls his earlier attempt to work the word into the poem – and again it
makes explicit something which in the published poem will remain implicit.
23 This couplet is noted immediately beneath Hill’s first attempt at the poem’s third day;
as mentioned in the text above, this begins ‘The third day moved me to [Impale?] / A
lark hunch-backed against the Gale’, but the word beginning the quatrain’s third line
is impossible to decipher: ‘[ ? ], a wisp, both high & frail, / That love & pity might
avail’. The presence of the words ‘love’ and ‘pity’ here, as well as the following ‘soul’,
suggest that Hill might initially have intended the poem to move in a very dif ferent
direction.
38 Piers Pennington
Three further gestures, each occurring separately, are to be found in this

extended passage: ‘And the sixth day I wrought again / Upon his creatures
& their pain’, Hill writes between two passages which develop the wan-
dering of the albatross, while two couplets, a line between them, bring the
third page of foolscap to its close. ‘I plucked with steel my horse’s blood
/ And then I mostly understood’, reads the first, and ‘It is by blood alone
we live / By blood alone to take [&?] give’, the second. A line of explana-
tion again follows a line of presentation in the first couplet, and when Hill
turns back to the image on the fourth and final page of foolscap the line
of explanation has gone: ‘The seventh day, again I rode, / In haste, a mes-
senger of God, / And, spurred, plucked out my horse’s blood’. These lines
strongly anticipate the lines which move the published poem towards its
close, but the many commas and clauses here create a sense of hesitation
which works formally against the ‘haste’ which is described. The repetition
of ‘blood’ in the second couplet gestures towards the four instances of the
word in the final section of the final version, while the somewhat awkward
variation of the familiar phrase ‘give and take’ will be made more complex
by being distanced from the personal in ‘To ravage and redeem the world’.
And to be found among the various draftings on the fourth page is one
further couplet which Hill will work into the poem’s conclusion: ‘The same
triumphant bones that lie / Beneath the rough pelt of this sea.’
In his Paris Review interview, Hill said that he had ‘never begun a poem
knowing, really, where it was going to end’,24 and the gestures towards a
conclusion sporadically recorded throughout this second stage of drafting
find the poet reaching out again and again towards a point of ending. This
ending is not drafted in full by hand (though three of the gestures seem to
have come to the poet in roughly the order in which they would be incor-
porated into the poem), but it is realised in its more or less final form in the
first typescript, which for the first time presents the whole poem in its full-
ness of shape. Three typescripts constitute this final stage of refinement, the
work of creation having for the most part been done, and these, as already
mentioned, can confidently be suggested to describe this final stage in its
entirety. Hill typed the poem out in full on each of the sheets – using his

father’s policeman’s typewriter – adding the year of its composition and his
name (in capitals) under each iteration, this early habit seeming to be the
source of the dates which will provide a narrative of development through For
the Unfallen. As might be expected, he makes the most substantial changes
to the first typescript (for which see the illustration on p. 40); and while a
number of suggestions are noted for the poem’s first three sections, it is the
fourth which receives the most sustained attention. The fixity of type on
the freshness of the clean page reveals a shift in tense between sections two
and three. Until this point, the speaker’s actions have been narrated in the
past tense, even though the many participles give that past action a sense of
present continuity; following the ‘has’ of the bracketed lines which bring the
third section to its close (‘Such as the stony phoenix has / In the gold crown
of its tree’), the poem moves strongly into the present tense as ‘The Phoenix
burns as cold as frost’ and then, two lines later, ‘goes wild and lost’, before
it returns to the past for the following day (‘I turned again’). When Hill is
looking over the typescript, though, he is wondering whether his speaker’s
actions in this fourth section should also be brought into the present, draw-
ing lines to link ‘burns’ and ‘turned’ and writing a note to himself in the
margin – ‘Perhaps “turn” for immediacy’. The suggestion would remain a
suggestion only, and this momentary irruption of immediacy would set the
scene for the temporal movements of the poem’s concluding lines.
Hill did make two related revisions to this fourth section, but the order
in which he did so remains unclear; he changes two of the days of his poem,
and he deletes a word from both of the lines in which these changes are
made, the second of these deletions being especially significant because Hill’s
other revisions throughout this final stage are largely revisions of substitu-
tion, not deletion. He may have changed the poem’s days and then struck
through the words – ‘on’ in the first of the lines, ‘And’ in the second – to
compensate for the alteration in rhythm, or he may have been unsure of
the rhythm and altered the poem’s days to strengthen it, or the two things
may have been complexly linked together and the decisions of revision
made more or less simultaneously. It does seem likely that the change of
days would have been made first, though; the final page of foolscap had
come to its close with a gesture towards the seventh day, but no fifth day had
been drafted in those pages, the speaker renouncing fierce and unregener-
ate clay on the fourth, then turning back to f lesh and blood on the sixth.
Hill’s first typescript of ‘Genesis’, with revisions
Hill resolves this by making the sixth day the fifth, and the seventh day the
sixth, writing in the margin, with reference to the text from which the poem
takes its title, ‘And the seventh day shalt thou rest!’ But with the loss of
the seventh day one of the line’s syllables was also lost, and Hill does more
than alter the line’s rhythm by deleting the word ‘And’. The poem’s days are
first introduced at the beginning of its second section: ‘The second day
I stood and saw’, the first of its stanzas begins, ‘And the third day I cried’,
the second. A further variation occurs in the poem’s third section – ‘And
I renounced, on the fourth day’ – where ‘And’ again leads the line, but a
dif ferent conjunction is used to begin the next day: ‘So, on the sixth’, Hill
had typed, and this will become ‘So, the fifth day’ in the two following
typescripts, where ‘So’ provides the link. Aside from the introduction of
the second day, then, each subsequent day refers back by conjunction to
what has come before, and Hill had originally wanted to continue this
anaphoric coherence into the poem’s final day; but following his deletion
of ‘And’ the only continuity is the continuity of days, the opening emphasis
on the preposition – heightened by the first of the deletions – intimating
a break between this final day and those which precede it.
The formal division marking the split between the poem’s fourth and
fifth sections immediately followed this tercet, though, and in his revisions
to the second and penultimate typescript Hill would alter the shape of his
poem in a deeply significant way. No evidence is to be found in either of the
earlier stages that he intended to divide the poem into numbered sections,
but these are common to all three typescripts. The poem, then, becomes
structured in two separate ways in this final stage of its drafting: by the nar-
rative organisation around the days of the week, something internal, and by
the formal organisation into five dif ferent sections, something external. The
presence of these two means of organisation introduces the possibility for
tension between them, and this is something which Hill exploits very early
on; the first day’s action corresponds to the first section (something known
by the reader only in retrospect), but the action of both the second and third
days comprises the second section, bringing about a sort of formal fall as the
congruence between day and section is made to disappear almost as soon
as it has been established. If the changing of the poem’s days had resolved
one point of ambiguity, then Hill’s repositioning of the split between the
poem’s fourth and fifth sections introduces another, one which resonates
42 Piers Pennington
through the poem as whole. The fifth section had begun with the line ‘By
blood we live, the hot, the cold’, but by having it begin instead with ‘On
the sixth day, as I rode’ Hill makes more suggestive the relation between
the individual movement which begins the poem and its generalising final
statement; these had been neatly contained into dif ferent sections, but now
they are made powerfully continuous, the final section describing a com-
plicating outward movement from ‘I’ to ‘we’ to ‘men’ to ‘Earth’.
Having reworked the two bracketed lines of the third section in the
penultimate typescript, Hill made a further change to the concluding sec-
tion when he was typing the poem out for the final time: ‘And by Christ’s
blood are men set free’ became ‘And by Christ’s blood are men made free’,
the alliteration strengthening the line’s patterning by creating a more insist-
ent parallelism between ‘by Christ’s blood’ and ‘men made free’, even as it
also calls attention to the inversion of syntax, which stands questioningly
at odds with its sense. When he introduced and read some of his poems
on the BBC’s Third Programme in 1965 Hill described ‘Genesis’ as seem-
ing ‘alien’ to him and concluding ‘with a f lourish that in retrospect strikes
me as being dishonest’.25 It was too fundamental a part of the poem to be
altered in any major way, though, and when he revised the poem for its
publication in the Collected Poems of 1985 he turned his attention to its
beginning, instead.26 If the deletion of the line describing the ‘tight ocean’
removed an element of opposition, the newly compact couplet only made
starker the tension between the speaker’s voice and the circumstances out
of which he speaks: ‘we are af fected every moment of our lives by pressures
for which a not wholly satisfactory analogy is the pressure of the air around
us’, Hill would later say, ‘One shapes the personal voice in some way. One
either does or one doesn’t’.27
25 Hill introduced and read some of his poems on the programme ‘The Living Poet’,
broadcast on 5 September 1965.
26 ‘I have felt impelled to alter words and phrases here and there. I have changed only
those details which have become a burden over the years’, Hill explained in the ‘Notes
and Acknowledgements’ at the back of the book (CP, p. 199).
Charles Lock
Beside the Point: A Diligence of Accidentals
It is not a matter of justice. Justice is in another world.

Or of injustice even; that is beside the point, or almost.
— TCP, p. 26
beside the point comma or almost full stop It is standard practice to

remove the indications of oral delivery when a paper is prepared for print;
but not here, the better to observe and attend to the noises and the silences,
of and by which poetry is composed:
Apostrophe Tis a fearful thing in capital Winter

To be shattered by the blast comma
And to hear the rattling trumpet
Thunder colon quote capital Cut away the mast exclamation point close quote
So we shuddered there in silence comma dash

For the stoutest held his breath comma
While the hungry sea was roaring comma
And the breakers talked with capital Death period
This parodic exercise by Franklin P. Adams (first printed in 1919: thus beck-
oning to a likewise italicised “Envoi”) poignantly expresses the absurdity in
giving voice to punctuation: the rhythm is disturbed, and the rhyme lost.
The poem is well titled “The Dictaphone Bard” and deserves notice: first,
for being a poem entirely without punctuation; and second, as one that,
by vocalising the symbols instead of silently pointing, turns a conventional
44 Charles Lock
ballad into a strikingly modern poem, its rhythms not uncharacteristic of

its time.1
Punctuation is traditionally consigned to the category of the acciden-
tal. Is there an accidental, in any text? Or anything accidental about any
text? The dif ference dear to old-style bibliographers between substantives
and accidentals is one that distracts our attention from points, the better
supposedly to get the point.2 Rousseau to his publisher:
There are innumerable faults in the punctuation. When I said that I wanted the
manuscript to be followed exactly, I did not mean this to be applied to the punctua-
tion, which is thoroughly defective.3
Cited by Philip Gaskell in his New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), this

has enjoyed privileged status as dispensation, liberating readers from serious
attention, licensing them to skim, even to adjust the meaning, according
to need or preference, or to the exigencies of common sense. Should our
attention even to poetry be enfolded within this dispensation? We would
resist, while acknowledging that it must be through the voice that the dis-
pensation is ef fected; and that voice is an inseparable constituent of poetry.
It is the voice that dissolves punctuation, and that confers the arbitration
of meaning on the one who speaks. A text is punctuated rather as food is
sealed and frozen, in order to preserve it in its passage from one unfrozen
state to another. Rabelais in the Quart Livre speaks of mots gelés, which on
being thawed release their sound: this may be taken as an allegory of the
voice frozen in writing (and especially in print), to be released by the one
1 Franklin P. Adams, Something Else Again (New York: Doubleday, 1920), p. 95, based
on James T. Fields’s once well-known ‘The Ballad of the Tempest’; for this I am
indebted to Jesper Kruse.
2 D. F. McKenzie honours Stanley Morison for his resistance to the distinction: ‘The
whole of Morison’s last great work, Politics and Script, would be salutary reading for
many writers on “accidentals” and “substantives”’: D. F. McKenzie, Making Meaning:
“Printers of the Mind” and Other Essays, ed. Peter D. McDonald and Michael F. Suarez
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002), p. 213.
3 Philip Gaskell, A New Introduction to Bibliography (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1972), p. 339.
who reads, restoring voice and breath.4 Punctuation might be understood

as those graphic signs which cannot be thawed, or which, if thawed, release
no sound, catch no breath.
And so arises the notion that punctuation is of merely transitory value:
it helps words to get from one voice to another. Voicing takes what matters,
what bears sense, the substantives, and releases them from the packaging, the
encumbrance of accidentals. If that is the purpose and function of punctua-
tion, then clearly the accidentals can be indefinitely adjusted to meet the
needs of the latest sort of reader: spelling and punctuation should accord
with modern editorial and reading practices. Geof frey Hill has expressed
his disapproval in a number of places, most extensively in the essay ‘Of
Diligence and Jeopardy’: modernised texts, their aim of ‘accessibility’ and
‘intelligibility’ licensed by a principled disregard for accidentals, ‘have
destroyed memory and dissipated attention’ (CCW, p. 287).5
Though the accidental, as distinct from the essential (and thence from
the substantial), is an antithesis of medieval logic, the term was introduced
into textual studies quite recently: the OED ascribes this sense of accident
to W. W. Greg in 1942. According to the cited passage (OED, s.v. ‘accident,
n.’, sense 6b), Greg considers accidentals to include punctuation, spelling,
typeface (and ‘other scribal or typographical details’), with one addition:
‘The only other accidental we need consider is line division’. Line division
here presumably excludes poetry, though it is clearly arbitrary in prose.
However, what is unmentioned anywhere as an accidental is space, the
space between words, and
even between lines. A space is the epitome of the accidental: it cannot be
voiced; it can hardly be thought. Yet even in prose there is one sort or qual-
ity of space, the indentation, that does carry significance. In reading prose
aloud, we do not announce line-endings, but we may often find a need to
voice the indentation, to say that a new paragraph begins now.
4 For the source in Plutarch of the conceit of writing as ‘frozen words’, see M. A. Screech,
Laughter at the Foot of the Cross (London: Allen Lane, 1997), pp. 298–9.
5 Compare Franklin P. Adams: ‘Transcriber’s Notes: Original variations in spelling,
hyphenation, and punctuation have been retained’, Adams, Something Else, p. 134.
46 Charles Lock
In listening to poetry only a practised ear is able to pick out a line divi-
sion unmarked by rhyme or pause. And very few could construct an image
of the stanza had their only acquaintance with the poem come through
listening. A stanza has a look and a shape that is created by a variety of
spaces and indentations. Yet in a poetry reading it is rare that the poet will
number stanzas or measure lines or tell us anything about the poem’s look
on the page. Adams prefaces ‘The Dictaphone Bard’ thus: ‘Begin each line
with a capital. Indent alternate lines. Double space after each fourth line’.
That sort of instruction would not be unhelpful to the audience at a poetry
reading struggling to imagine the shapes that poems make. When listen-
ing blind, we can be puzzled by line length and stanza shape, and we are
often surprised and disconcerted by the poem’s close. (By contrast, what
is shaped allows for no sudden ending.)
Voice absolves the reader of punctuational attentiveness; it also deprives
the reader of the sense of space and shape, not only that of the letters and
words, but of the poem as a field of print within the page. If we count space
among the accidentals – and therefore as of substantive weight – we must
recognise that poetry cannot live by voice alone: consider the sonnet. Yet
of all textual genres, it is poetry that remains the one most voiced, and most
resistant, still, to the current mode of reading that keeps our lips sealed,
the words unsounded. Everything else in print that meets our eyes can be
read or registered in silence; to pass over in silence the words of poetry is
to leave them frozen, their sounds trapped.
The relation between poetry and punctuation is one that was brought
anew to poets’ attention by the typewriter; ever since, the poet as com-
poser has been able to exercise some of the compositor’s control over the
fine details of layout. In the early sixteenth century, perhaps in response
to the new authority of type, we find a few examples of what are known as
‘punctuation poems’: so named, though their ‘point’ is that they lack one,
or any. Their sense depends on potential or latent pointing:
Trusty seldom to their friends unjust
can be read
Trusty, seldom to their friends unjust,
or
Trusty seldom, to their friends unjust.
Three of these poems were first printed in the early twentieth century; the
form was discussed brief ly in the Review of English Studies in 1938–9, but
has attracted little notice since.6
Mis-punctuation is famously staged in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,
where Theseus says of Quince as Prologue ‘This fellow doth not stand
upon points’ so that there’s ‘nothing impaired, but all disordered’ (V.i).7
Unlike the wit of a punctuation poem, here the humour works only in
and by voicing. The text has to be punctuated ‘incorrectly’: it cannot be
left unpunctuated, lest Quince unwittingly deliver it aright. The theatrical
exploitation of the device of a punctuation poem is belated: the tension of
the unpunctuated poem belongs to the early sixteenth century (or possibly
late fifteenth), to the contemporaries of Rabelais.8
6 For details see M. B. Parkes, Pause and Ef fect: an Introduction to the History of
Punctuation in the West (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1992), p. 134 (note 44). Three such
poems are printed by R. H. Robbins in Secular Lyrics of XIVth and XVth Centuries
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), pp. 101–2. Robbins notes (p. 263): ‘That this type
of literary tour-de-force has not been forgotten is illustrated by a poem (from the
Paris Soir) in The New York Times, 16 May 1941, p. 2, an alexandrine octave, the
riming verses to the left of the caesura a eulogy of England, and those to the right a
damnation of Hitler, the whole being a seeming paean of the Führer.’ Another punc-
tuation poem, from the early sixteenth century, ascribed to Richard Hattfield, is ‘All
women have vertues noble & excellent’; cited by David R. Carlson, ‘The Henrician
Courtier Writing in Manuscript and Print (Wyatt, Surrey, Bryan, and Others)’, in
Kent Cartwright (ed.), A Companion to Tudor Literature (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell,
2010), p. 162.
7 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ed. Peter Holland (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1994), V.i.118, 124–5, p. 238.
8 Though some punctuation poems in Latin were identified by James R. Kreuzer,
‘Some Earlier Examples of the Rhetorical Device in Ralph Roister Doister’, Review
of English Studies, 14 (1938), 321–3, they belong to the late medieval or early modern
period. There can obviously be no antecedents in Classical Latin where inf lection
48 Charles Lock
Print gives new weight to punctuation, and gives rise to new anxieties.
Yet printers and compositors live by their own rules, stand on their own
points and pointings, and will not tolerate interference from scribes. Scribes
can take care of the words, but printers know best how to prepare those
words for freezing. No punctuation poem was composed for a composi-
tor to set; none would have survived the imposition of house-rules. And
none seems to have been printed until the twentieth century: they belong
to what Harold Love termed the age of ‘scribal publication’.9 Though we
now read them in print, they have survived only because the poet (as scribe)
still had authority to point, or not to point; un-pointed poems survive
in manuscript only because manuscript was their final destination. The
manuscript of most poems would normally have been destroyed once the
compositor had done his job.
In the twentieth century the typewriter gave the poet a means of match-
ing script to print with some precision. Though Mallarmé distributed
words around the page in 1898, the experimentation of ‘Un coup de dés’
owes nothing to the technology available to the writer. Ezra Pound seems
to have been, in 1913, the first to use double and multiple spacing, and to
insist that the printer follow the typescript:
IN A STATION OF THE METRO
The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

Petals on a wet, black bough .
Ezra Pound
So it first appeared in Poetry, though here it can be only approximately

spaced: my computer’s keyboard is less precise than Pound’s typewriter.10
not word-order determines sense and there’s no punctuation ‘to speak of ’. It is the
f lexible yet semantically determinate word-order of English (and other vernaculars)
that invites unpunctuated wit.
9 Harold Love, Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1993).
10 Ezra Pound, ‘In a Station of the Metro’, Poetry, 2:1 (April 1913), 12; my thanks (again)
to Jesper Kruse. My thanks also to New Directions and the Ezra Pound Literary
Property Trust for permission to reproduce this poem in this state in its entirety.
Still beside the point, this point, here at Keble College, let me pay a
tribute to location. Location, proximity, nextness: these are the mere acci-
dentals of motion, to those for whom metaphor is an independent value.
However, metonymy, the binary pair of metaphor, invites such a tribute,
af fords space, for it is metonymy that makes space count. Metonymy does
the work for what Geof frey Hill names contexture. Here, in this college, as
an undergraduate reading English, I was tutored by Malcolm Parkes, who
would bewilder and even irritate us with his principle that the only aspect
of a text worthy of sustained attention was its punctuation. After reading
(aloud) an essay on any topic, the comment might be predicted: ‘You cited
line 456…Did you notice the medial comma there? No? Well, think about
it’. I did not, and I continued to miss the point for many years until the
publication of Pause and Ef fect: An Introduction to the History of Punctua-
tion in the West (1992), a book whose alternative title had been ‘Getting the
point’. Having got it, one understood that nothing should ever be beside
the point, least of all the point. (Unless, a parenthesis within a digression,
one treats words, both before and after, as beside the point: as having no
meaning apart from that conferred or established by the points.)
Entirely to this point is Christopher Ricks’s lecture, ‘Geof frey Hill
and “The Tongue’s Atrocities”’, which in 1978 inaugurated that attention
to typographical detail which has contributed so much to our apprecia-
tion of poetry, even allowing its study to recuperate, somewhat, from the
dead readings of the ideological and sentimental import of substantives.11
The words cited in my title come from A Treatise of Civil power, under
which title a book by Geof frey Hill exists in two versions. Two versions
with one title? But if the titles are not quite identical, can we speak of two
versions? The Clutag Press book of 2005 shows a title on the cover and
spine that bears a lower-case p for power; in the Penguin (2007), the head
of Power is upper-case. This is the more perplexing in light of the author’s
detailed acknowledgement in the Penguin to the ef fect that ‘Clutag Press
has kindly allowed me to retain the format of the original cover and title
page’ (TCP, p. [x]). The format is with deliberation retained, yet there is
a change of case in a single letter. Does this titular discrepancy mean that
11 Reprinted as ‘Geof frey Hill 1: “The Tongue’s Atrocities”’, in Christopher Ricks, The

Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 285–318.
50 Charles Lock
we have two entirely dif ferent volumes, with many instances of lexical,
syntactical, and even poemic repetition or overlap? The Penguin Treatise
displays a discrepancy between its own cover and title-page: where the
Penguin cover has Power, the Penguin title-page conforms to the Clutag
title-page: power. This inconsistency between title on title-page and title
on cover is itself disturbing, though not unique in the Hill corpus. On the
title-page and half-title page of the Counterpoint Press edition of Speech!
Speech! those two words and their buttressing marks of punctuation are
italicised: Speech! Speech! Yet on the cover and the spine (and the front
f ly-leaf ) these words are in roman: Speech! Speech! These things matter;
there can be no accidentals where mystery’s at stake. Not the least of the
tongue’s atrocities may be its indif ference to pointing.
The concluding chapter of The Enemy’s Country (1991) is entitled
‘Envoi (1919)’, a title that contains a parenthesis as well as (being) the title
of the part of the poem with which the chapter is concerned. As a conclu-
sion this chapter is an ‘envoi’ to the book, and, typography being a mine-
field, we might suspect that the Clark Lectures which form the first three
chapters were delivered, as we are told, in 1986, but that the ‘Envoi’ was
added for the publication of the lectures as a volume in 1991. A treacher-
ous typo might have reversed the digits, and we would find ourselves with
Pound (and Franklin P. Adams) in 1919. The long first note to Hill’s ‘Envoi
(1919)’ reads, in part:
In ‘Hugh Selwyn Mauberley’…‘Envoi (1919)’ is distinguished from the other poems of
the sequence by being printed in italic type…One may reasonably hesitate to impute
emblematic significance to typography or other details of book-production which
may have been simple expediencies. Even so…(CCW, p. 659)
Even so, accidentals happen. In line with Philip Gaskell’s deployment of
Rousseau, Hill cites Ivor Gurney instructing Marion Scott to ‘punctu-
ate as you please’ (CCW, p. 428). The past century or so has witnessed a
growing assertion on the poet’s part of punctuational rights and spatial
insistence.12
12 For a most elaborate insistence on space within and around the poetic word, see
Word for / word, 16 (Winter 2010): Gallery 4, Anne Blonstein, available online at
<http://www.wordforword.info/vol16/gallery4.htm>, accessed 5 July 2011.
We have reason to suppose the attentions of Geof frey Hill to be punc-

tilious. Appeals to expediency are rare; as a critic his eye for the easy way out
is sharp, as is his tongue. The focus of an essay by Hill is often the moment
at which a writer takes the way of expediency, even one as apparently noble
as an apology. Pound’s is the exemplary case, his attempt at reparation – ‘To
confess wrong without losing rightness’ – charged not with simple but with
crafted, practised expediency: ‘grammatically self-serving and metrically
glib’ (CCW, p. 400).
Pound and Dryden are among the most compromised of all great poets.
Their dif ficult, confounding examples provide Hill, and through Hill, us,
with claims that stick. Pound can be cited approvingly:
You cannot call a man an artist until he shows himself capable of reticence and of
restraint, until he shows himself in some degree master of the forces that beat upon
him. (CCW, pp. 171, 251)
Pound had clearly mastered the forces of punctuation, and had thus cul-
tivated a resistance to the coercions of print, most dazzlingly (yet unem-
phatically: Pound glosses resistance as reticence and restraint) through the
use of the double space in ‘In a Station of the Metro’.
Punctuation has purposes both phonetic and graphic: the voice, both
in its temporal f low and in its claim to sovereignty in verse, is in punctua-
tion met not only or always with guidance but also with resistance. Dryden
is honoured by Hill for ‘his command of the essential facts: that a poet’s
words and rhythms are not his utterance so much as his resistance’ (CCW,
p. 179). Resistance here indicates an avoidance of the enemy’s tongue, that
is to say, the common rhythms and idioms, what all the others are saying.
Pound ef fected that resistance by breaking the pentameter, and by taking
control of punctuation, and of spaces: like Quince he stands upon other
points or none.
Resistance tends to be local and inconspicuous, as in a colon of Hill’s:
Or if not why not: call writing nothing
but self-indemnity for what is denied it?
Yes, to be blunt, the pitiless wrench between
truth and metre, though you can scarcely hear this.
(TCP, p. 3)
52 Charles Lock
Here is careful play with a sequence of words without punctuation where

punctuation might help: and with punctuation where its presence is odd. Is
the colon a metrical pause (as might divide /caesura/ a verse in a psalm), in
which case we would read it thus: ‘Or, if not, why not call writing nothing
but…’ That sounds right. If the colon is syntactical it would also be doing
the work of a mark of interrogation, while that mark at the end of the
second line would indicate a rising inf lexion rather than a strictly inter-
rogative construction. This ‘colon’ displays and conceals the ways and the
wit of a ‘punctuation poem’.
There is resistance to be registered in a caesura, and there is the absence
of resistance to be scarcely heard (and not seen at all) in enjambment.
Truth and metre aspire to join in justice, which can be displayed in print
by justification. Though in prose justification will be on both left and right
sides, it is in verse asymmetrical, on the left side only. The right side is left
unjustified, the better there to realise the potential for barely visible forms
of syntactical resistance. Péguy was in Hill’s words ‘a meticulous reader of
proof ’ (CP, p. 206).13 It is no accident that The Mystery of the Charity of
Charles Péguy (1983), so attentive to non-justification from the right, should
follow Mercian Hymns (1971), a work which displays uniform right-side
justification.14
The Mystery avails itself of the properties of verbs that might be phrasal
verbs:
To dispense, with justice; or, to dispense

with justice.
(CP, p. 190)
This invitation to discriminate among enjambments, or to distinguish

between a run-on line and an enjambment, is prof fered through the device
foregrounded in punctuation poems. A run-on line is any line that ends
13 Hill’s own meticulousness over proof is recalled by Diana Athill in Stet (London:
Granta, 2000), pp. 66–7.
14 I am grateful to Susan Ang for drawing my attention to the layout of Mercian
Hymns.
without a mark of punctuation; enjambment is strictly a line-ending in

which it would be syntactically wrong to insert any such mark:
Crack of a starting-pistol. Jean Jaurès

dies in a wine-puddle. Who or what stares
through the café-window crêped in powder-smoke?
(CP, p. 183)
The end of the first line is enjambed; no comma can come between subject
and verb. The end of line two is run on, as a comma could be placed after
‘stares’, as a comma can be placed between any verb and its indirect object. It
may not be normal in current usage, it may modify the sense, but it would
not be incorrect. The fourth line of this first stanza reads:
The bill for the new farce reads Sleepers Awake.
The display type of posters often dispenses with punctuation, though

seldom dispensing with the exclamation mark. The absence in this bill of
both exclamation and comma turns an imperative exhortation – Sleepers,
Awake! – into a f lat indicative. Ibsen was, like Rousseau, indif ferent to punc-
tuation; he left dashes where compositors could supply what they judged
to be appropriate marks, and he trusted actors to undo the damage.15 An
actor (or a soloist) would know what to do with the unpunctuated ‘Sleep-
ers Awake’; the reader of this poem is much less certain. Not least through
the voicelessness that italics sometimes mark (or enjoin) ‘Sleepers Awake’
might be regarded as a sort of programmatic non-pronouncement.
On the dif ference between the enjambed and the run-on, The Mys-
tery, with its high proportion of unpunctuated line-endings, is quietly
emphatic:
15 See Inga-Stina Ewbank, ‘Reading Ibsen’s signs: ambivalence on page and stage’, Ibsen
Studies, 4:1 (2004), 4–17; Inga-Stina Ewbank was Hill’s colleague at Leeds and the
linguistic advisor on his version of Brand (1978). Ibsen’s When we Dead Awaken
lurks in the shadow of Bach; Kenneth Patchen’s Sleepers Awake (punctuation sic)
appeared in 1946.
54 Charles Lock
Did Péguy kill Jaurès? 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 sag and cry?
(CP, p. 183)
The first line division is enjambed: no comma falls between verb and direct
object. Divisions at end of second and third lines are run-on, as the phrase
‘by what they write’ renders the verb write unable to take an object. What
follows is an elliptical co-ordinate clause: ‘as [they stand] by their camp-
beds’. Rhythmically and rhetorically we expect another mark of interroga-
tion after ‘what they write’. There ought to be punctuation here: there is
no possible continuation of this sentence that does not end in a mark of
interrogation. The line end here does the work of a pause, while negotiating
the zeugma that activates ‘stand by’ not as a phrasal verb of metaphorical
force – stand by what they write – but as a verb with a metonymic prepo-
sition: stand by their camp-beds, by their weaponry, by their comrades.
Or: they stand, by their camp-beds. For while a phrasal verb admits no
comma in its midst, any verb can allow a comma before the preposition
of its indirect object.
The phrasal verb ‘stand by’ suggests a principled abstraction of hon-
ourable stubbornness. Standing, whether by their beds or their weapons,
themselves on stand-by, the soldiers might also be bystanders; and they
might stand by even when things happen. Compare the range of semantic
force commanded by ‘stand by’ with what happens in ‘dispense, with justice’;
and in ‘dispense / with justice’. The line-end could be merely a run-on, and
is enjambed only by force of the antithesis between the verb and the phrasal
verb. No comma can interfere when we ‘dispense-with’ something.
The dif ference in the verb made by the zeugma of its objects can be
detected only through a felt absence of the comma: ‘by what they write[,]
as by their camp-beds’. Is ‘dispense’ the same verb (on its own) as it is in
‘dispense with’? Does the one take a direct object, the other (through ‘with’)
an indirect object? Or should they be treated as quite distinct verbs, both
of them transitive? To dispense / to dispense with? To stand / to stand by?
Because one cannot insert a comma within a phrasal verb, it could be argued
that its preposition does not identify an indirect object. The preposition
is almost a suf fix, as: to dispense-with, or to stand-by. The phrasal verb is a

grammarian’s headache; for the poet it is a zeugmatic juncture of syntactic
possibility and punctuational wit.
‘Though you can scarcely hear this’: for you can’t hear an enjambment,
or not quite. Nor can you see one: you can’t see the dif ference between a
run-on line and an enjambment, though you can test the dif ference by syntax
and by hearing. If a comma can be ‘visualised’ there’s no enjambment:
Here there should be a section without words

for military band alone: ‘Sambre et Meuse’,
the ‘Sidi Brahim’ or ‘Le Roi s’Amuse’;
white gloves and monocles and polished swords
(CP, p. 190)
After ‘words’, insert comma. There’s a rhyme to be seen, though hardly

heard: the envelope rhyme of words and swords (words in swords) heard
within ‘a section without words’: a cut in or into silence, cut by means not
of silence but music, instrumental rather than choral: band music, unac-
companied. Who can voice these lines without grieving for the graphic
residue and the abrogated silence?
‘Pindarics’ 14 takes from Pavese this epigraph: ‘The work we achieve
is always something other than we intended’ (WT, p. 48). If it were not
so there would be no readers, no readings. The poem turns to the master-
victim of the unintended achievement:
I’m spent, signori, think I would rather

crash out than glide on through. Pound glided
through his own idiocy; in old age
fell upon clarities of incoherence,
muteness’s epigrams, things crying of f.
This is a refined form of resistance, as insidious as it is invisible. Possible

readings ‘glide on’, then ‘glide on through’, as we ‘glide / through’ the lines;
words ‘cry / of f ’ when the phrasal verb is enjambed. Not to identify a
phrasal verb, or to tell simple verb from phrasal verb, is the most potent
subversion: resistance that leaves no trace.
56 Charles Lock
Resistance can also be punctuationally enacted at the intonational level,

by supernumerary marks, notably those of exclamation, and by quotation
marks. The essay ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”’ begins:
The quotation-marks around ‘menace’ and ‘atonement’ look a bit like raised eye-
brows. (CCW, p. [3])
In ‘Our Word Is Our Bond’ Hill mocks the rule of the Modern Humani-
ties Research Association: ‘Avoid the practice of using quotation marks as
an oblique excuse for a loose, slang, or imprecise (and possibly inaccurate)
word or phrase’ (CCW, p. 150). Hill responds: ‘That which the MHRA
Style Book sees as “oblique excuse” may in fact be direct or oblique rebuke’,
and explains: ‘“Inverted commas” are a way of bringing pressure to bear
and are also a form of “ironic and bitter” intonation acknowledging that
pressure is being exerted. They have a satiric function, can be used as tweez-
ers lifting a commonplace term out of its format of habitual connection’
(CCW, p. 151).
Quotation marks are prominent in the title of a poem from Tenebrae
(1978):
‘Christmas Trees’
Bonhoef fer in his skylit cell

bleached by the f lares’ candescent fall,
pacing out his own citadel,
restores the broken themes of praise,

encourages our borrowed days,
by logic of his sacrifice.
Against wild reasons of the state

his words are quiet but not too quiet.
We hear too late or not too late.
(CP, p. 171)
The quotation marks fall around and enclose what is ‘only’ a simile, and an
enigmatic one until we identify its source in Dietrich Bonhoef fer’s letter
from prison dated 27 November 1943:
Meanwhile, we have had the long-awaited attack on Borsig. It was quite strange to
see those f lares which the leading aircraft dropped, just like a Christmas tree coming
down straight over my head.16
So reads the standard English translation, but this turns Bonhoef fer’s plural
(‘die “Weihnachtsbaüme”’) into a single Christmas tree, and removes the
quotation marks which might indicate an ‘“ironic and bitter” intonation’.
The f lares are dropped in order to illuminate the target: is this as ‘Christ-
mas trees’ illuminate? The quotation marks belong to Bonhoef fer’s text,
as if to acknowledge the irony of the simile, to apologise for its bitterness,
or at least to bring some pressure to bear on it.
‘“Christmas Trees”’ appears to be a poem without enjambment: each
line takes the measure of its syntax. Of its nine lines only two lack termi-
nal punctuation: in both a comma is not only possible but would seem to
be, in prose, acceptable. The first sentence fills two stanzas, its main clause
‘Bonhoef fer restores…encourages…’ Bonhoef fer seems to be modified by
a past participial phrase ‘bleached by the f lares’ candescent fall’ and by a
present participial phrase ‘pacing out his own citadel’. Only the latter is
separated, as a phrase, by two commas. It is the absence of a comma before
(and implicitly after) the phrase in the second line that compels us to realise
that that past participial phrase modifies not Bonhoef fer but his cell. This
syntactical asymmetry complicates the relationship, whether synecdochic
or metaphoric or metonymic, between his cell and his own barely-rhyming
citadel. If there were a comma after cell:
Bonhoef fer in his skylit cell,

bleached by the f lares’ candescent fall,
pacing out…
the past participial phrase would modify Bonhoef fer rather than the cell:
thus the run-on at the first line-ending is in fact an enjambment, of the
most exquisite kind that English syntax can cultivate, or tolerate.
16 Dietrich Bonhoef fer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans.
Reginald Fuller et al. (London: SCM Press, 1953), p. 75.
58 Charles Lock
In the poem’s second and third sentences, filling the third stanza, we
have no commas, though one could be put at the end of line seven:
Against wild reasons of the state

his words are quiet but not too quiet.
Why not insert a comma after ‘state’? Punctuation recognises and appeals
to its own reasons of state. And after the first ‘quiet’, another comma would
enjoin a rhetorical pause, for the sake of antithesis: his words are quiet, but
not too quiet. His words are quiet – but not too quiet. (The absence of a
comma before but in the penultimate line and before or in the last line is a
punctuational absence always belatedly to be marvelled at.)
Here we must develop the notion of latent punctuation. This, mini-
mally, and inescapably, is what makes every work of poetry something
other than intended. We have seen how much Hill’s verse encourages the
reader to entertain punctuation that isn’t there. Lexically, a reader will
substitute words of similar sense or reference to those written: a noun for
a pronoun, a familiar synonym for an unfamiliar word: this is the endless
work of paraphrase, interpretation, and translation that any reading must
undertake. Only through tentative alternative wordings is one able to gauge
the weight of the word chosen. Properly understood, the reader’s work of
‘tacit substitution’ concerns not only ‘substantives’ but also accidentals:
punctuation, layout, font, spacing, line-breaks. To each of these, the atten-
tive reader is invited to consider latent alternatives. The graphic residue
shapes a space of alternative forms of what no voice can carry, nor eye see:
the ‘latent accidental’. It is the latent, both substantively and accidentally,
whether by voiced means or silent, that does the work of ‘contexture’.
Throughout, Hill’s devotion to the arts of resistance, his articulation of
the worth of diligence, his honouring of recusancy, all take a typographi-
cal edge:
there’s Willy Brandt kneeling at the Ghetto Memorial
on his visit to Warsaw, December of Nineteen Seventy:
I did what people do when words fail them.
(TCP, p. 26)
There are four run-on lines but no enjambments in this sonnet ‘On Look-
ing Through 50 Jahre im Bild: Bundesrepublik Deutschland’ (and ‘looking
through’ is what we can do when we count run-on lines, but is insuf ficient
for the identifying of enjambment). The italicising of 50 warns us to say
fünfzig, and is neatly distinct from the lettered out ‘December of Nine-
teen Seventy’. Why is the last line, like Pound’s ‘Envoi (1919)’, in italics?
In listening to those words, one cannot see the italics: nor can one hear
that the Fünfzig of the title is written in numerals, while ‘December of
Nineteen Seventy’ is spelt out. What do people do when words fail them?
Sometimes, embarrassed, they take to reading the small print or worrying
over the typeface: I am trying to decide, now, whether the full stop that
closes that italicised sentence is, itself, in italics. I rather think not, and I
wonder at the syntactic and, indeed, tonal dif ference that would be ef fected
by a full stop in roman as distinct from one in italic. The photographer
and graphic designer Judith Aronson informs me that in most fonts the
dif ference between an italic and a roman stop is detectable on the screen
only by the shape of the next letter keyed in. Printed, the dif ference can
seldom be detected by the naked eye:…(regular, italic, bold). If the font and
style of punctuation are barely to be distinguished, the font and style of a
typographical space is wholly invisible, even in bold: think about it. Yet
whether the full stop that ends this poem is in italic, and thus concludes
the spoken words as from within, or whether the punctuation is imposed,
thus cutting of f that speech (or that silence) from the outside, makes all
the dif ference in what’s beyond words. This invisible distinction we may
term the typographical sublime, and it can be intuited only by those whom
(spoken) words fail.17
17 In Rhodes House, a few hundred yards from Keble College, is a memorial, high in the
cupola, to all the Rhodes Scholars who died in two world wars: eight Germans are
among those honoured in the period 1939–45. The longest of all the names is ‘A. von
Trott zu Solz’. Adam von Trott is well known, his attractive and brilliant personality
provoking troubled af fectionate ref lections in memoirs of Oxford in the thirties.
Though his sense of patriotic duty compelled him to serve the Reich, von Trott died
by execution after the failure of the Stauf fenberg plot on 20 July 1944. But what of
the other Rhodes Scholars from Germany who are also honoured prominently in the
60 Charles Lock
One may reasonably hesitate to impute emblematic significance to the

minutiae of typography. Even so, the punctuation resonates:
To dispense, with justice; or, to dispense

with justice. Thus the catholic god of France,
with honours all even, honours all, even
the damned in the brazen Invalides of Heaven.
Here there should be a section without words
Commas, latent or actual, and line-divisions, enjambed or not, summon

us to attend to the diligence of accidentals. Geof frey Hill has called for a
theology of language, in a sense rather more complicated (and etymologi-
cally attuned, and pitched) than that phrase normally serves. It might not
be beside the point (or would be, and properly so) to make an appeal, here,
that part of that discipline be dedicated to a theology of punctuation.
rotunda of Rhodes House? Of their seven names, none appears among those com-
memorated in Das Gewissen steht auf: Lebensbilder aus dem deutsches Widerstand,
published in 1984 under the aegis of Willy Brandt. From the index (‘This index is
confined to names of opponents and victims of National Socialism, and of persons
associated with them’) one learns that one of the seven, A. von Bernstorf f, served
in the German Embassy in London until 1933, and not thereafter. Of the other six
I can find no record, no memorial, no evidence of their status in the Reich, nor of
the ways in which, between 1939 and 1945, they lost their lives. Under the cupola of
Rhodes House Hill’s punctuation resonates.
Kathryn Murphy
Hill’s Conversions
In a sermon preached on Ash Wednesday 2008 at Trinity College, Cam-

bridge, Geof frey Hill spoke, appropriately, on Christian repentance. He
approached his topic via Reformation semantic disputes, beginning with
a debate between Thomas More and William Tyndale on whether the
Greek word μετάνοια, frequent in the New Testament, should be trans-
lated ‘penance’ or ‘repentance’. Rather than entering the lists on either
side, Hill instead approved their alertness to verbal distinction, and the
intimate interconnection of matters linguistic and doctrinal in sixteenth-
and seventeenth-century English: ‘our language at that time could sustain
nuance and fine distinction in ways not now sustainable or understood.
Who now cares for the authority of metanoia or whether it is translated as
penance or repentance?’1 The modern failings are twofold: a lack of ethical
sensitivity and recognition of the necessity of penitence; and a failure of
responsibility and discrimination in the use of words. One answer to the
rhetorical question – who cares? – is, of course, Geof frey Hill.
The OED’s compound definition of metanoia in part confirms Hill’s
complaint at modern semantic laxity, by eliding the nuance of the dispute:
‘The act or process of changing one’s mind…spec. penitence, repentance;
reorientation of one’s way of life, spiritual conversion’.2 For More and Tyn-
dale, penitence and repentance were not equivalent, the former implying
a Catholic ceremonial duty, the latter a Lutheran internalisation of guilt.
1 Geof frey Hill, Ash Wednesday Sermon, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, 6

February 2008, available online at <http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/show.php?dowid=520>,
accessed 5 July 2011.
2 OED, s.v. ‘metanoia, n.’ The first citation, from 1577, postdates More and Tyndale
by almost 50 years.
62 Kathryn Murphy
Both would agree however with the OED’s first and final definitions, on
the basis of etymology. ‘Metanoia’ is literally a change of mind.3 Tyndale
noted that both penance and repentance are metaphorical interpretations
of a more literal significance:
Concerning this word repe[n]taunce, or (as they [Roman Catholics] vsed) penaunce,
the Hebrue hath in the old Testament generally (Sob) turne, or be conuerted. For
which the translation that we take for S. Jeromes, hath most part (Conuerti) to turne,
to be conuerted…And the Greek in the newe Testament hath perpetually (Meta-
noeo) to turne in the hart, and minde, and to come to the right knowledge, and to
a mans right wit agayn.4
In justifying his own introspective interpretation, Tyndale engages with

the verbal texture of Hebrew, Greek, and the Vulgate’s Latin, asserting his
accuracy not just to sense, but to grammar, morphology, and etymology.
The Bedford minister William Est provides a fuller account of the meta-
phorical and etymological scope of metanoia:
Teshuba the Hebrew, Metànoia, the Greeke, resipiscentia the latine: conuersion, the
English, are Synonimies: All teach vs, that repentance is a turning from sinne. Metanôen
conuerti, to be turned. The Metaphor is borrowed from a Traueller, who wandring
out of his way, and being admonished, turnes againe into his right way. Auersion, a
turning out of the way, is, when one forsaketh God and serueth Sathan; Reuersion,
is, when a man leaues sinne, and returnes to God by repentance. Sin then, is, per auia
errare, to wander through by waies: repentance is, Ad viam rectam redire; To returne
into the right way again.5
3 From the Greek μετα- (here ‘change’), and νόος (mind). See OED, s.vv. ‘metanoia,
n.’; ‘meta-, prefix’; ‘nous, n.’
4 William Tyndale, ‘Prologue, made vpon the Gospell of S. Mathew’ [1534], included
in The whole workes of W. Tyndall, Iohn Frith, and Doct. Barnes (London, 1573),
pp. 32–8 (37). Such discussions reappeared frequently: see esp. Heinrich Bullinger,
Fiftie godlie and learned sermons […] (London, 1577), pp. 561–2; Jean Calvin, A har-
monie vpon the three Euangelists […] (London, 1584), p. 727; Jeremy Taylor, Vnum
Necessarium […] (London, 1655), pp. 67–72.
5 William Est, The triall of true teares. Or the summons to repentance (London, 1613),
pp. 37–8.
As Tyndale and Est make clear, early modern ‘conversion’ was not solely
the crossing of confessional boundaries that is the predominant modern
meaning of the term, but a turning away from sin and towards God. Est’s
polyptoton (conversion, aversion, reversion; turn, turn again, turn out of
the way, return; per auia, Ad viam) traces a theological progression: turn-
ing away, turning back, returning. Etymology becomes metaphor, and the
words realise their theological point.6
Hill frequently praises such congruence of language and theology,
of style and faith. He has claimed that reading the OED had convinced
him both that ‘sematology is a theological dimension’ and that ‘the use of
language is inseparable from that “terrible aboriginal calamity” in which,
according to Newman, the human race is implicated’ (CCW, p. 279).7
Hill has protested ‘the widespread emphasis, among theologians as well
as scientists, on words as “arbitrary signs”’ (CCW, p. 363). In theological
sematology, signs are ‘arbitrary’ in a sense which Hill forces against the
actual history of its sense-changes: drawing on its root in ‘arbiter’ (judge
or supreme ruler), it becomes the equivalent for ‘judicious’ and ‘autono-
mous’.8 ‘Arbitrary’ is one of the ‘great words which lie directly on the active-
passive divide’ (CCW, p. 391). Literary craft, for Hill, consists in making
a virtue of inevitability: ‘The more gifted the writer the more alert he is
to the gifts, the things given or given up, the données, of language itself ’
(CCW, p. 188).9
6 Classical Latin ‘convertere’ means ‘to turn about, to reverse’, ‘to change, alter, trans-
form’, ‘to translate’; see Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary
(Oxford, 1879), s.v. ‘converto’, I and I. B.2. The etymology is ‘f. con- together, alto-
gether + vertere to turn’, OED, s.v. ‘convert, v.’
7 Hill was earlier reluctant to fully assert ‘a theological view of literature’: see CCW,
pp. 18, 19; Blake Morrison, ‘Under Judgment’, interview with Geof frey Hill, New
Statesman, 99:2551 (8 February 1980), 212–14 (212); John Haf fenden, ‘Geof frey Hill’,
in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haf fenden (London: Faber and Faber,
1981), pp. 76–99 (89). For later assertions of ‘a theology of language’, see CCW,
p. 405.
8 See e.g. CCW, pp. 562, 572.
9 See also CCW, pp. 155, 157, and TL, XLVI.
64 Kathryn Murphy
Hill praised Gerard Manley Hopkins for ‘finding radically new ways
of compounding the intellective with the sensuous elements of language’
(CCW, p. 485). This dualism is complicated by a passage from Simone Weil
which Hill has repeatedly cited ‘as crucial, as unequalled’:
Simultaneous composition on several planes at once is the law of artistic creation,

and wherein, in fact, lies its dif ficulty.
A poet, in the arrangement of words and the choice of each word, must simultane-
ously bear in mind matters on at least five or six dif ferent planes of composition.10
The many planes appeal to dif ferent modes of apprehension, intellective

and sensuous: syntax, allusions literary and historical, etymology, history of
usage; the sound and look of words and phrases, homophony, paronomasia,
euphony, rhythm, rhyme. I want to suggest in this essay that metanoia, as
an organising metaphor and an ethical and rhetorical trope, has crucial
significance for Hill as a figure for the conversion of the contingent into
the motivated, the arbitrary into the significant, on many planes of com-
position. For the purposes of clarity, my discussion separates the turns of
thought and phrase related to metanoia and conversion into three ‘planes’,
critical, theological, and rhetorical. It will however be obvious that these
are neither fully distinct, nor, by any means, exhaustive.
1 The Turn Upon the Self: Critical Metanoia
The sense of metanoia as ‘spiritual conversion’ is manifestly a central concern

for Hill. Of the writers to whom Hill has dedicated poems, or paid tribute in
his critical writings, many are converts, including Jonson, Dryden, Hopkins,
10 Hill, ‘Civil Polity and the Confessing State’, The Warwick Review, 2 (2008), 7–20
(11), quoting Weil, The Need for Roots, trans. A. F. Wills (London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul, 1952), p. 207; see also Geof frey Hill, ‘“The Conscious Mind’s Intelligible
Structure”: A Debate’, Agenda, 9:4/10:1 (Autumn/Winter 1971–2), 14–23 (14–15);
and CCW, p. 573.
Newman, Aleksander Wat (to Catholicism), and Donne, T. S. Eliot, Gil-

lian Rose (to Anglicanism). At least as significant are recusants who refuse
to convert under pressure or in adversity (More, Tyndale, Southwell), and
those for whom conversion was torturous, and who remained stubbornly
‘self-excommunicate’ (Wat, Weil, Charles Péguy).11 Two of Hill’s early
poems also depict hearts hardened to metanoia. ‘The Bidden Guest’ and
‘Canticle for Good Friday’ use privative participial adjectives to suggest
the latent state before conversion, or in which the turning to God seems
impossible: ‘unbending candles’, ‘my heart’s unbroken room’, ‘wounds,
unquenched with oil’ (CP, p. 20); ‘not transfigured’, ‘As yet unsearched,
unscratched’, ‘The strange f lesh untouched’ (CP, p. 38).12
The change of heart or mind is usually, however, less obviously con-
cerned with religious communion. ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”’,
the first though not the earliest essay in the Collected Critical Writings, is
much concerned with penitence and appropriate gestures of reparation for
wrong done. Hill cites Matthew Arnold’s recognition of Edmund Burke’s
‘integrity’ in ‘his capacity to “return…upon himself ”’ (CCW, p. 7). Arnold’s
phrase becomes part of Hill’s most characteristic critical vocabulary.13 Hill
defines it as ‘the transformation of mere ref lex into an “act of attention”,
a “disinterested concentration of purpose” upon one’s own preconceived
notions, prejudices, self-contradictions and errors’ (CCW, pp. 164–5).
11 For ‘self-excommunicate’, see CP, p. 207.

12 Also cf. ‘Lachrimae coactae’, CP, p. 148. The title ‘The Bidden Guest’ recalls the first
line of Herbert’s ‘Love (III)’: ‘Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back, /
Guiltie of dust and sinne’, in The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 661. Hill’s speaker is not however
granted the ultimate willingness to join the eucharistic feast of Herbert’s ‘So I did sit
and eat’. On conversion in seventeenth-century devotional poetry see Molly Murray,
The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from
Donne to Dryden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
13 See e.g. CCW, pp. 176, 195, on Hobbes; p. 227, on Dryden; p. 445, on Whitman and
Gurney; p. 545, on Eliot; pp. 83, 167, 421, and Geof frey Hill, ‘Between Politics and
Eternity’, in Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacof f (eds), The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-
Century Responses (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2001), pp. 319–32 (325),
on himself.
66 Kathryn Murphy
The bending of ‘ref lex’ is automatic; the turn of ‘return’ deliberate. The
‘return’ establishes a critical stance towards oneself, and entails attempted
reparation for errors committed or wrong done.
It is in the language of repentance that Hill discusses his own returns.
In interview with John Haf fenden, he commented that he knew ‘the bitter
experience of discovering, much later, that [his] work contained previously
unsuspected howlers. The only good reason for a poet to interfere with his
poem once it’s in print is a penitential reason of that kind.’14 Hill’s republica-
tion of ‘In Memory of Jane Fraser’ with minor emendations and a rewritten
final line, ‘as a necessary penitential exercise’, is the most familiar example
in his own work.15 The ‘returns’ for which Hill commends other writers
are generally such corrections: revisions of ideas, words, or positions, or
repeated approaches to particularly thorny problems.
That such returns upon oneself might however tend to gratuitous
self-harm is recognised in Hill’s essay on the inveterate reviser John Crowe
Ransom. On the second of two successive stages of alteration to the poem
‘Eclogue’, Hill comments ‘It is not revision but reversion; not renunciation
but ruin’ (CCW, p. 135). The alliterative pairs form contrasting etymologies:
Ransom’s return is not a seeing anew, but a turning back. A lack of judge-
ment thins ‘renunciation’ to ‘ruin’. Though returning upon oneself is an
ethical necessity, it thus has a tendency to vitiation. Following T. H. Green,
Hill distinguishes between ‘return’ and ‘recoil’ upon the self (CCW, p. 164),
and judges that Ezra Pound’s remorse for his wartime activities was ‘a recoil
rather than a return’ (CCW, p. 165). The pairing, like ‘ref lex’ and ‘return’,
‘revision’ and ‘reversion’, promotes an etymological contrast, though this
time bogus: the decisive change of direction of ‘turn’ versus the reverting
involution of ‘coil’. In fact, ‘recoil’ is backsliding (‘to go behind or to the
rear, to retreat, fall back, give ground’); it is indulgent absorption in the
self; it is also, remotely, obscene.16
14 Haf fenden, Viewpoints, p. 85.

15 Geof frey Hill, King Log (London: André Deutsch, 1968), p. 70.
16 See OED, s.vv. ‘recoil, v.1’, and ‘cule, n.’: ‘-coil’ derives from French cul and ultimately
from Latin culus: the bottom or anus. Hill ponders the problem of such ‘overtones’
or ‘harmonics’ rebounding upon a writer’s usage at CCW, p. 203.
Hill’s essay ‘The Tartar’s Bow and the Bow of Ulysses’ amplifies the
metaphorical resonance of the critical and ethical ‘turn’, drawing it into the
ambit of the questions of agency and arbitrariness crucial to Hill’s sense of
poetic craft. Francis Bacon claimed in the Advancement of Learning (1605)
that ‘wordes, as a Tartars Bowe, doe shoote backe vppon the vnderstanding
of the wisest, and mightily entangle, and peruert the Iudgement’ (CCW,
p. 193). The wielders of words are also their victim, in another figure which
perplexes problems of agency and passivity with motions of reversion (or
perversion) and recoil.17 Bacon proposed various modes of escape from
the dangers of the tartar’s bow: purged vocabulary, plain style, an artifi-
cial language. These remedies, of course, are not for Hill. He is concerned
with ‘clearing the terms of judgement amid the mass of circumstance, the
pressures of contingency’ (CCW, p. 201), not by rejecting the inheritance
of language, but by overcoming inertia:
words, even when they ‘bend’ or ‘twist back’ upon the progress of the argument,
are not bound to do so destructively, as Bacon’s figure of the Tartar bowman would
suggest; it is not inevitable that words rebel against all attempts at better distinc-
tion. (CCW, p. 201)
Hill takes ‘bend’ and ‘twist’ from De augmentis scientiarum (1623), Bacon’s
Latin expansion of The Advancement of Learning, where the Tartar’s bow
recurs in a discussion of the Idols of the Market, which represent the ways
in which words and language interfere with true commerce between the
mind and things. The image is expressed in Latin, according to Hill, ‘more
cogently’: words ‘retro in intellectum (unde profecta sint) retorqueant’
[twist back into the intellect, from which they went forth] (CCW, p. 194).
This brings the metaphorical potential of the Tartar’s bow into the ambit
of the etymological play on turning, returning, and recoiling. Hill in fact
slightly but tendentiously skews the syntax of the original, which reads
17 Tartars and Scythians were known in early modern England for being able to
shoot both backwards and forwards from horseback using a composite bow. See
Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2000), p. 311. I am grateful to Matthew Sperling for letting me see
his unpublished work on the origins of the image.
68 Kathryn Murphy
‘[verba] impetum suum (more Tartarorum sagittationis) retro in intellec-

tum (unde profecta sint) retorqueant’ [[words] twist their attack (like the
shooting of the Tartars) back towards the intellect (whence they came)].18
Hill’s elision, which makes the twisting intransitive rather than transitive,
allows for an equivocation. Rather than words firing back on the intellect
like a Tartar shooting backwards as he rides away, the bow is held by the
writer: ‘Against Bacon’s exemplum of the Tartar’s bow one may set the
metaphor of the writer as a player upon an instrument’ (CCW, p. 201). If
the Tartar’s bow recoils upon the writer-as-archer, the writer-as-violinist
has their bow under control.19
The metaphorical bow is put to a further purpose in the essay, cor-
roborating the stress on converting passive recoil into agency. Hill turns
to the preface to Dryden’s All for Love:
The death of Anthony and Cleopatra…has been treated by the greatest Wits of our
Nation, after Shakespeare; and by all so variously, that their example has given me
the confidence to try myself in this Bowe of Ulysses amongst the Crowd of Sutors;
and, withal, to take my own measures, in aiming at the Mark.20
Hill points out the ‘equivocal’ nature of the analogy, since, in the Odyssey,
none of Penelope’s suitors could string Ulysses’s bow (and died for trying).
Dryden, however, implies that the bow is already strung, and compounds
modesty with an assertion of strength:
18 In Francis Bacon, The Collected Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert
Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, intro. Graham Rees, 7 vols (London:
Longman et al., 1879; repr., 1996), IV, p. 646 (erroneously given at CCW, p. 647, as
p. 645).
19 That a pun on ‘bow’ lurks here is clear from the quotation with which Hill illustrates
his image, from an essay entitled ‘A Pianist as Violinist’, by Joyce Rathbone: ‘You have
got to know exactly where you are going, aurally and physically[,] and then you have
got to make exactly the right movement to take you there at the right time’ (CCW,
p. 201). Citing Rathbone, ‘A Pianist as Violinist’, Tempo, 123 (1977), 14–22.
20 John Dryden, The Works of John Dryden, 20 vols (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1956–89), XIII, p. 10.
[Dryden] comprehends the necessary expertise…and the need to weigh and gauge
his own abilities…One is true to one’s aim by taking one’s true aim in the measures
of a craft that is at once intimately one’s own and not one’s own…The equivoca-
tion…does not preclude a proud certainty. It is a cursory…accommodation of critical
opinion and of the rabble of one’s so-called peers. It is also the necessary sense of
occasion, the measuring of the moment when genius will step forward and declare
itself. (CCW, pp. 206–7)
Dryden is praised elsewhere for his ability to ‘transform a driven condi-

tion into a cadenced vehemence’ (CCW, p. 231). He turns the unforeseen
recoiling of the medium of language into a demonstration of skill, con-
tingencies into craft. ‘One’ can master the recalcitrant medium through
genius, bending the bow to the purpose of the will.
2 Incurvation: The Theological Turn
‘Bow’ itself is in its oldest and most literal sense ‘a bend, a bent line’.21 Like
‘recoil’, this echoes a conception of sin to which Hill has frequently returned.
Luther, following Augustine, wrote of sinful man as homo incurvatus in
se, which Hill has glossed as ‘humankind turned, or bent, inwards upon
itself ’:22 stooped with the burden of sin. The image suggests a theological
geometry and physics: the Fall, a colossal weight, occasions a bending or
incurvation away from rectitude; the ideal ‘return’ ef fects a resumption of
uprightness, a vertical grace, a ‘returne into the right way’.
Hill often detects and praises ‘the simultaneous recognition of strength
and impediment’ which constitutes ‘Intrinsic quality of style’ (CCW, p. 195).
In ‘Language, Suf fering, and Silence’, Hill quotes a line from a letter from
21 OED, s.v. ‘bow, n.1’

22 In a Remembrance Day Sermon delivered at Balliol College, Oxford, 11 November
2007. The sermon was printed, with footnotes, in the Balliol College Annual Record
2008 (Oxford, 2008), 24–7; at the time of writing it was also available online, without
notes, with the Trinity Ash Wednesday sermon. See also CCW, pp. 400, 706–7.
70 Kathryn Murphy
Tyndale to John Frith, a future martyr for the Reformation then imprisoned
in the Tower of London: ‘Though we be sinners, yet is the cause right’. This
Hill contrasts with a phrase from Pound, whose penultimate Canto CXVI
moves from statements of incoherence and fragmentation to an assertion of
the work’s worth in spite – or because? – of its incompletion.23 The state-
ment which Hill singles out for attention sounds initially like a paraphrase
of Tyndale: ‘To confess wrong without losing rightness’. But Hill makes an
ethical adjudication on the basis of their turns of phrase:
Tyndale’s introductory subordinate clause stoops to confess the fact of our innate sin-
fulness, a turn which, introducing the direct af firmation of faith, is immediately recti-
fied by it…By contrast, the Pound…is grammatically self-serving and metrically glib. It
sounds superficially right, but it is not right; it is like a travesty of a profound spiritual
recognition, semper peccator, semper penitens, semper justus. (CCW, p. 400)
The ‘profound spiritual recognition’ is Luther’s: the Christian is always a

sinner, always penitent, always just. ‘Peccator…penitens…justus’ sound like
successive stages of psychological recognition: first acknowledgement of
one’s sinful condition, then painful penitence, then the final realisation of
God’s grace and justification in spite of man’s unworthiness. The ‘process’
is however simultaneous (‘semper’). It has been called ‘living in a circle’.24
Luther’s grammar is theologically precise: peccator is a noun; penitens an
active present participial adjective; justus a passive past participial adjec-
tive. Man in an estate of grace is always a sinner; always in the process of
repenting, turning in metanoia; always already justified. The rectitude of
justification is simultaneous with the cringe of penitence.
Like Est and Tyndale on metanoia, Hill’s analysis works through puns
on etymology (the roots of ‘right’, ‘correction’, ‘direct’, ‘rectification’, ‘justifi-
cation’, ‘justice’, ‘incurvation’, ‘trope’, ‘turn’), syntax, grammar, and morphol-
ogy. Tyndale mimes human incurvation and its righting. His first clause
‘stoops’ to acknowledge both innate unworthiness, and its subordination
to what follows. The main clause returns upwards – ‘rectifies’ is the right
word – without cancelling the confession of sinfulness. Pound’s phrase is
23 Ezra Pound, The Cantos (London: Faber and Faber, 1987), pp. 795–7.
24 See Daphne Hampson, Christian Contradictions: The Structures of Lutheran and
Catholic Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 50.
by contrast ‘self-serving’. His acknowledgement of error and assertion of

rightness are co-ordinate. That hypotaxis and parataxis are crucial is con-
firmed by Hill’s indication of a moment when Tyndale ‘slipped’: ‘Thus we
are synners and no synners’ (CCW, p. 400). Pound’s phrase fails because
he does not return upon himself: he ‘self-corrects’ only by suggesting he
was always right.25
There is an echo in Hill’s description of Tyndale’s stooping clause of
the early poem ‘Genesis’, where Hill again articulates, through etymology,
the mutual implication of agency and subjugation in the human predica-
ment. In its second section, the speaker issues a warning to ‘Beware…The
hawk’s deliberate stoop in air’ (CP, p. 15). ‘Stoop’ is Hill’s word for Tyndale’s
self-acknowledged incurvation. The ambiguities of its juxtaposition with
‘deliberate’ are resonant. Primarily it evokes the hawk’s murderous intent:
‘deliberate’ means carefully considered, deriving from the past participle of
Classical Latin ‘deliberare’, to weigh carefully.26 However, the association of
‘stoop’ with the Edenic lapse and its aftermath highlights another, contrary
meaning, based, as with ‘recoil’, on a false or folk etymology. In ‘deliberare’,
the prefix ‘de-’ is used in the sense ‘completely’; a dif ferent function however
is ‘undoing or reversing the action of the verb’.27 The ‘stoop’ is de-liberate:
the hawk has lost freedom, just as the Fall separated Adam’s will from his
desire, and, in some versions of theology, signalled the end to free will, and
the imposition of God’s decrees of election and reprobation.28
25 For further comment on these passages see Kathryn Murphy, ‘In My Opinion, Having
Read These Things’, PN Review, 191, 36:3 ( January–February 2010), 18–21.
26 The significance of ‘deliberate’, contrasted with ‘intent’ and ‘purpose’, is minutely
discussed in J. L. Austin’s ‘Three Ways of Spilling Ink’, in Philosophical Papers, ed.
J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 272–88. I am
grateful to Matthew Sperling for this reference. Austin brief ly touches on the words’
morphology and ‘trailing etymologies’, on the grounds that ‘no word ever achieves
entire forgetfulness of its origins’ (283). He does not consider, however, that some
words remember origins other than their own. The meaning of ‘deliberation’ in
Hobbes is brief ly considered by Hill at CCW, p. 194.
27 OED, s.v. ‘de-, prefix’: the former sense is I.3, the latter I.6.
28 For similar though of course less theologically resonant puns on ‘deliberare’ in Horace,
see Michael Henry, ‘More on Puns in the Cleopatra Ode’, Mnemosyne, fourth series,
45/4 (1992), 529–31.
72 Kathryn Murphy
In ‘Canticle for Good Friday’, the ‘dulled wood’ of the cross ‘Spat on
the stones each drop / Of deliberate blood’ (CP, p. 38). Again this poises
between choice and inevitability, free will and ineluctable gravity: indicat-
ing at once Christ’s chosen self-sacrifice, and its necessity in providential
history. A further irony is introduced by the parallel root of ‘deliver’, from
a popular Latin skewing of ‘deliberare’, meaning ‘to free completely’. The
blood is delivered (released) from the body; it will also deliver the souls it
saves. The etymon only enriches the resonances: ‘deliberare’ is ultimately
from ‘libra’, a Roman weight of twelve ounces, a balance, or set of scales.
The speaker of ‘Genesis’ had earlier seen ‘The osprey plunge with triggered
claw’; ‘plunge’ (like ‘plummet’) derives from Latin ‘plumbum’, lead.29 The
osprey’s plunge, and the hawk’s stoop, succumb to the gravity of the fall-
ing, and fallen, situation.
In the fourth section of ‘Genesis’, the speaker ‘turn[s] again / To f lesh
and blood and the blood’s pain’. The re-turn inaugurates the ‘ravage[d]
and redeem[ed]’ world of the final section. Like Tyndale’s stoop, ‘Genesis’
requires a rectification: in the words of a recent poem, ‘As when redeemed
the plummets reascend’ (Oraclau | Oracles, section 11).
3 Figures of Return: The Rhetoric of Metanoia
‘Turn’ and ‘return’ thus act for Hill as metaphorical articulations of the
human predicament in ethics and theology, falling under the category of
metanoia in a broad sense. Metanoia is also however a specific rhetorical
figure. The first citation in the OED is from Henry Peacham’s Garden of
Eloquence, a rhetorical manual published in 1577: ‘Metania [sic] is…a dis-
cription of things, by reprehension, thus, he played the man amongest his
ennimyes, nay he played the Lyon…also, when the Oratour correcteth &
29 Cf. the predatory ‘plunge’ in ‘Three Baroque Meditations (I)’: ‘An owl plunges to
its tryst / With a field-mouse’ (CP, p. 89).
blameth himselfe.’30 The latter sense is predominant in George Puttenham’s

Arte of English Poesie, which Englishes metanoia as ‘the Penitent’: ‘when
we speake and be sorry for it, as if we had not wel spoken’.31
The importance of this figure for Hill is evident, in his sermons, in
the corrections to ‘In Memory of Jane Fraser’, in his calls for a ‘confessing
state’, or in the closing lines of the recent ‘Coda’: ‘I know that sounds / a
damn-fool thing to say’ (TCP, p. 50).32 Metanoia sensu stricto is however
just one of several figures of return and repetition important to Hill. He
cites as an example of the ‘return upon oneself ’ lines from Keats’s ‘Ode to
a Nightingale’: ‘Of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. // Forlorn! the very
word is like a bell’.33 This is anadiplosis, Puttenham’s ‘Redouble’, ‘when with
the worde by which you finish your verse, ye beginne the next’ (167). The
etymology of ‘anadiplosis’ is ‘to double back’: a literal return upon oneself.
Hill calls the ef fect of Keats’s repetition ‘not so much a recollection as a
revocation’, renouncing the ‘attitude towards art and within art’ suggested
by ‘faery lands forlorn’ (CCW, p. 7). The anadiplosis is ‘like a bell / To toll
me back from thee to my sole self ’: Keats, in a turn which Hill relishes,
unites the form and metaphorical function of the rhetorical figure.
Hill employs more overt versions of such literalisation: ‘The charge / is
anadiplosis and the sentence / the sentence here handed down’ (SC, 2.54).
Section X of The Triumph of Love begins ‘Last things first’, and ends with
lines which are also a definition: ‘a telling figure out of rhetoric, / epanalep-
sis, the same word first and last’ (TL, X). Epanalepsis – Puttenham’s ‘slow
returne’ – is also enacted in the completed arc of the poem, which begins
30 Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577), sig. Riiii. See OED, s.v.
‘metanoia’.
31 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), p. 179. References
hereafter are incorporated into the text. Hill reads Puttenham, and other early modern
rhetoricians: see e.g. CCW, pp. 196, 199–201, 646.
32 Altered, in yet another example of metanoia, from the version in A Treatise of Civil
Power (Thame, Oxfordshire: Clutag Press, 2005): ‘I know that sounds / a wicked
thing to say’.
33 John Keats, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, lines 70–1, in The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard,
second edition (London: Penguin, 1977; repr., Harmondsworth, 1981), p. 348.
74 Kathryn Murphy
‘Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp’ (TL, I), and ends ‘Sun-blazed,
over Romsley, the livid rain-scarp’ (TL, CL). The recoil is antanaclasis, or
‘the Rebounde’, in which words are ‘vsed in diuers sences, one giuing the
Rebounde vpon th’other’ (173).34 Puttenham, following the ancients, clas-
sifies figures of speech as ‘Auricular’, which ‘serue th’eare onely’; ‘sensable’,
which serve ‘the conceit [sc. intellect]’ alone; and ‘sententious’, which serve
both (133). The returning figures all belong to the final category, and com-
pound the intellective and sensuous planes of language.
In addition to the standard figures of rhetoric, Hill develops a reper-
toire of poetic techniques in which conversion and turning are embodied
in the ‘sensuous’ elements of the poetry. Perhaps the most overt example
appears in The Triumph of Love:
Since when has our ultimate reprobation

turned (oculos tuos ad nos con-
verte) on the conversion or
reconversion of brain chemicals –
the taking up of serotonin? I
must confess to receiving the latest
elements, Vergine bella, as a signal
mystery, mercy, of these latter days.
(TL, CIX)35
Brian Cummings has commented on ‘the submerged, impossible metaphor

in the concept of conversion, of an alteration in chemical state, an alchemy
of person’.36 The metaphor is here made real. The punning on turning is
insistent. Hill situates three ‘turn’ words (‘turned’, ‘verte’, ‘reconversion’) at
34 Cf. Hill’s quotation of Puttenham’s definition of prosonomasia, in which words ‘do

pleasantly encounter and (as it were) mock one another by their much resemblance’
(CCW, p. 199). For examples, see ‘Lachrimae’ (CP, pp. 145–51), ‘Of Coming Into
Being and Passing Away’ (C, p. 4).
35 The Latin reads ‘turn your eyes towards us’, and appears in the hymn ‘Salve Regina’.
Cf. ‘Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres’, 3, in which the ‘Dame / de Sous-Terre’ is urged
to ‘turn’ her ‘strange countenance’ (CP, p. 179).
36 Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; repr., 2007), p. 371.
the beginning of successive lines, in conceptual anaphora.37 The enjamb-

ment signals the line-endings themselves as ‘turns’; ‘the phrasing does what
it says’, as Hill comments of Milton’s ‘exemplary handling of enjambment’ in
his sonnet ‘To Mr H. Lawes, on his Airs’. By splitting ‘con- / verte’ across a
morpheme boundary, Hill draws attention to the etymological calque, and
leaves ‘verte’ as an imperative, meaning, simply, ‘turn!’ The passage is con-
cerned with other possible valences of ‘conversion’: the body’s absorption
of medication, which then ‘converts’ brain chemicals; transubstantiation,
and the body’s transformation of elements in the Eucharist; the turning of
the advocate’s merciful eyes on the sinner, and the turning of the sinner to
God. The reciprocity of ‘conversion or / reconversion’ chimes with Hill’s
concern with the simultaneous mastery and subjugation of the writer’s
relationship to language.
The emphasis on turning is endemic in Hill’s poetry. Play on turn, ver-
sion, ref lex, tort, and their cognates is frequent.38 Very often, Hill uses such
words at the enjambed turn of the line: ‘Thus the bereaved soul returns
/ upon itself ’ (CP, p. 187); ‘humming / vortices’ (TL, IX); ‘Slow down
here; / turn at the volta’ (SS, 47). The Orchards of Syon provides the most
dizzying array: ‘Return’ is the last line of the first section, while the the-
matic centrality of Paul Celan’s Atemwende, or ‘turn / of breath’, provides
the opportunity for multiple translations (OS, XXVIII, XXXI, XXXII,
XXXVI, LI). Recent volumes are also peppered with the turns of palin-
dromes and anagrams.39
Hill is far from the first to exploit these puns, and the network of
allusions they set up is significant. Most obvious, perhaps, are the open-
ing lines of Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday, which, named for a day of repentance
and marking Eliot’s own conversion, begins ‘Because I do not hope to
turn again / Because I do not hope / Because I do not hope to turn’.40
37 ‘Anaphora’: etymologically a carrying back or again.

38 See e.g. CP, p. 76; TL, VIII.
39 See e.g. OS, XXV; SS, 37, 97, 115, 120; SC, 2.30; WT, pp. 30, 46; O, 8.
40 T. S. Eliot, ‘Ash-Wednesday’, in Collected Poems 1909–1962 (London: Faber and Faber,
1968), p. 95; the final section opens with the same lines, having altered ‘Because’ for
‘Although’, in what might be an anticipation of the epanalepsis-with-a-dif ference
76 Kathryn Murphy
Ash-Wednesday is one of the poems which Hill exempts from his criticism
of Eliot’s ‘decline’.41 Eliot’s elective af finity, in his poems of conversion,
is with Dante, with whom Hill claimed, implausibly, to have had only
‘insignificant’ engagement, until a commission demanded his attention.42
Hill instead turns to Petrarch, who supplies the title for The Triumph of
Love, and whose Latin poems in particular are dense with etymological
puns on turning and conversion.43 The Earl of Surrey’s free translation of
part of Petrarch’s Triumph plays on the line-endings ‘turne’ and ‘returne’.44
The Petrarchan poem which Hill invokes most frequently in Triumph of
Love, however, is the last in the Rime sparse, a palinode (literally a ‘poem
of recantation’) punctuated by the invocation ‘Vergine bella’. This has
been described as a ‘renunciatory prayer…of fering a final, conversionary
perspective’, as Petrarch relinquishes profane for divine love;45 it belongs
among what Hill praises as ‘certain exultant / canzoni of repentance’ (TL,
XXIII). Petrarch is also probably on Hill’s mind in the appropriately named
poem ‘Ritornelli’: ‘Lost to no thought / of triumph he returns / upon
himself ’ (C, p. 8).46
which brackets The Triumph of Love. On Hill’s fraught relationship to Eliot, see
Christopher Ricks, True Friendship: Geof frey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell
Under the Sign of Eliot and Pound (New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University
Press, 2010), pp. 1–71.
41 See e.g. CCW, pp. 534, 541, 546, 549.
42 See ‘Between Politics and Eternity’, p. 319. Reading Dante as a poet of conversion is
well established: see e.g. John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion, ed. Rachel
Jacof f (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986).
43 See Lisa Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will: The Theology of Figure from Augustine
to the Sonnets (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), pp. 76–7.
44 See ‘Such waywarde wais hath love’, in Henry Howard, Poems, ed. Frederick Morgan
Padelford, rev. edn (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1928), p. 73.
45 See Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, trans. and ed. Robert M. Durling (Harvard, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1976), pp. 575–83; Freinkel, Reading Shakespeare’s Will, p. 94.
46 ‘Ritornello’ is the diminutive from the Italian for return, and is a recurring melodic
pattern in music, and thence a recurring rhyme scheme, much used by Petrarch in
his ballate.
Behind all of these lies the Vergilian pun which derives ‘verse’ itself
from turning, on analogy, as the lines traverse the page, with the turning of
a plough at the end of each line in a field.47 Hill’s interest is not, like Seamus
Heaney’s, bucolic,48 but technical, and he extends it by playing on the roots
of ‘trope’ and ‘strophe’.49 Though ‘“Trope” is a term possibly over-resorted to
in recent years’, Hill uses it – of course – ‘because it means “turn”’ (CCW,
pp. 140–1). Strophe is invoked in The Orchards of Syon:
Strophe after strophe. Achilles

from Ajax:
…
Strophe after strophe
ever more catastrophic.
(OS, X)
The mention of Achilles and Ajax again f lags word-history: ‘strophe’ and
‘catastrophe’ derive from Greek tragedy, in which the chorus, crossing the
stage in one direction, would recite a ‘strophe’, and returning, an ‘antistro-
phe’. ‘Catastrophe’ is (in both senses) a dramatic turning point: the moment
in ancient drama at which the plot turns decisively towards its close, either
a turn for the worse or a complete transformation.
The theme is picked up in the sequence ‘Pindarics’, in Without Title.
Dedicated to Cesare Pavese, the poems take the triadic form of a Pindaric
ode: three stanzas, of which the first two (the strophe and antistrophe) are
identical in metre and number of lines, and the last (the epode) dif ferent.
Ben Jonson’s ‘To the immortall memorie, and friendship of that noble paire,
Sir Lucius Cary, and Sir H. Morison’, one of the first formally Pindaric
47 The opening of Vergil’s first Georgic reads ‘Quid faciat laetas segetes, quo sidere
terram / vertere, Maecenas, ulmisque adiungere vitis’, translated by Dryden as ‘What
makes a plenteous Harvest, when to turn / The fruitful Soil, and when to sowe the
Corn’. Hill activates the pun at CP, p. 64 and OS, VIII.
48 See Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 65, and
‘Glanmore Sonnets’: ‘Each verse returning like the plough turned round’, in Opened
Ground: Poems 1966–1996 (London: Faber and Faber, 1998), p. 164.
49 Derived respectively from the verbs τρέπειν and στρέφειν, both ‘to turn’.
78 Kathryn Murphy
poems in English, calqued the Greek stanza names in headings for each
section: ‘The Turne’, ‘The Counter-turne’, and ‘The Stand’.50
The Pindaric ode is a form that enacts the return on oneself, and Hill’s
pindarics are peppered with puns on the technical terms of Pindar’s and
Jonson’s odes. The relationship of turn, counterturn, and stanza becomes
a thematic concern: Hill pitches the ‘turn’ of the strophe or verse against
‘choric stance or stanza, the final stand’ (WT, p. 45). The etymologies of
‘strophe’ and ‘stanza’ collide. Egregious enjambment is probably the most
remarked aspect of Jonson’s ode, separating ‘twi- / Lights’ across a line-
break, and ‘Ben // Jonson!’ at the juncture between a ‘Counter-Turn’ and
‘Stand’.51 This – a Pindaric trope – Hill echoes in ‘Yet where I am in this
I simply o- / mitted to discover’ (WT, p. 46). But the link between the
formal strictures of a Pindaric ode, enjambment, and the technical and
metaphorical turn is clearest in Hill’s phrase ‘at that juncture the strophe
stands / incontrovertibly revealed’ (WT, p. 36).52 Here enjambment presents
a paradox: a turning point is held between two words of stasis. ‘Incon-
trovertibly’ encodes, etymologically, the antistrophe or counterturn. The
paradox of ‘stasis / wholly without stillness’ (WT, p. 45) is characteristic,
Hill suggests, both of poetry, which is simultaneously verse and stanza,
and of the moment of conversion, a vanishing point of transformation –
catastrophe – around which the turning world pivots.
50 Stand is not in fact a calque for ‘epode’, which is literally ‘after-song’. Jonson’s usage
follows the Italian volta / rivolta / stanza, used by Minturno: see Carol Madison,
Apollo and the Nine: A History of the Ode (Baltimore, MD: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1960), p. 301. In one contemporary manuscript, Jonson’s ‘Counter-turnes’ were
entitled ‘retourne’: see Paul H. Fry, The Poet’s Calling in the English Ode (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 1980), p. 18.
51 See e.g. John Hollander, Vision and Resonance: Two Senses of Poetic Form, second
edition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 141–4, 269–70.
52 See also WT, pp. 38, 40.
4 Conclusion
Hill’s epigraph to ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atonement”’ is from the theolo-

gian Karl Barth: ‘Thus my noblest capacity becomes my deepest perplexity;
my noblest opportunity, my uttermost distress; my noblest gift, my dark-
est menace’ (CCW, p. [3]). The menace of the gift of language is however
potentially reversed by a further turn on the same fulcrum, bringing grace
out of misery: ‘As with other patrimonies, our language is both a blessing
and a curse, but in the right hands it can mediate within itself, thereby
transforming blessing into curse, curse into blessing’ (CCW, p. 341). These
chiastic conversions turn on the ability of the ‘right hands’ to compose
simultaneously on many planes, and to use the ‘given’ and ‘ornamental’
features of language to unite sense and intellect.
This is a central theme of Hill’s essay ‘A Pharisees to Pharisees’, on
Henry Vaughan’s poem ‘The Night’, which takes as its text the ‘conversion-
conversation’ (CCW, p. 327) between the Pharisee Nicodemus and Jesus,
recounted in John 3. Jesus interprets Nicodemus’s night visit as a search
in spiritual darkness for light. In this ‘primary act of conversion, from the
literal to the figurative’, Hill claims, ‘the figure of speech is intended to be
literally true. Poetic metaphor is a means of converting the actual into the
real’ (CCW, pp. 316, 318). This conversion parallels Sigurd Burckhardt’s
definition of a pun, which Hill quotes with approval: ‘the creation of a
semantic identity between words whose phonetic identity is, for ordinary
language, the merest coincidence’ (CCW, p. 322).53 The frequency with
which conversion and turning are articulated in Hill’s writing through puns
might be thought trivialising, but only when we forget that the archetypal
conversion was signalled by the slip of one letter, from Saul to Paul.54 By
transforming the de-liberate into the deliberate, the curse of language is
somehow, and to some extent, revoked.
53 Quoting from Sigurd Burckhardt, ‘The Poet as Fool and Priest’, English Literary
History, 23 (1956), 281.
54 On this ‘metanomasia’, see Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary
on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 2005), pp. 9–11.
80 Kathryn Murphy
The burden of this essay has been to identify some, at least, of the
many planes on which the ‘Reverse impulse’ (SC, 2.27) of turn and return
operates in Hill’s writing. Hill exploits the conceptual and etymological
ramifications of metanoia to the full. It is the necessary ‘penitential exercise’
for wrongs committed, and the appropriate acknowledgement of the abo-
riginal calamity. As the ‘return upon oneself ’, it is the mark of appropriate
self-critique, and of ethical justice: ‘the counterturn shall set / us straight,
justly’ (WT, p. 39). The return can be a recoil, conversion perverted: Hill’s
metaphorical turns supply a critical vocabulary which enables simultaneous
ethical and literary judgement. And these critical, ethical, and theological
concerns are articulated in a host of ‘sensuous’ tropes (metanoia, enjamb-
ment, anadiplosis, polyptoton, epanalepsis, pun, anagram, and palindrome)
which are also an appeal to the intellect. There is in Hill an exception to his
own remark that ‘no other English poet can convince us, as Herbert can,
that the “otherness” of figurative language is, even as we meet it, instantly
turned upon itself “in a sense most true”’ (CCW, p. 358).
Michael Molan
Milton and Eliot in the Work of Geof frey Hill
T. S. Eliot casts a long shadow over the twentieth-century reception of Milton,

and his first essay on Milton is a key text in the ‘controversy’ which animated
Milton studies at the beginning of the century.1 The complicated structure of
the controversy involves arguments about various features of Milton’s poetry,
theology, and politics, but Eliot’s initial essay focuses on a stylistic analysis,
amounting to a symbolic rejection of a canonical writer by a leading poet.
The essay is not a general condemnation of Milton’s poetry; rather, Eliot
delivers a particular critique of Milton, claiming that his ‘rhetorical style’
is a bad inf luence on contemporary poets. In this style, ‘a dislocation takes
place, through the hypertrophy of the auditory imagination at the expense
of the visual and tactile, so that the inner meaning is separated from the
surface’.2 This places the essay in line with Eliot’s theory of the seventeenth-
century ‘dissociation of sensibility’, which he had claimed ‘was aggravated
by the inf luence of the two most powerful poets of the century, Milton and
Dryden’.3 Milton is mentally and physically bound to this theory:
1 T. S. Eliot, ‘A Note on the Verse of John Milton’, Essays and Studies, 21 (1936), 32–40;
reprinted as ‘Milton I’ in On Poetry and Poets (London: Faber and Faber, 1957),
pp. 138–45. For a standard account of the Milton controversy, see Patrick Murray,
Milton: The Modern Phase (London: Longmans, 1967), particularly chapter one,
‘The Modern Reaction’ (pp. 1–12), and chapter three, ‘Dissociation of Sensibility’
(pp. 31–49). For a more recent assessment, see Tom Lockwood, ‘Milton in the
Twentieth Century’ in Paul Hammond and Blair Worden (eds), John Milton: Life,
Writing, Reputation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), pp. 167–86.
2 Eliot, ‘Milton I’, p. 143.
3 T. S. Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, Selected Essays, revised third edition (London:
Faber and Faber, 1951), pp. 281–91 (288).
82 Michael Molan
Had Milton been a man of very keen senses – I mean of all the five senses – his blind-
ness would not have mattered so much. But for a man whose sensuousness, such as it
was, had been withered early by book-learning, and whose gifts were naturally aural,
it mattered a great deal.4
Here and elsewhere, ‘sensuousness’ is a central criterion for poetry that

resists the dissociation; in his early attempts to formulate the theory, Eliot
identifies in poets writing before Milton ‘a quality of sensuous thought, or
of thinking through the senses, or of the senses thinking’, ‘a direct sensuous
apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling’.5 Milton
fails this criterion and in turn misdirects the English poetic tradition.
In 1947, Eliot delivered an address which came to be seen as a recanta-
tion of his earlier position; indeed, his fellow anti-Miltonist F. R. Leavis
could quibble with ‘recantation’, but still be highly critical of Eliot’s failure
to hold the line against ‘the scholars’.6 Eliot no longer finds Milton a bad
inf luence on modern poets, and praises ‘the remoteness of Milton’s verse
from ordinary speech’ as ‘one of the marks of his greatness’.7 In reassessing
Milton, he comes to reassess the dissociation of sensibility:
The fact is simply that the Civil War of the seventeenth century, in which Milton is
a symbolic figure, has never been concluded. The Civil War is not ended: I question
whether any serious civil war ever does end…No other English poet, not Wordsworth,
or Shelley, lived through or took sides in such momentous events as did Milton;
of no other poet is it so dif ficult to consider the poetry simply as poetry, without
our theological and political dispositions, conscious and unconscious, inherited or
acquired, making an unlawful entry.8
4 Eliot, ‘Milton I’, p. 139.

5 T. S. Eliot, ‘Imperfect Critics’, The Sacred Wood (London: Faber and Faber, 1997),
pp. 14–38 (19); Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, p. 286.
6 F. R. Leavis, ‘Mr Eliot and Milton’, The Common Pursuit (London: Chatto & Windus,
1952), pp. 9–32.
7 T. S. Eliot, ‘Milton II’, On Poetry and Poets, pp. 146–61 (155). This is a shorter ver-
sion of the original lecture, which was first published as ‘Milton’, Proceedings of the
British Academy, 33 (1947), 61–79.
8 Eliot, ‘Milton II’, p. 148.
He goes on to speculate that ‘If such a dissociation did take place…it is

a consequence of the same causes which brought about the Civil War’.9
Eliot’s problems with Milton – which persist despite the qualified praise
of ‘Milton II’ – are both technical and political, and these two aspects are
fused together in his theory.
Eliot’s inf luence on Hill has become a critical commonplace;10 as
Christopher Ricks has noted, it is often a point of attack as well:
The conviction that it is Eliot’s achievement with which Hill’s invites comparison is
of long standing…A corollary of this has been the number of charges uniformly lev-
eled at Eliot and Hill: charges of inaccessibility, obscurity, elitism, inspissation, and
foreign paraphernalia; charges of prejudice, nostalgia, and the idealizing of the past;
charges of scabrousness and obscenity, and even of mystification and outrage.11
As this list suggests, the negative view of Eliot’s inf luence on Hill combines
poetic and political issues in a manner reminiscent of Eliot’s Milton criti-
cism. This is particularly significant given the increasing presence of Milton
in Hill’s later poetry. Canaan (1996), for instance, opens with the first of
a series of three poems entitled ‘To the High Court of Parliament’ and
dated ‘November 1994’ (C, pp. 1, 51, 72). These titles adopt Milton’s form
of address in Areopagitica (1644) and the date marks the three hundred
and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of that pamphlet.12 Aside from
this, the volume is threaded through with Miltonic allusions and themes,
9 Ibid. p. 153.
10 For example, on the poetry, see Christopher Ricks, ‘Geof frey Hill 1: “The Tongue’s
Atrocities”’, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), pp. 285–318; for a
comparison of Hill and Eliot’s critical prose, see Eric Grif fiths, ‘Hill’s criticism: a life
of form’, in Peter Robinson (ed.), Geof frey Hill: Essays on his Work (Milton Keynes:
Open University Press, 1985), pp. 172–84.
11 Christopher Ricks, True Friendship: Geof frey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell
Press, 2010), p. 19.
12 Areopagitica begins: ‘They who to States and Governours of the Commonwealth
direct their Speech, High Court of Parlament…’ (Complete Prose Works of John
Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe, 8 vols (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1953–82),
II: 1643–8, pp. 480–570 (486)).
84 Michael Molan
and is part of a tetralogy which at various points draws on Milton’s poetry

and prose as an imaginative resource. Later volumes, such as Scenes from
Comus and A Treatise of Civil Power, have foregrounded Milton to an even
greater extent, and in all of these interactions Milton’s political activities
have been of great importance.13
Almost simultaneously, Hill has begun to reassess Eliot’s achievement
in a sequence of critical essays beginning with ‘Dividing Legacies’, a review-
essay first published in the same year as Canaan. On the face of it, Eliot’s
stock has fallen as Milton’s has increased. Ref lecting on Hill’s treatment of
Eliot, Christopher Ricks has proposed that ‘Hill’s poems make manifest
a debt to Eliot which constitutes one of the highest forms of gratitude,
while Hill’s criticism mostly sounds anything but grateful’.14 I will argue
that there is a more dynamic relationship between Hill’s poetry and prose
than this, so that some of the critical positions taken in the essays are
worked through in the poetry, and vice versa. By tracing Hill’s developing
understanding of a phrase from Milton as it passes through the poetry and
the prose, this essay will show how Hill has refined his critical terminology
and set it against Eliot and other modernist writers in order to articulate
his understanding of the interactions between poetry and politics.
Though the watershed of Canaan is important, Milton’s inf luence can be

identified throughout Hill’s career. The sonnet sequence ‘An Apology for the
Revival of Christian Architecture in England’, collected in Tenebrae (1978),
13 The title of the latter is taken from Milton’s pamphlet A Treatise of Civil Power in
Ecclesiastical Causes (1659); see Complete Prose Works of John Milton, VII: 1659–60,
pp. 229–72.
14 Ricks, True Friendship, p. 29.
is a particularly allusive set of poems in a self-consciously literary volume.15

There are, however, very few places where quotations from other writers
are clearly indicated by inverted commas. One of these moments occurs
in the opening stanza of ‘A Short History of British India (iii)’:
Malcolm and Frere, Colebrooke and Elphinstone,

the life of empire like the life of the mind
‘simple, sensuous, passionate’, attuned
to the clear theme of justice and order, gone.
(CP, p. 157)
The four names in the first line are those of English colonial of ficials based
in India. This sonnet is part of a group of three within the larger sequence,
and focuses on the legacy of British involvement in India as part of the
sequence’s broader assessment of nineteenth-century British politics and
culture. At first glance, the quotation is a phrase that Hill has gone on
to cite frequently, particularly when defining or defending his poetics.16
Milton’s description of poetry as ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’ appears
in ‘Of Education’ (1644):
Logic therefore so much as is usefull, is to be referr’d to this due place withall her
well coucht heads and Topics, untill it be time to open her contracted palm into a
gracefull and ornate Rhetorick…To which Poetry would be made subsequent, or
indeed rather precedent, as being less suttle and fine, but more simple, sensuous
and passionate.17
15 On the volume more generally, see Clive Wilmer, ‘An Art of Recovery: Some
Literary Sources for Geof frey Hill’s Tenebrae’, Agenda, 30:1–2 (Spring-Summer
1992), 139–58.
16 For example, see Hill’s comments in conversation with Blake Morrison in ‘Under
Judgment’, New Statesman, 99:2551 (8 February 1980), 212–14 (212), or those on
Speech! Speech! for the Poetry Book Society bulletin, reprinted in Clare Brown and
Don Paterson (eds), Don’t Ask Me What I Mean: Poets in their Own Words (London:
Picador, 2003), p. 117.
17 Milton, Complete Prose Works of John Milton, II: 1643–8, pp. 357–415 (402–3).
86 Michael Molan
Hill has admitted in an interview with the Paris Review that ‘I have said,
almost to the point of boring myself and others, that I am as a poet simple,
sensuous and passionate. I’m quoting words of Milton which were redis-
covered and developed by Coleridge.’18 This type of remark has sometimes
seemed defensive, a response to accusations of ‘dif ficulty’, but Hill has gradu-
ally applied pressure to Milton’s phrase and it has become an important
part of his critical terminology.
Indeed, in ‘A Short History of British India (iii)’ he is not actually
quoting Milton. Coleridge provides one of the epigraphs for the sonnet
sequence as a whole: ‘the spiritual, Platonic old England…’ (CP, p. 152).
This, as Hill notes, is taken from Anima Poetae, the earliest selection from
Coleridge’s notebooks to be published, in which ‘Platonic old England’ is
characterised by ‘Sir Philip Sidney, Shakspere, Milton, Bacon, Harrington,
Swift, Wordsworth’, and set against ‘commercial Great Britain’, which is
represented by, among others, ‘Locke at the head of the philosophers and
Pope [at the head] of the poets’.19 Coleridge quotes and misquotes Hill’s
preferred phrase a number of times – ‘simple, sensuous, and impassionate’,
‘simple, sensuous, and impassioned’, ‘simple, sensuous, passionate’20 – and
he develops the phrase in one of his notebooks by breaking it down into
its component parts. He exclaims:
How awful is the power of words! – how fearful often in their consequences when
merely felt, not understood! most awful when both felt and understood!21
18 Carl Phillips, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXX: an interview with Geof frey Hill’, Paris
Review, 154 (Spring 2000), pp. 272–99 (277).
19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Anima Poetae, from the unpublished note-books of Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: William Heinemann, 1895),
p. 151; see Coleridge, The Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn et al., 5 vols (London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957–2002), II, §2598, for the modern text.
20 See Roberta Florence Brinkley (ed.), Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 1955), pp. 546–7.
21 Ibid. p. 547.
The resonance of this comment with Eliot’s dissociation of sensibility – its

privileging of a ‘fidelity to thought and feeling’22 – is unmistakable, a strong
counterpart to Coleridge’s distinction between ‘the spiritual, Platonic old
England’ and ‘commercial Great Britain’. Moreover, the opening stanza of
‘A Short History of British India (iii) is, according to Eliot’s definition in
‘The Metaphysical Poets’, a ‘dif ficult’ passage:
[I]t appears likely that poets in our civilization, as it exists at present, must be dif ficult.
Our civilization comprehends great variety and complexity, and this variety and
complexity, playing upon a refined sensibility, must produce various and complex
results. The poet must become more and more comprehensive, more allusive, more
indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning.23
This is Eliot’s assessment of the poetic terrain in light of the seventeenth
century’s dissociation of sensibility, and Hill adjusts this historical theory
by means of Coleridge’s use of Milton.24 Hill’s ‘the life of empire like the life
of the mind’ suggests an uncomplicated relationship between politics and
aesthetics, though the lack of a verb complicates the agency of this state-
ment. There is the suggestion of a possible healing of the dissociation, not
only drawing together Eliot’s ‘thought and feeling’, but – given that the East
India Company was the precursor to the British Raj – also dissolving the
division between Coleridge’s ‘Platonic old England’ and ‘commercial Great
Britain’. The sonnet has many such pressure points, where the reader might
choose between nostalgia and critical history. The oversimplification of ‘like’
22 Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, p. 285. For Hill discussing the metaphysical poets
in connection with Milton’s ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’, see John Haf fenden,
‘Geof frey Hill’, in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haf fenden (London:
Faber and Faber, 1981), pp. 76–99 (80).
23 Eliot, ‘The Metaphysical Poets’, p. 289.
24 In a review of Hill’s Collected Poems and Henry Hart’s The Poetry of Geof frey Hill,
David Norbook discusses ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in
England’ alongside Hill’s essay ‘Redeeming the time’ (CCW, pp. 88–108), in which
Hill ‘analyses the 19th century in terms of a dissociation of sensibility, a fall from
rootedness’. He notes that the ‘emergence of Coleridge as the figure who almost
uniquely transcends the dissociation is not unfamiliar in English critical writing,
and not immune to challenge’ (‘Shaggy Fellows’, London Review of Books, 9:13 (9 July
1987), 22–3 (23)).
88 Michael Molan
is immediately modified by Coleridge’s ‘simple, sensuous, passionate’, three

words which ‘properly understood…[would produce] works truly excellent,
and capable of enlarging the understanding, warming & purifying the heart,
and placing in the centre of the whole Being the Germs of noble & manlike
Actions’ according to Coleridge’s gloss.25 This is then followed by ‘attuned /
to the clear theme of justice and order’. The music that had appeared earlier
in the sequence – ‘old hymns of servitude’ and ‘High voices in domestic
chapels’26 – has become associated, through sensuous intelligence, with the
language of ‘justice and order’. The careful way this vocabulary – ‘attuned…
clear theme’ – no more than hints at metaphor is in contrast to the rest of
the sonnet’s sensual description. No sooner is this relationship established
than it is severed by ‘gone’, marking a new dissociation.
The choice of sonnet form for this sequence is itself a mark of Milton’s
inf luence on Hill. It was a technical decision that had a wider significance
for the volume:
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).27
Prince’s book examines a number of sixteenth-century Italian poets, includ-

ing Giovanni Della Casa, and the ways in which their various devices of
rhyme, enjambment, and word-order inf luenced the structure and dic-
tion of Milton’s verse. Prince describes Della Casa’s poems as ‘sonnets of
compliment and ref lection’, and suggests that ‘the extreme artifice of the
style’ may have inf luenced the ‘equivalent ef fect of strangeness’ in Milton’s
verse.28 Hill recognises that this type of poetry retains its viability into
25 Brinkley, Coleridge on the Seventeenth Century, p. 547.

26 ‘Quaint Mazes’, CP, p. 152; ‘Who are these coming to the sacrifice?’, CP, p. 154.
27 Alexandra Bell, Rebecca Rosen, and Edmund White, ‘Strongholds of the Imagination’
(interview with Geof frey Hill), The Oxonian Review, 9:4 (18 May 2009), available
online at <http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/geof frey-hill/>, accessed 5 July 2011.
28 F. T. Prince, The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954),
pp. 24–5.
the twentieth century when he suggests elsewhere that Prince himself

was inf luenced by this style, and that some of his most successful poems
‘are twentieth-century equivalents of poems by Bembo and Della Casa as
interpreted by Prince the professional literary scholar’.29
One could argue for the stylistic importance of this form for some of
Hill’s sonnets, particularly its approach to the sonnet’s structure, its rejec-
tion of the standard volta division between the octave and the sestet, and
in the structuring and argumentative force of its internal rhymes. However,
as Milton has become increasingly foregrounded in Hill’s work, the sonnet
has largely disappeared from view, only to reappear in his recent work, most
prominently in A Treatise of Civil Power. During this period of absence,
Milton’s sonnets have occasionally emerged as thematic concerns in ways
that suggest that Hill’s poetry has internalised the lessons of the form. For
instance, in The Triumph of Love:
Active virtue: that which shall contain

its own passion in the public weal –
do you follow? – or can you at least
take the drift of the thing? The struggle
for a noble vernacular: this
did not end with Petrarch. But where is it?
Where has it got us? Does it stop, in our case,
with Dryden, or perhaps,
Milton’s political sonnets? – the cherished stock
hacked into ransom and ruin; the voices
of distinction, far back, indistinct.
Still, I’m convinced that shaping,
voicing, are types of civic action. Or, slightly
to refashion this, that Wordsworth’s two
Prefaces stand with his great tract
on the Convention of Cintra, witnessing
to the praesidium in the sacred name
of things betrayed.
(TL, LXX)
29 Geof frey Hill, ‘Il Cortegiano: F. T. Prince’s Poems (1938)’, PN Review, 147, 29:1
(September–October 2002), 28–31 (29–30).
90 Michael Molan
‘Active virtue’ introduces the theme of Renaissance humanism; initially

suggesting Machiavelli’s virtù, it is refocused by the phrase ‘public weal’,
establishing the twinned contexts of Italian humanism and its later English
incarnation. This phrase recalls Sir Thomas Elyot’s distinction between
public weal and common weal, which Hill cites in ‘Common Weal,
Common Woe’ (CCW, p. 269), reinforcing the dangerous ambiguity of
‘contain’ in the opening two lines: is this private passion kept in check or is
this self-interest maintained in the public sphere?30 Such things cannot be
pulled apart any more than a political sentiment and its expression may be
held separate. Or, at least, this is Hill’s contention: he has been ‘convinced’
that ‘shaping, / voicing, are types of civic action’ by his meditating upon
the English tradition of the noble vernacular, and this is a tradition directly
opposed to Eliot’s view of the seventeenth century: Milton and Dryden,
who ‘aggravated’ the dissociation of sensibility, are the champions of the
noble vernacular in England. The leap forward to Wordsworth is logical,
since – apart from his works of poetics and politics – Wordsworth is cred-
ited with reviving the Miltonic sonnet in the early nineteenth century.31
The phrase ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’ does not appear again in
Hill’s poetry until 2005’s Scenes from Comus:
Masques are booked to be simple, sensuous,

comely, shaped to a fair design;
not over-passionate
(SC, 2.6)
30 The doubleness of passion in the public sphere is one of the themes of ‘Unhappy
Circumstances’: ‘The utterance of naked will, as much below the level of prescriptive
and proscriptive terms like “moral” and “immoral” as “resistless genious” is above
the sordid brokerage of this world, is one that haunts the “just city”, “res publica”’
(CCW, p. 186).
31 See Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1986), chapter three, especially pp. 39–49; Joseph Phelan, The Nineteenth-
Century Sonnet (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), especially chapters one
and two.
Some of the qualifications that distort Milton’s original phrase are drawn
from Hill’s meditation upon ‘Active Virtue’ in The Triumph of Love. The
addition of ‘shaped to a fair design’ recalls Hill’s claim that ‘shaping, / voic-
ing, are types of civic action’, where the poetry is now literally part of the
aristocratic coding and public performance of the masque. Similarly, ‘not
over-passionate’ condenses ‘that which shall contain / its own passion in the
public weal’; this had previously been a contentious ambiguity for Hill, but
now becomes a matter of decorum, as well as part of the nexus of compro-
mises that this particular form of writing has forced upon Milton. His script
has been ‘censored’ (SC, 2.14), his actors ‘think too highly of themselves’
(SC, 1.17), and his masque is physically and economically constrained:
Hard to imagine them so crámped: thírty

feet by síxty? – I can’t believe it.
Were the first builders pinched for cash, or what?
(SC, 2.28)
But the reader is not necessarily to view these restrictions as hurtful or

alien to the artistic process. Milton’s masque has been ‘booked’: though the
problems are many (perhaps even an actor’s going of f book, misreading or
misinterpreting Milton’s text), the patronage is necessary. This obstacle to
a modern sensibility is felt in ‘fair’, the seventeenth-century sense of beauty
(‘Sabrina fair’)32 now almost completely obscured for the modern reader,
who is more conditioned to hear its sense of minimal approval or perhaps
even the suggestion that the design’s necessary compromises are a fair deal
between poet and circumstance.
The competing claims of chastity and sensuality (or fruitfulness), which
Milton’s masque explores through the figures of the Lady and Comus, are an
important theme in Scenes from Comus, and these tensions find resolution
in the word ‘sensuous’. Hill has expressed his admiration for the criticism
of Charles Williams, so it is interesting to note that a considerable part of
32 ‘A Masque presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 [Comus]’, in John Milton, Complete

Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, revised second edition (Harlow: Pearson Longman,
2007), p. 224, line 858.
92 Michael Molan
Williams’ introduction to the Oxford World’s Classics edition of Milton’s

English poems is given over to an analysis of ‘Comus’ in these terms.33
Indeed, in his 1947 lecture on Milton, Eliot described this introduction as
‘the best prolegomenon to Comus which any modern reader could have’.34
Williams notes that Comus ‘is, no doubt, a black enchanter, but he talks
the most beautiful poetry’; in opposition, the lady and her brothers ‘know
that Chastity is the guardian and protector of fruitfulness, that Temper-
ance is the means of intense joy’.35 Scenes from Comus endorses this bond
between beautiful poetry and temperance:
I’ve not pieced out the story – Milton’s script
was brief ly censored, bits of sex expunged
for the girl’s sake. Chastity makes its bed
with sensuality, could not otherwise
use such authoritative vehemence
devoid of knowingness.
It’s an attractive doctrine to me now.
(SC, 2.14)
Hill has noted with approval the OED’s entry for the word ‘sensuous’,
which records that the word was ‘Apparently invented by Milton, to avoid
certain associations of the existing word sensual’ (CCW, p. 274). This is
a distinction that Hill had made clear in previous volumes of poetry, for
example in Speech! Speech!:
Dissever sensual
from sensuous, licence from freedom; choose
between real status and real authority.
(SS, 119)
33 For Hill’s appreciation of the criticism of Charles Williams, see CCW, pp. 562–4
and pp. 571–3; see also ‘Sidney Keyes in Historical Perspective’ in Tim Kendall (ed.),
The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2007), pp. 398–418 (404–5 and 413–14).
34 Eliot, ‘Milton II’, p. 147.
35 John Milton, The English Poems of John Milton, with an introduction by Charles
Williams, and a reader’s guide to Milton compiled by Walter Skeat, M. A. (London:
Oxford University Press, 1940), p. xii.
The vehicle Hill chooses for this distinction is a seventeenth-century com-

monplace: Puritans were often attacked in pamphlets for seeking licentious-
ness under the banner of liberty. Milton had been vulnerable to this kind
of attack because of his early pamphlets arguing in favour of divorce, so he
made similar accusations against those who would misinterpret his views.36
In ‘Sonnet XII. On the Detraction which followed upon my Writing Cer-
tain Treatises’, he declares: ‘Licence they mean when they cry liberty’.37
Moreover, ‘dissever’ recalls Milton’s masque, where the Lady cannot be
freed from Comus – chastity freed from unchecked sensuality – ‘without
his rod reversed, / And backward mutters of dissevering power’.38 These
powers are necessarily bound together: ‘Sensuous is not sensual, but such
knowledge / increases with sensuality’ (OS, LVII).
In Scenes from Comus, this generative relationship is figured as an
almost physical experience:
I doubt Marvell bought out | Milton’s fouled life.

But bring on music, sonorous, releasing.
What we háve becomes their reticence.
Within the radius of a storm’s hollow
like honey in a tree. Bayed Milton reticent?
Or that wit-bibber from Hull? I say self-being
goes the last word with bóth, that it goes proud
in its own passion – mystical couvade
with sensual dying, sensuous rebirth.
(SC, 2.8)
36 For example, in The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce (1643) he asks that his pam-
phlet receive a ‘free audience and generous construction’ and condemns ‘the brood
of Belial…[who] will know better, when they shall hence learne, that honest liberty
is the greatest foe to dishonest license’; see Milton, Complete Prose Works of John
Milton, II: 1643–8, pp. 217–356 (225).
37 Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, p. 297, line 11. This is echoed by Hill in ‘On Reading
Milton and the English Revolution’: ‘Wiped the old slur between liberty and licence’
(A Treatise of Civil Power (Thame, Oxfordshire: Clutag Press, 2005), n.p., stanza 3).
38 Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, p. 222, lines 815–16.
94 Michael Molan
A ‘couvade’ is ‘a series of customs according to which, on the birth of a

child, the father performs acts or simulates states natural or proper to the
mother, or abstains for a time from certain foods or actions, as if he were
physically af fected by the birth’ (OED, s.v. ‘couvade’). The terms ‘sensual’
and ‘sensuous’ are here part of a phenomenological description of poetic
creation, with ‘couvade’ holding this poetics in tension with the physical
world. But ‘self-being’ is a matter of civic action as well, and the political
cost of ‘its own passion’ looms over the certainty of Hill’s statement: after
the Restoration – perhaps with the help of friends such as Marvell – Milton
escaped the potentially dire consequences of his interregnum activities in
support of the Republic and was forced into retirement, though the exact
circumstances are uncertain. History disputes the ‘last word’ on this period
of rebellion and restoration, though Milton was to have his in the politi-
cal arguments and ambiguities of Paradise Lost, Paradise Regained, and
Samson Agonistes. In part, Scenes from Comus operates as a clearing-house
for ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’, in which Hill settles the meanings
of these terms and their significance for his understanding of the relation-
ship between poetry and politics. The fruits of this work can be seen in
the essays written alongside this poetry.
There has been no sustained engagement with Milton in Hill’s critical

prose and this has remained the case despite Milton’s increasing visibility
in the poetry. In the opening pages of ‘The Tartar’s Bow and the Bow of
Ulysses’, Hill brief ly discusses Milton’s ‘Sonnet XIII. To Mr. H. Lawes, on
his Aires’ and its praise of the composer Henry Lawes’ skill in setting words
to music (CCW, pp. 192–3). Milton’s sonnets make an appearance in Alien-
ated Majesty, which is comprised of lectures delivered between 2000 and
2005, but this is in a f leeting comparison with Hopkins, and in terms that
are already familiar from Hill’s engagement with Prince (‘the vernacular
artifice of Milton’s political sonnets’ (CCW, p. 529)). However, despite
this lack of overt engagement, Milton’s inf luence can be felt at important
moments in this collection, shaping Hill’s analysis of poetry in the public

sphere and refining his critical terminology.
The first three lectures in Alienated Majesty analyse Emerson, Whit-
man, and Hopkins in relation to ‘alienated majesty’, a term Hill takes from
Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’. In Hill’s development of the term, his recur-
ring themes of the arbitrary power of words and the importance of ‘respon-
sible speech’ (CCW, p. 48) are refocused through Emerson in order to
explore the dynamics of self-expression and public utterance:
Emerson’s vision of alienated majesty more truly belongs close to either side of what
I have just called ‘the thin line that divides fecundity from desolation’. Desolation
for Emerson was both existential and civic. (CCW, p. 504)
In phrasing that looks forward to Hill’s A Treatise of Civil Power and its
attempts to define ‘civil power’, the Emerson lecture works through ‘civic
intelligence’, ‘civic power’, ‘civic desolation’, and ‘civil polity’ in a process
that Hill has elsewhere termed ‘clearing my own meanings’.39 Hill claims
that ‘Emerson’s genius, basically and substantially understood, is in the
perception of this dislocation of public and private’ (CCW, p. 502). In
all of the lectures in Alienated Majesty, Hill attempts to rehabilitate ideas
such as ‘spontaneity’ and ‘self-expression’, working against the grain of later
twentieth-century conceptions of poetry. By exploring the ‘natural history
of American creative thinking’ (CCW, p. 494), with Hopkins’ similari-
ties to and interest in Whitman justifying his inclusion, Hill separates out
confessionalism and spontaneity, and places the latter within the domain
of what he terms ‘civil polity’. The second half of the collection continues
Hill’s excavation of a very personal literary history and, focusing on Eliot,
charts a history of the deterioration of poetry’s political engagement. To
enable an understanding of the nature of Milton’s inf luence on these lec-
tures, Hill’s earlier assessment of Eliot provides a framework.
39 In ‘Between Politics and Eternity’, Hill writes that ‘“Clear my own meanings” is a
suggestive phrase, appropriated forty years ago from a review by A. Alvarez, which
until now has probably inf luenced my approach to scholarly and critical method
more than anything else that I have read’ (in Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacof f
(eds), The Poets’ Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses (New York: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux, 2001), pp. 319–32 (319)).
96 Michael Molan
Alienated Majesty makes use of the terminology of sensuality and

sensuousness, but it is not Hill’s first attempt to bring this to bear upon
Eliot’s work. In ‘Dividing Legacies’, Hill reviewed the publication of Eliot’s
two sets of lectures on metaphysical poetry.40 He pays tribute to Eliot’s
‘instinct for spotting the significant detail in a line of thought or nexus
of circumstance’, which he claims ‘is that of the true scholar-critic’, but he
nevertheless laments the ‘final incoherence of the Clark Lectures’ (CCW,
p. 371). In doing so, he invokes an important critical distinction:
The distinction to be emphasized here is between pitch and tone. The style of Eliot’s
address to his audience is a matter of tone; the burden of his analytical criticism is,
or ought to be, the question of pitch. (CCW, p. 375)
This is a distinction Hill has insisted upon before, but here, for the first
time, it is set in the context of Eliot’s theory of metaphysical poetry and the
dissociation of sensibility.41 He claims that Eliot’s broad definition of meta-
physical poetry ‘irrecoverably misdirected his own argument away from
its centre of gravity’, borrowing his terms from Eliot’s statement that ‘the
centre of gravity of metaphysical poetry [lies] somewhere between Donne
and Crashaw, but nearer the former than the latter’ (CCW, pp. 366–7). He
challenges Eliot ‘to demonstrate that “centre of gravity” is, critically speak-
ing, a term of common utility’ and, to this end, focuses his attention on
Eliot’s treatment of Donne. Eliot claims to be investigating ‘the sensuous
interest of Donne in his own thoughts as objects’, but Hill fails to find ‘a
convincing presentation of “sensuous interest”’ (CCW, pp. 368, 376):42
40 T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, ed. Ronald Schuchard (London:
Faber and Faber, 1993).
41 For Hill’s own brief history of his use of these terms (for he has refined them, some-
times confusingly, over the years), see ‘Translating Value’, CCW, pp. 383–93 (391).
For a critical assessment of Hill’s use of the terms in ‘Dividing Legacies’, see Peter
Robinson, ‘Toiling in a Pitch’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 26:3 (1997), 263–9.
42 Thomas Day has approached Hill and Eliot through this concept in ‘Sensuous
Intelligence: T. S. Eliot and Geof frey Hill’, The Cambridge Quarterly, 35:3 (2006),
255–80. However, this essay focuses more on its relation to another of Hill’s models
for the writing process, ‘the antiphonal voice of the heckler’ (see ‘Redeeming the
Time’ (CCW, pp. 88–108)).
[H]e gives us an idea, a notion, an indication, of sensuous interest. I am clear in my

own mind that what I have called the pitch of Hooker’s prose is also the sensuous
interest of that prose; I am equally convinced that a discovery of the pitch of Donne’s
language in, say, ‘A Nocturnall upon S. Lucies Day’ or ‘A Hymne to Christ, at the
Authors last going into Germany’ would also be a recognition of the sensuous inter-
est of those poems. (CCW, p. 376)
Hill finds within Eliot’s faltering criticism ‘no sensuous interest, that is to
say, no sense of pitch, no centre of gravity’ (ibid.). This is a hostile takeover
of Eliot’s terminology. Hill completes the attack by claiming that Eliot’s
failings as a literary critic are significantly involved with the failure of his
later verse: ‘Eliot’s poetry declines over thirty years from pitch into tone,
and these late-published papers contribute significant evidence to the
history of that decline’ (CCW, p. 377). This conclusion is followed by a
condemnation of the tone of Four Quartets.
This terminology had appeared in Hill’s prose before: in his 1994 essay
‘Keeping to the Middle Way’ he noted the opposition between sensuality
and sensuousness in Donne (CCW, p. 313). But in ‘Dividing Legacies’ Hill
is specifically picking up on a quality of language which Eliot’s analysis has
failed to pin down: sensuousness, a criterion for the metaphysical poetry of
which Eliot approved, is supposed to be lacking or severely diminished in
the poetry after the dissociation of sensibility, and this is given as a reason
for ousting Milton from the canon. ‘Dividing Legacies’ questions Eliot’s
handling of the term and combines it with Hill’s own critical terms ‘pitch’
and ‘tone’. This review-essay marks an important development in Hill’s
thinking about poetry: in the same year, he published Canaan, the first
volume to show an increased interest in Milton. Here, in the poem ‘That
man as a rational animal desires the knowledge which is his perfection’,
‘sensuous intelligence’ is a criterion of lyric poetry:
I imagine singing I imagine
getting it right – the knowledge

of sensuous intelligence
entering into the work –
(C, p. 2)
98 Michael Molan
By Alienated Majesty, Hill has advanced further in the process of clearing

his meanings. What remained of the previous ambiguities in the definitions
of ‘sensuousness’ and ‘sensuality’ in his critical prose has been swept away.
In his comparison of Whitman and Hopkins, the dif ference is clear:
That fact that Whitman, with his magnificent recreative powers of description
which Hopkins would have envied with the sincerest desire of emulation, appeared
indif ferent to any moral distinction between the sensuous and the sensual, would have
struck the self-sacrificial Jesuit as one of the most deadly of sins. (CCW, p. 512)
Such distinctions are a preparation for the clarity of ‘sensual dying, sensuous
rebirth’ in Scenes from Comus. Hill makes the link clear in the next lecture
of the series, when he claims that ‘to Hopkins the line between sensuous
and sensual was as fine-drawn as it had been for Milton, who introduced
the word ‘“sensuous” into English’ (CCW, p. 521).
As the final chapter of Collected Critical Writings, ‘A Postscript on
Modernist Poetics’ invites the claim that it amounts to a definitive clearing
of meanings. This is not without justification, since the lecture confirms
some of Hill’s strongest judgements on his predecessors, and in doing
so draws on material from two earlier critical essays. The more recent is
‘Between Politics and Eternity’, in which Hill discusses the importance of
Dante’s Monarchia for an understanding of the Divine Comedy and the
relationship between poetry and politics. In doing so, he makes several
references to Eliot’s monograph Dante, displaying some of the critical
ingratitude that Ricks has identified as characteristic of Hill’s prose on
Eliot.43 In fact, the whole essay could be seen as a rebuttal of both Eliot’s
book and his understanding of the relationship between poetry and politics.
The very decision to focus upon Monarchia, a treatise on the separation
of ecclesiastical and secular jurisdiction, is a response to Eliot; Hill notes
‘the place the Monarchia must be given in any just estimation of the intel-
ligence that created the Comedy’, whereas Eliot identifies the Vita Nuova
as the minor work that ‘does more than any of the others [to] help us to a
43 T. S. Eliot, Dante, The Poets on the Poets no. 2 (London: Faber and Faber, 1929).
fuller understanding of the Divine Comedy’.44 Hill’s criticisms of the Faber

monograph series in which Eliot’s book appeared as ‘antepasts to enjoyment
and the refining of taste’ respond to Eliot’s language (‘The enjoyment of
the Divine Comedy is a continuous process’) as well as anticipating Hill’s
later analysis in Alienated Majesty, in which Eliot’s sense of ‘enjoyment’
signals his decline into ‘a man-of-letters and a raconteur’.45 Hill’s rebuttal
comes closest to Eliot’s text when he is establishing the importance of the
Monarchia:
So what is this ‘presence,’ this intrinsic value [which the Monarchia possesses]? I will
answer by analogy. Antonio Gramsci’s ‘Il canto decimo dell’ Inferno’…does have this
presence. Eliot’s Dante…does not. I cannot finally determine why that should be so;
or rather, I can determine it but cannot bring it to irrefutable demonstration. ‘Irrefu-
table’ is not hubris: I am not making any special claim for my own powers.46
Compare:
I wish to make clear that my own opinions are merely opinions founded only upon
reading the text. I do not think that they are such as can either be verified or refuted by
scholars; I mean to restrict my comments to the unprovable and the irrefutable.47
It is not without significance that ‘irrefutable’ is a word that Hill associates

with Milton, since towards the end of the essay he identifies Milton as one
of the few poets ‘of Dante’s lineage’:48
Dante anticipates also the life and work of Milton; in his generosity of imagination
– many times at odds with anger and vindictiveness, many times transfiguring his
own inequities; in the relation of verse to prose – compare the role of the Monarchia
44 Hill, ‘Between Politics and Eternity’, p. 326; Eliot, Dante, p. 61. Hill specifically denies
this preeminence to Vita Nuova: ‘it is from this work [Monarchia], more than from
the Vita Nuova or the Convivio, that I draw a sense of the immediacy of Dante’s
poetic intelligence in potentia’ (p. 327).
45 Hill, ‘Between Politics and Eternity’, p. 320; Eliot, Dante, p. 16; Hill, CCW, p. 560.
46 Hill, ‘Between Politics and Eternity’, p. 320.
47 Eliot, Dante, p. 62.
48 Section XXIII of The Triumph of Love alludes to the fifth book of Paradise Lost:
‘Add the irrefutable / grammar of Abdiel’s defiance’.
100 Michael Molan
with that of The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates, or A Treatise of Civil Power in
Ecclesiastical Causes; in the sense of the inescapable body of politics where individual
involvement takes on some of the formal characteristics of the agon.49
Hill contrasts this relationship between poetry and politics with that of his
modernist predecessors. While Monarchia may have something in common
with Milton’s writing, ‘It has nothing in common, so far as I can see, with
the political writings of key figures of our own time – Yeats, Pound, Eliot,
MacDiarmid – all of whom, in one way or another, aestheticize politics’.50
This essay is an important bridge between ‘Dividing Legacies’ and ‘A Post-
script on Modernist Poetics’, providing the terminology of ‘aestheticized
politics’ and confirming the link between Milton and Eliot in Hill’s under-
standing of poetry and politics.
The other critical essay that provides material for ‘A Postscript on Mod-
ernist Poetics’ is one of Hill’s earliest. In ‘“The Conscious Mind’s Intelligible
Structure”: A Debate’, an essay focusing on Yeats, Hill connects political
engagement and poetic technique by showing them to be participating in
the same phenomenological processes.51 It is acknowledged as the source
for comments in Inventions of Value on two occasions in the Collected
Critical Writings (CCW, pp. 704, 707), but the material it provides for ‘A
Postscript on Modernist Poetics’ is included silently. This consists of two
quotations, both of which Hill now subjects to the ‘Bradleian criterion’, a
test drawn from his two lectures on Eliot and F. H. Bradley: ‘getting within
the judgement the condition of the judgement’ (CCW, p. 566). The first
is from Simone Weil:
Simultaneous composition on several planes at once is the law of artistic creation,

and wherein, in fact, lies its dif ficulty.
49 Hill, ‘Between Politics and Eternity’, p. 330. This could also be seen as a response to
Eliot, this time his essay ‘What Dante Means To Me’ (To Criticize the Critic (London:
Faber and Faber, 1965), pp. 125–35), in which Milton is unfavourably compared with
Dante (132–3).
51 Geof frey Hill, ‘“The Conscious Mind’s Intelligible Structure”: A Debate’, Agenda,
9:4/10:1 (Autumn/Winter 1971–2), 14–23.
A poet, in the arrangement of words and the choice of each word, must simulta-
neously bear in mind matters on at least five or six dif ferent planes of composition…
Politics, in their turn, form an art governed by composition on a multiple plane.52
In ‘“The Conscious Mind’s Intelligible Structure”’, Hill draws two impor-

tant conclusions from this: that ‘one does not attain objectivity simply by
surrendering to the primary objective world’ and that ‘Within the circum-
ference of her “law”, lyric poetry is necessarily dramatic’.53 In ‘A Postscript
on Modernist Poetics’, the first of these conclusions is now rendered as
‘the poetic word is arbitrary’, while the quotation as a whole is used to
attack Eliot with the ‘Bradleian criterion’: his acceptance of Gottfried
Benn’s ‘description of lyric “of the first voice” as being “addressed to no
one”’ is of a piece with his silence over Benn’s Nazi sympathies, so that ‘in
speaking of Benn’s theory of the lyric he has not got the condition of the
judgement within the judgement, and therefore the discussion of Benn’s
lyric theory remains as nothing more than a point of minor etiquette’
(CCW, pp. 573–4). Such critical failures by Eliot must be seen as part of
this tendency to ‘aestheticize politics’.
Yeats had also been included in that list of ‘key figures of our time…
all of whom, in one way or another, aestheticize politics’.54 ‘A Postscript on
Modernist Poetics’ presents Yeats’s political poetry in a more sympathetic
light, though it does not reverse the verdict completely, referring as it does
to ‘Yeats’s political aesthetics or aesthetical politics’ (CCW, p. 577). Nev-
ertheless, Hill considers Yeats to be ‘more Bradleian than is Eliot’ (CCW,
p. 574) and this is illustrated by an example drawn from ‘“The Conscious
Mind’s Intelligible Structure”’ that hinges on a ‘telling distinction between
inept self-expression on the one hand and, on the other, the preservation
of formal distinctions as a necessary part of self-expression’ (CCW, p. 567).
In correspondence with Margot Ruddock, Yeats writes of her poetry:
52 Ibid. 15; CCW, p. 573.

53 Hill, ‘“The Conscious Mind’s Intelligible Structure”’, 15.
102 Michael Molan
When your technic is sloppy, your matter grows second-hand – there is no dif ficulty
to force you down under the surface – dif ficulty is our plough.55
Ruddock rejects the criticism, claiming that Yeats has ‘made poetry, my
solace and my joy, a bloody grind I hate!’56 Self-expression is distinguished
from exhibitionism, just as it will be much later in the lectures of Alienated
Majesty. The way in which these lectures combine these technical demands
with the demands of the public sphere has its roots in Hill’s earlier essay:
When Yeats depicts his own search for a speech ‘natural and dramatic’ (Letters, ed.
Wade, 1954, 583), ‘simple and passionate’ (ib, 668) he is far from advocating spon-
taneous lyricism. He is, even, in the second instance, possibly echoing Milton. An
early use of the word ‘passionate’ in Yeats’s Letters is to be found in his reference, in
May 1887, to T. M. Healy’s ‘rugged, passionate speech’ in the House of Commons,
‘the most human thing I heard.’ (35). It is arguable that Yeats’s sense of ‘simple and
passionate’ speech was always forensic rather than domestic.57
Hill’s focus on ‘passionate’ anticipates his later uses of the word in The
Triumph of Love and Scenes from Comus. Though this might suggest that
Hill had a political interpretation of ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’ in
mind at an early stage in his career, it has taken a long development in
the poetry and prose for Hill to articulate this clearly and to work out
its implications for his understanding of those modernist poets who ‘aes-
theticize politics’.
The phrase ‘aestheticized politics’ informs and shapes an important part

of Hill’s more recent work, so it would be valuable to establish a working
definition of this phrase, which in turn might adumbrate the character of
55 Hill, ‘“The Conscious Mind’s Intelligible Structure”’, 21; CCW, p. 567.

56 Hill, ‘“The Conscious Mind’s Intelligible Structure”’, 21.
57 Ibid. 15.
the alternative that Hill’s poetry and critical prose moves to endorse and
exemplify. One possible source would be Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Work of
Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in which an analysis of the
modern conditions of the aesthetic leads to the conclusion that the ‘logi-
cal result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life’.58
Such an inf luence would not be unprecedented in Hill’s work. In ‘Poetry
as “Menace” and “Atonement”’, Hill quotes from the Hannah Arendt
essay on Benjamin that acts as an introduction to the selection of Ben-
jamin essays published as Illuminations (CCW, pp. 5–6). This volume
includes both ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’
and ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, the latter essay providing Hill
with the figure of ‘Angelus Novus’ in The Triumph of Love.59 The inf luence
of Benjamin appears strongest (and the Fascist connection clearest) in
‘Between Politics and Eternity’, in which Hill of fers as ‘an instance of Eliot’s
aestheticized – and aestheticizing – politics’ the epigraph to Eliot’s Dante,
which is a quotation from the founder of Action Française, Charles Maur-
ras (‘Sensibility, redeemed from itself and reduced to order, became a basis
of perfection’).60
Nevertheless, Hill does not seem suf ficiently engaged with Benjamin’s
analysis for ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ to
be anything more than his basic source, providing both the phrase and
some pertinent associations. The full significance of the term is bound up
with Hill’s use of the ‘Bradleian criterion’ in Alienated Majesty (and in ‘A
Postscript on Modernist Poetics’ in particular). This draws together politics
and poetics, an analogical relationship that is actualised in the real world
conditions in which politics and poetry interact. Hill’s most recent state-
ment of this relationship is ‘Civil Polity and the Confessing State’, an essay
published to coincide with the quatercentenary of Milton’s birth.61 In the
58 Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zorn (London:
Jonathan Cape, 1970), pp. 219–53 (243).
59 Benjamin, Illuminations, pp. 255–66 (259); compare TL, XXV, LX.
61 Geof frey Hill, ‘Civil Polity and the Confessing State’, The Warwick Review, 2:2 ( June
2008), 7–20.
104 Michael Molan
first part of the essay, Hill discusses his belief that ‘poetry is inextricably
bound into the purpose and function of civil polity’;62 in the second, he
sets out his vision of a Confessing State, ‘in which penitential discipline is
inwoven with the texture of legislation itself ’.63 Milton provides the model
for poetry in the Confessing State:
If the ‘Confessing State’ had any kind of contemporary ‘viability’ – it will always
possess validity – I would expect it to be represented by, and in, treatise-poems.
Treatise-poems do not have to be of any great length; I can think of a number which
are sonnets or coda-ed (‘caudate’) sonnets: e.g. Milton, ‘I did but prompt the age
to quit their clogs’, ‘A book was writ of late called Tetrachordon’, ‘Because you have
thrown of f your Prelate Lord’, ‘To the Lord General Cromwell, May 1652’; Gerard
Hopkins, ‘As kingfishers catch fire’, ‘The Candle Indoors’, ‘To what serves Mortal
Beauty?’, ‘Tom’s Garland: on the Unemployed’.64
Hill’s final definition of this poetry returns to a familiar phrase, though
one which has been picked apart and tested for thirty years: ‘hierarchical,
democratic, erudite, “simple, sensuous and passionate”’.65 The provocative
contradictions of this definition separate the treatise poetry of the Confess-
ing State from the aestheticized politics of Hill’s modernist predecessors.
The phrase ‘aestheticized politics’ does not simply suggest that the poet’s
politics have remained untouched by his critical intelligence, but that he
has failed to observe the Bradleian criterion, ‘getting within the judgement
the condition of the judgement’. The Confessing State’s privileging of peni-
tence over opportunistic apology is analogous to this poetic dynamic, since
‘Democracy…exists along some kind of active-passive divide; and one looks
for an intelligence capable of responding to, registering, regenerating, the
collisions and recognitions that occur at that interface’.66
62 Ibid. 7.
63 Ibid. 13.
64 Ibid. 15.
65 Ibid. 19.
66 Ibid. 9.
The inf luence of Milton on Hill is a large topic, for which this essay
of fers a potential framework. Rich areas for study include the way in which
Hill’s early poetry draws on Milton with Blake as an important mediat-
ing figure, a dynamic which is carried forward into Canaan (‘Churchill’s
Funeral’); and the inf luence of Milton’s prose on the later poetry, especially
The Triumph of Love. Furthermore, Hill’s use of Milton has implications
for the understanding of Milton’s twentieth-century reception, particu-
larly the hidden politics of this process. This essay provides one approach
to Hill’s later poetry, including his recent collection, A Treatise of Civil
Power, in which Milton’s life and work provide Hill with a paradigm of
the interactions of poetry and politics.
Matthew Sperling
Hill and Nineteenth-Century Linguistic Thought
The Oxford English Dictionary is a work of the first importance to Geof frey

Hill’s poetry and critical writing. In ‘Common Weal, Common Woe’ (1989),
Hill’s essay on the second edition of the dictionary, he of fers high praise:
It is a blessing, both for the genius of the language and for the ‘peculiar work’ of
the writer, that this is so…That the great work of Murray, his associates and his suc-
cessors is a matter of immeasurable national indebtedness should be a proposal not
subject to debate…Most of what one wants to know, including much that it hurts
to know, about the English language is held within these twenty volumes. (CCW,
pp. 276, 278, 279)
Hill’s phrase ‘peculiar work’ is a quotation from sense four of the diction-
ary’s entry for the word genius, which he had cited earlier, writing that: ‘the
genius of the language is peculiarly determined by, and is correlatively a
determinant of, “the special endowments which fit a man for his peculiar
work”’ (CCW, p. 275). Hill’s own ‘peculiar work’ has been blessed by and
indebted to the OED to an unusual degree, as Vincent Sherry acknowledges
when he writes that Hill ‘is a student of the etymological dictionary’.1 The
debt is clear on every page of his poetry, and frequently within his criticism:
the long entry for ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ in the index to the Collected
1 Vincent Sherry, The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geof frey Hill
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), p. 33 (compare pp. 2, 20); see also
Henry Gif ford, ‘Hill and the dictionary’, in Peter Robinson (ed.), Geof frey Hill: Essays
on his Work (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), pp. 149–58.
108 Matthew Sperling
Critical Writings (CCW, p. 794) indicates how often Hill’s arguments have
recourse to its resources, and within that book’s first dozen pages alone Hill
calls on the dictionary three times, not so much to clarify as to enrichingly
complicate the sense of his own uses of ‘instinctive’, ‘assent’, and ‘assump-
tion’ (CCW, pp. 4, 12). As the central monument of historical philology
in English, and one of the largest achievements of nineteenth-century
linguistic historicism, the OED is indispensible to a writer so deeply and
continuously engaged with the history of the language as Hill, making good
on his claim in a 1983 sermon that the OED is ‘the quarry of my distinctions
and definitions’.2 On the jacket photograph for The Orchards of Syon, Hill
sits with the whole weight of the dictionary shelved behind him.
But none of the forms of praise Hill articulates above is free from
dif ficulty. As a student of the dictionary, Hill will know that the primary
sense of the verb to bless, deep in its etymological past, was ‘to mark (or
af fect in some way) with blood (or sacrifice)’, and that the word is histori-
cally contiguous with the dif ferent but homonymous verb derived from
the French blesser, which means ‘To wound, hurt; to beat, thrash, drub’
(OED, s.vv. ‘bless, v.1’, ‘bless, v.2’).3 Although our immeasurable national
indebtedness should be a proposal not subject to debate, by implication the
proposal might be, or have been, subject to debate; and Hill follows this
sentence with ‘a more contentious suggestion’ that is itself taking part in
that debate: ‘That the very nobility of its achievement is inseparable from
the stubbornness of its f laws’ (CCW, p. 278). While the dictionary contains
‘most of what one wants to know, including much that it hurts to know’,
this is still not all that one would like it to contain, and perhaps some part
of the hurt may reside in the limitation implied by ‘most’. The stubborn
2 Geof frey Hill, ‘“Thus my noblest capacity becomes my deepest perplexity”’, sermon

delivered at Great St Mary’s, the University Church, Cambridge, 8 May 1983 (privately
printed), p. 3. A copy is available for consultation in the archive folder ‘Religion/
Literature: Sermons (1983–90)’ (Brotherton Collection, MS 20c Hill/5/1/168).
3 Compare the collocation of ‘curse’ and ‘blessing’ in TL, LXXXIII and CXXXIX;
and see CCW, p. 341: ‘our language is both a blessing and a curse’; see also Peter
McDonald, Serious Poetry: Form and Authority from Yeats to Hill (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 2002), pp. 212–13; and, in Hill’s Clavics, the grim doubleness of the line: ‘Splash
blessings on dead in Afghanistan’ (section 7).
f lawedness of the OED, and the hurtful things within the language that the
OED records, are co-implicated with a larger emphasis in Hill’s thinking on
language. The reason there are things it ‘hurts to know’ about English, for
Hill, is because ‘sematology is a theological dimension’, because ‘the use of
language is inseparable from that “terrible aboriginal calamity” in which…the
human race is implicated’ (CCW, p. 279, citing Newman). The imperfection
inherent in language and in its users’ ef forts is a subset of a more inclusive
consequence of fallenness: ‘the imperfection that marks all human ef fort,
especially where it aims to avoid it’ (CCW, p. 281, citing J. I. Mombert).
From the perspective of the modern science of lexicology, these must
seem rather implausible lines along which to mount a critique of the OED.4
But elsewhere in ‘Common Weal, Common Woe’, Hill goes into more detail
on the shortcomings of the dictionary, describing the editorial practice
behind the first edition in a manner which is instructive about his relation
to the history of linguistic thought:
It is no disparagement to suggest that the labours of successive editors and associate

editors between 1879 and 1928 seem more akin to the ‘diligence’ of Tyndale or of
Ascham’s Scholemaster than to the visionary philology of Trench’s spiritual mentors
Coleridge (‘For if words are not THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS…’) and Emer-
son (‘Parts of speech are metaphors, because the whole of nature is a metaphor of
the human mind’). Murray’s editorial stamina, his ‘iron determination and capacity
for unremitting work’, may be preferred to Coleridge’s spasmodic, though intense,
labours. One cannot, however, dismiss Coleridge’s words. The man who wrote that,
in Shakespeare’s poems, ‘the creative power, and the intellectual energy wrestle as in
a war embrace’ and who thought of images in poetry as ‘diverging and contracting
with the…activity of the assimilative and of the modifying faculties’ was making sense
in a way that bears upon the nature and function of a work such as the OED. In the
original argument between Murray and the Delegates of the Clarendon Press there
was a mistaken premise, or false equation, and the implications of this continue to
confuse debate. (CCW, p. 270)
4 Hill’s essay has indeed encountered adverse criticism from other scholars of the
dictionary: see Ian Michael, ‘The New “OED”’ (letter), Times Literary Supplement,
5–11 May 1989, 485; Charlotte Brewer, ‘The Second Edition of the Oxford English
Dictionary’, Review of English Studies, 44 (1993), 313–42 (314, 323); and Brewer,
Treasure-House of the Language: The Living OED (London and New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2007), p. 187.
The ‘mistaken premise, or false equation’ that Hill has in mind hinges on the
relation (or lack of one) between the language of poetry and the supposed
body of ‘common’ usage. The proper use of literary language as citational
evidence in historical lexicography is a matter of long dispute, and Hill
enters into the dispute with a detailed consideration of the treatment of
Hopkins’s vocabulary (among others) in the second edition.5 But Hill’s
formulation of a ‘mistaken premise, or false equation’ also governs the divi-
sion he himself proposes between ‘“diligence”’ and ‘visionary philology’. In
the cited passage Hill is attempting to situate the editorial practice behind
the OED by comparison to five writers widely diverse from each other in
time and context. ‘[T]he “diligence” of Tyndale and Ascham’ looks ahead
to Hill’s essay on Tyndale’s translation of the New Testament, ‘Of Dili-
gence and Jeopardy’, where ‘diligence’, ‘diligent’ and ‘diligently’ become, for
Hill, Tyndale’s ‘own literal and spiritual imprimatur for the elect’: ‘words
of covenant, constancy, and constant application’ (CCW, pp. 294, 282);
and it looks back to Roger Ascham’s late sixteenth-century treatise on the
method of teaching Latin to the young, The Schoolmaster, where ‘diligence’
and its siblings have a similar exemplary force.6 On one side of the equation,
5 See, for instance, Jürgen Schäfer, Documentation in the OED: Shakespeare and Nashe
as Test Cases (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), for a pioneering early entry into the
field; Dennis Taylor, Hardy’s Literary Language and Victorian Philology (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993), for a very thorough treatment of Hardy as a test case; John
Willinsky, Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED. (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1994), for a strongly accusatory view of the topic; Charlotte Brewer, ‘OED
Sources’, in Lynda Mugglestone (ed.), Lexicography and the OED: Pioneers in the
Untrodden Forest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 40–58, and sub-
sequently Brewer, Treasure-House, pp. 184–97, for a more measured analysis of the
place of literary sources; and John Considine, ‘Literary Classics in OED Quotation
Evidence’, Review of English Studies, 60 (2009), 620–38, for a recent and judicious
overview of the topic.
6 Roger Ascham, The Schoolmaster, or Plain and Perfect Way of Teaching Children to
Understand, Write, and Speak the Latin Tongue (1570) in Roger Ascham, The Whole
Works, ed. J. A. Giles, 3 vols (London: John Russell Smith, 1864), III, pp. 63–276.
There are seventy-one instances of ‘diligence’, ‘diligent’, or ‘diligently’ in the book.
See also the folder of archive materials to which Hill gave the title ‘In Search of
Diligence’ (Brotherton Collection, MS 20c Hill/4/13/1).
‘diligence’ is a model of careful and faithful scholarly work, a ‘literal and

spiritual imprimatur’ which extended beyond Tyndale alone to a great por-
tion of medieval European culture, since the word entered English from
French in the fourteenth century, with parallel formations in Spanish and
Italian, and soon took on particular applications traversing religious, legal,
personal, and social discourses (OED, s.v. ‘diligence, n.’).7
On the other side of the equation Hill poses the ‘visionary philology’
of Richard Chenevix Trench and of his ‘spiritual mentors’, Coleridge and
Emerson. Trench is the Victorian poet, theologian, and philologist who
was successively Dean of Westminster and Archbishop of Dublin, and
who instigated the long making of the OED when he delivered a historic
paper to the Philological Society entitled ‘On Some Deficiencies in Our
English Dictionaries’ in 1857, a paper which established the principles of
inclusiveness (‘A Dictionary…is an inventory of the language…an historical
monument, the history of a nation contemplated from one point of view’)
and descriptivism (‘It is no task of the maker of it to select the good words
of a language…He is an historian of it, not a critic’) which made the OED
a unique lexicographical endeavour.8
This essay will be concerned with Hill’s relation, both in poetry and
prose, to this triangulation of visionary philologists, with Emerson seen
through the lens of Trench’s work. Between them, these three comprise
the central presence in Hill’s understanding of what is important in post-
romantic philology in English. Hill has provided an outline, spread between
several locations, for this understanding. A mid-1960s hand-out that Hill
7 Compare Hill’s use of the word in poetry: ‘stif f diligence’ (C, p. 71), ‘diligence / and
attention’, ‘Tyndale’s / unshowy diligence’ (TL, CXIX, CXLVI).
8 Richard Chenevix Trench, On Some Deficiencies in Our English Dictionaries, second
edition (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1860), pp. 4–6. For Trench’s importance to
the OED, see Hans Aarslef f ’s description of him as its ‘chief originator’, in Aarslef f, ‘The
Original Plan for the OED and its Background’, in Robert W. Burchfield and Aarslef f,
The Oxford English Dictionary and the State of the Language (Washington, DC:
Library of Congress, 1988), pp. 33–44 (34); or again Aarslef f, The Study of Language
in England, 1789–1860, second edition (London: Athlone Press, 1983; first published
1967), on ‘the truly Faradayan saintliness he carried to the enterprise’ (p. 230).
prepared for students on his Hopkins M. A. seminar at the University of
Leeds, never published but now archived at Leeds, gives nine citations on
the nature and history of words, from Coleridge (two citations), Emerson
(two citations), Trench (four citations), and Hopkins (one citation), most
of which recur elsewhere in Hill’s writings;9 it provides circumstantial
evidence of Hill’s field of interests pre-dating the major sources, which
include several of his prose writings, notably ‘Redeeming the Time’, the
1983 sermon ‘Thus my noblest capacity becomes my deepest perplexity’,
‘Commonweal, Common Woe’, and ‘Poetry and Value’. The understanding
that emerges from these sources begins with Coleridge and runs through
Emerson, Trench, Hopkins, and the first edition of the OED in the nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries; as the work of the OED continues
up to the present day, figures such as William Empson and J. L. Austin
make their own contributions to the field. Hill suggests several names
for what this loose canon of linguistic thinkers is engaged in: if it is not
‘visionary philology’, it might be a sort of ‘linguistic anthropology’, after
James Murray’s description of himself as a man ‘interested in that branch
of Anthropology which deals with the history of human speech’ (CCW,
p. 272); or a sort of ‘linguistic phenomenology’, after J. L. Austin (CCW,
p. 159: ‘only that is rather a mouthful’, p. 630n); or a ‘rational and scientific
study of language’, after the DNB description of Trench’s work, which Hill
applies in turn to the work of Empson and Austin.10
This is an unconventional conception of what is important within
linguistic thought, and it stands at some distance from the major fray as
understood by historians of the language sciences. The emphasis in my
title on ‘linguistic thought’ rather than ‘linguistics’ ref lects a movement
within linguistic historiography in the last few decades, away from a view-
point of historical self-justification on the part of the modern discipline
of linguistics, and towards a ‘view from within’, which pays attention to
lines of thought that may now seem superseded but which in their own
9 Thanks to Kenneth Haynes for alerting me to this document; a copy is held in the
folder of archive materials titled ‘Trench, Etc.: On the Study of Words’ (Brotherton
Collection, MS 20c Hill/5/1/216).
10 Hill, ‘“Thus my noblest capacity…”’, p. 3.
time were as central, if not more central, to the discourse on language, than
those which seem, retrospectively, more sound.11 Coleridge, Emerson, and
Trench in any case write about language in a relatively non-technical way,
themselves standing at a distance from the most advanced linguistic schol-
arship of their day. Nonetheless, the significance that Hill draws from their
linguistic thought is closely attuned to three crucial and related ideas within
nineteenth-century philology in the larger European sense: its historicism,
its organicism, and its claims to the status of a science.12
Coleridge’s sense that words do not ‘wield’, or ‘constitute’, or ‘discover’, but

simply are ‘living powers’, is a figure of the organicism which is present in
many facets of intellectual life (and particularly German intellectual life)
in the period.13 Language has a form and an internal history, a pattern of
change and development, which are as innate and complete in themselves as
11 For a clear statement on this movement, see Roy Harris, ‘Western Linguistic Thought
before 1800’ in Keith Brown (ed.), Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, 14 vols
(second edition, Amsterdam and London: Elsevier, 2005), XIII, pp. 559–71; for
the ‘view from within’, see Giulio Lepschy, ‘Introduction’, reprinted in each volume
of Lepschy (ed.), History of Linguistics, 4 vols (Storia della linguistica, 1990–2; in
English translation, London: Longman, 1994–8); and see the retrospective preface
to Aarslef f, Study of Language, pp. v–vi, for an account of the early stages of this
movement within linguistic historiography.
12 See Anna Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics (1998), IV in Lepschy
(ed.), History of Linguistics, chapter four (pp. 83–97), for an introduction to these
three ideas.
13 Ibid. pp. 86–8, for contexts of the organic metaphor; and see Rulon Wells, ‘The Life
and Growth of Language: Metaphors in Biology and Linguistics’, and Anna Morpurgo
Davies, ‘“Organic” and “Organicism” in Franz Bopp’, both in Henry Hoenigswald
and Linda F. Weiner (eds), Biological Metaphor and Cladistic Classification: An
Interdisciplinary Perspective (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987),
pp. 39–80, 81–107.
are the form and developmental history of a biological organism. When Hill
cites Coleridge’s sentence on ‘living powers’ in ‘Common Weal, Common
Woe’, it is the fourth time he has done so (see CCW, pp. 95, 148, 158, and
624n); and he will go on to cite it in ‘Poetry and Value’:
we are all overcome, at some time or another in our particular area of discourse, by a
kind of neutral, or indif ferent, or disinterested force in the nature of language itself:
a force that Coleridge describes incomparably well in the sudden blaze of a sentence
at the beginning of Aids to Ref lection (CCW, p. 488)
Language has a ‘disinterested’ force because it has a ‘nature’ and a life which
are its own, and which are alien to its users. Our words mean more than
we know – or rather, their meanings are what we know, even if we didn’t
know we knew it. (So August Boeckh famously defined philology as ‘die
Erkenntnis des Erkannten’ – ‘the knowledge of the known’, or perhaps
‘the recognition of what has been recognized’.)14 This pentecostal ‘sudden
blaze of a sentence’ comes from the preface to Aids to Ref lection (1825),
as Coleridge describes the most important of the ‘Objects of the present
volume’, which is this:
To direct the Reader’s attention to the value of the Science of Words, their use and
abuse and the incalculable advantages attached to the habit of using them appropri-
ately, and with a distinct knowledge of their primary, derivative, and metaphorical
senses.15
14 August Boeckh, in Enzyklopädie und Methodologie der philologischen Wissenschaften

(1877), cited in Sylvain Auroux et al. (eds), History of the Language Sciences: An
International Handbook on the Evolution of the Study of Language from the Beginnings
to the Present, 3 vols (New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2000–6), II, p. 1173.
15 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Aids to Ref lection, ed. John Beer, in Coleridge, The Collected
Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Bart Winer, 16 vols
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2002), IX, pp. 6–7. Compare the
passage from Biographia Literaria that Hill also cites in ‘Redeeming the Time’, on
‘the close connection between veracity and habits of mental accuracy; the beneficial
after-ef fects of verbal precision in the preclusion of fanaticism, which masters the
feelings more especially by indistinct watch-words’ (Coleridge, Biographia Literaria,
ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate: in Coleridge, Collected Works, VII:2, p. 143;
cited in CCW, p. 95).
The ‘Science of Words’ to which Coleridge enjoins attention entails not
just an ‘appropriate’ understanding of their present usage, but also an atten-
tion to their history:
Ref lect on your thoughts, actions, circumstances, and – which will be of especial

aid to you in forming a habit of ref lection, – accustom yourself to ref lect on the
words you use, hear, or read, their birth, derivation and history. For if words are not
THINGS, they are LIVING POWERS, by which the things of most importance to
mankind are actuated, combined and humanized.16
In ‘Redeeming the Time’, as later in ‘Poetry and Value’ (CCW, pp. 488–9),

Hill connects the ‘living powers’ to the other key figure of Coleridge’s
linguistic thought. He writes that Coleridge’s ‘sense of the moral copula,
though not exclusively grammatical, was attuned to the minute particulars
of grammar and etymology’; and suggests that ‘The words “actuated, com-
bined, and humanized” take the strain against “the general taste for uncon-
nected writing”’ (CCW, p. 95).17 The broader significance of Coleridge’s
‘desiderated “moral copula”’ (CCW, p. 94) is its place in his philosophical
project of arguing the precedence of language to thought; he understands
categories of the understanding to be grounded in prior linguistic struc-
tures, and finds this originally instantiated in the ‘Co-inherence of Act
and Being…the I AM IN THAT I WILL TO BE, of Moses, the Absolute
I AM, and it’s grammatical correspondent…the VERB SUBSTANTIVE’.18
16 Coleridge, Aids to Ref lection, p. 10.

17 For the ‘moral copula’, see Coleridge, Table Talk, ed. Carl Woodring, in Coleridge,
Collected Works, XIV, pp. 248–9.
18 Coleridge, The Notebooks, ed. Kathleen Coburn and Anthony John Harding, 5 vols
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969–2002), IV, § 4644; compare Coleridge,
Biographia Literaria, 1, p. 304 (‘repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation
in the infinite I AM’); and Coleridge, Logic, ed. J. R. de J. Jackson, in Coleridge, Collected
Works, XIII, p. 82 (‘the title “I Am” attributed to the Supreme Being by the Hebrew
legislator must excite our admiration for its philosophic depth, and the verb substantive
or first form in the science of grammar brings us to the highest possible evidence of its
truth’). For Moses’ ‘I AM THAT I AM’, see Exodus 3:13–14. For Coleridge’s arguments
on ‘the constitutive role of language in thought’, see James C. McKusick, Coleridge’s
Philosophy of Language (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 122–4.
In Hill’s criticism, Coleridge’s idea of the precedence of language to thought

is ferried, though not without some resistance, into the orbit of Hill’s
understanding, implicit throughout his work and explicated in ‘Poetry
and Value’, that ‘Language…does not issue from ref lection but is an inher-
ent element within the activity of ref lection itself…an integral part of
the body of ref lection’ (CCW, pp. 488–9). The language user needs to
‘ref lect’ on the ‘living powers’ which are themselves a constituent part of
his ref lection. When Coleridge urges attention not just to the ‘primary,
derivative, and metaphorical senses’ of these ‘living powers’ but also to
their ‘birth, derivation and history’, his emphasis makes clear the degree
to which nineteenth-century organicism sponsors and enables nineteenth-
century historicism:19 it is because words can be conceived of as organisms
that they become entities with a history of birth, growth, and death, to
be narrated like a historical biographer – in much the same way that Hill
can write ‘Obnoxious means, far back within itself, / easily wounded’ (TL,
CXLVIII), imagining a word, like a biographical subject, to have a hidden
but recoverable past which accounts for its present condition.20
Having been cited five times over the course of nearly thirty years in
Hill’s critical prose, Coleridge’s ‘living powers’ were finally and triumphantly
actuated as poetry in The Orchards of Syon:
Too many times I wake on the wrong

side of the sudden doors, as cloud-
smoke sets the dawn moon into rough eclipse,
though why in the world thís light is not
19 See Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics, p. 87.

20 For an early statement of the ‘word-histories’ philosophy, see Franz Passow, the German
lexicographer on whose Greek lexicon Liddell and Scott based their English version,
in his 1812 pamphlet, ‘On the Aim, Plan and Completion of Greek Dictionaries’:
‘The dictionary should set forth the life history of each single word according to a
convenient and clearly-ordered arrangement’ (cited in Aarslef f, ‘The Original Plan’,
p. 42). Passow was named as the model for the OED’s procedure by Herbert Coleridge,
the first editor of the dictionary: ‘the theory of lexicography we profess is that which
Passow was the first to enunciate clearly’ (Herbert Coleridge, ‘Appendix: A Letter
to the Very Rev. the Dean of Westminster from Herbert Coleridge, Esq’, printed in
Trench, On Some Deficiencies, pp. 71–8 (72).)
revealed, even so, the paths plum-coloured,

slippery with bruised leaves; shrouded the clear
ponds below Kenwood; such recollection
no more absent from the sorrow-tread
than I from your phantom showings, Goldengrove.
I dreamed I had wakened before this
and not recognized the place, its forever
arbitrary boundaries re-sited,
re-circuited. In no time at all
there’s neither duration nor eternity.
Look! – crowning the little rise, that bush,
copper-gold, trembles like a bee swarm.
COLERIDGE’s living powers, and other
sacrednesses, whose asylum this was,
did not ordain the sun; but still it serves,
bringing on strongly now each f lame-recognizance,
hermeneutics of autumn, time’s
continuities tearing us apart.
Make this do for a lifetime, I tell myself.
Rot we shall have for bearing either way.
(OS, XXIV)
We seem to be in a memory of the gardens of Kenwood House, now an

English Heritage property overlooking Hampstead Heath, just a few min-
utes away from Coleridge’s Highgate. The gardens there were designed
by Humphry Repton, whose Observations on the Theory and Practice of
Landscape Gardening (1803) sets out four design principles – congruity,
utility, order, and symmetry – underpinned with a theory of the status
of natural objects in the mind congruent with the major philosophical
idealism of his time:
So natural is the love of order and of symmetry to the human mind, that it is not
surprising it should have extended itself into our gardens, where nature itself was
made subservient.21
21 Humphry Repton, The Landscape Gardening and Landscape Architecture of the Late
Humphry Repton, Esq: Being his Entire Works on these Subjects, ed. John Claudius
Loudon (London, 1840), p. 112.
The other place name, ‘Goldengrove’, recurs throughout Orchards, and

of course comes from Hopkins’s ‘Spring and Fall’, where it stands for a
prelapsarian kingdom of natural beauty before the knowledge of death,
which is nonetheless irrecoverable by the ‘young child’ to whom the poem
is addressed, grieving over the unleaving of the grove.22
But on a less literal level, prior to this, it seems that we may be in a
dream, and this dream-like state is instantiated by several sense-threshold-
hovering puns. These puns begin from clichés, and they straddle what
Christopher Ricks, writing about Hill’s clichés, has called the ‘gulf between
the way we usually mutter such-and-such a phrase and how we might use
it if the doors of perception were cleansed’.23 To find ourselves waking ‘on
the wrong / side of the sudden doors’ is disconcertingly to find the cliché
of waking on the wrong side of the bed to be not quite ‘rinsed and restored
to function’ (CCW, p. 48), but rather swerving into a new perception we
don’t have a way of understanding yet. Two further puns on clichés take
them of f into regions of dissimilitude. The phrase ‘why in the world’ is
first the cliché ‘intensifying an interrogative’ (OED, s.v. ‘world, n.’); but it
might also be an unidiomatic literalism: if we allow that the ‘sudden doors’
might be doors of perception, or doors between the waking world and
somewhere else (sleep, or death, or heaven, perhaps), then ‘in the world’
now has an alternative, against which to become meaningful. Later, ‘In no
time at all’ has the same structure: in cliché, it means quickly, not lasting
long (‘You’ll wake up in no time at all’); but literally it means outside of
time: ‘neither duration nor eternity’, as in Wilfred Owen’s beautiful lines
in ‘Asleep’: ‘And in the happy no-time of his sleeping, / Death took him
by the heart’ (OED, s.v. ‘no-time, n.’).
Coleridge enters after the poem has given us a turn, re-siting our atten-
tion forcibly (or ‘arbitrarily’) with the exclamation ‘Look!’ Before us is a
‘sudden blaze’ of an image, a carefully filigreed picture that trembles as we
22 Gerard Manley Hopkins, The Poetical Works, ed. Norman H. MacKenzie (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 166.
23 Christopher Ricks, ‘Clichés’, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984),
pp. 356–68 (362).
read it, managing the metamorphosis from crown to bush to metallic objet
to ‘bee swarm’ (ringing a change on the expected phrase ‘swarm of bees’)
as a natural-seeming progression of syntactic ef fect. And then the swarm
of ‘living powers’ enters – in italics rather than Coleridge’s upper-case, like
words from a foreign language, alien presences. The ‘living powers’ – that
is, words – ‘did not ordain the sun; but still it serves…’ The word ‘it’ here
hovers between a semantically empty syntax-marker, and a deictic pointer
back towards either the sun (which is syntactically most obvious), or (per-
haps more cogently) the Coleridge citation. It is ‘COLERIDGE’s living
powers’, the idea of them, which serves to enable (or ‘actuate, combine and
humanize’) our ‘f lame-recognizance’, that is, the vision both of the sun and
of the (not-quite-burning) bee-bush, and implicitly the entire vision, the
‘phantom showing’ of worldly and wordly beauty, that the poem has dis-
covered to us. Where Coleridge argues that linguistic forms precede and
govern cognitive forms, Hill’s assertion that these ‘living powers’ ‘did not
ordain’ the sun (ordain: ‘to regulate, govern, direct, manage, conduct…To
plan, devise, contrive…To determine…as part of the order of the universe or
of nature’: OED, s.v. ‘ordain, v.’, senses 2a, 4, 14b) argues for a more inter-
dependent relation between words and things, making good on the terms
of Coleridge’s phrasing ‘actuated, combined and humanized’. To place the
‘living powers’ within the ‘asylum’ of the perceptual world itself actuates
Coleridge’s abstract principle of things being ‘actuated’ by words.
The chief inheritor of Coleridge’s linguistic thought in England was Richard

Chenevix Trench; its chief inheritor in the United States was Ralph Waldo
Emerson; and Emerson’s chief inheritor in England was, in turn, Trench: in
Trench’s books of word-lore we find the ideas of these two ‘spiritual mentors’,
as Hill justly calls them, taken deep into the body of his thinking. I have
mentioned already Trench’s position as the father of the OED, but Trench’s
philological activities did not only involve the dictionary, for in the 1850s
he wrote three other books – On the Study of Words (1851), English Past
and Present (1855), and A Select Glossary of English Words Used Formerly
in Senses Dif ferent from their Present (1859) – that had a great inf luence on
the mid-Victorian discourse on language; and in the first of these, we find
both Coleridge and Emerson looming large. Indeed, Trench is a signifi-
cant mediator for Hill’s understanding of the linguistic thought of both
Coleridge and Emerson. When Hill cites Coleridge’s ‘living powers’ as an
example of the ‘visionary philology’ which made him a spiritual mentor
to Trench, and when he includes the citation on his Hopkins hand-out,
he is following Trench’s appropriation of the trope: On the Study of Words
returns to ‘living powers’ three times, as at the beginning of the first lecture,
where he describes a young man’s ‘first discovery of the fact that words are
living powers’ as ‘like the dropping of scales from his eyes, like the acquiring
of another sense, or the introduction into a new world’.24
Hill’s critical engagement with Trench is documented in several places.
In the Hopkins hand-out, he gives four citations from Trench’s philological
works; he first cites Trench in his published criticism in ‘Perplexed Persist-
ence’ (1975), describing the ‘radical’ insight of On the Study of Words: ‘It was
Trench who learned from Coleridge, via Emerson, “how deep an insight
into the failings of the human heart lies at the root of many words”’ (CCW,
pp. 117–18);25 and he later returns to Trench in ‘Common Weal, Common
Woe’, where he suggests Hopkins’s indebtedness to Trench’s ‘sometimes
inaccurate etymologies’ (CCW, p. 265), and in the passage on ‘visionary
philology’ cited earlier. But in between these two essays comes his most
expansive discussion of Trench, in the 1983 sermon in which Hill situates
Trench at a nexus of philological and theological concerns informing lan-
guage and selfhood. Taking up Yeats’s figure, that ‘dif ficulty is our plough’,
when poets work at ‘grammar and words’, Hill makes a direct link between
24 Richard Chenevix Trench, On the Study of Words: Five Lectures Addressed to the
Pupils at the Diocesan Training School, Winchester (London: John W. Parker and
Son, 1851), p. 2; see also pp. iv, 24.
25 For the citation, see Trench, Study, p. 37.
ploughing the recalcitrant matter of the self and ploughing into the matter
of language: ‘One is ploughing down into one’s selfhood and into the deep
strata of language at one and the same time’;26 and the last third of the
sermon turns towards the OED, both as a tool that poets can use in their
ploughing, and an embodiment of the philological matter into which they
plough: ‘The rock out of which my present discourse is hewn, the quarry
of my distinctions and definitions, is of course the original twelve-volume
Oxford English Dictionary together with its later supplements.’ Trench, for
Hill, is the guiding intellectual force behind the dictionary: Hill credits
him with ‘Much of the initial inspiration for the founding of this great
venture’, and cites the first edition of the Dictionary of National Biography,
which describes how Trench ‘popularised a rational and scientific study
of language’, and how the OED (then still in progress) ‘was originally sug-
gested and its characteristics indicated by (him) in 1857’.27
In the sermon, Hill goes on to connect the DNB’s description of a
‘rational and scientific study of language’ with one of the master tropes
of the mid-Victorian discourse on language, which is also a key figure for
the inf luence of the sciences on nineteenth-century linguistic thought.28
Having pictured the poet’s as someone ‘ploughing down…into the deep
strata of language’, and having described the ‘rock out of which…discourse
is hewn’, Hill addresses one of the nineteenth century’s own means of fig-
uring language as a land-mass: the geological metaphor. Here I cite Hill
citing Trench citing Emerson:
26 Hill, ‘“Thus my noblest capacity…”’, pp. 1–2.

27 Ibid. p. 3. For the DNB citation, see Ronald Bayne, ‘Trench, Richard Chenevix
(1807–86)’, Dictionary of National Biography, ed. Leslie Stephen and Sidney Lee, 22
vols (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1909), XIX, pp. 1118–21. The 2004 second edi-
tion, though somewhat more circumspect, allows that Trench’s philological works
‘constituted an important impetus toward the study of the English language’, and
that he is ‘commonly regarded as having provided the impetus’ that led to the dic-
tionary (Kenneth Milne, ‘Trench, Richard Chenevix (1807–86)’, Oxford Dictionary
of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), available online at
<http://www.oxforddnb.com>, accessed 5 July 2011.
28 See Morpurgo Davies, Nineteenth-Century Linguistics, pp. 88–90, on the inf luence
of the sciences.
Trench’s widely-read On the Study of Words, based on lectures given at the Diocesan
Training School, Winchester, was first published in 1851…In the first lecture he takes
up Emerson’s description of language as ‘fossil poetry’, finding that definition ‘strik-
ing’ but ‘too narrow’. Trench continues:
Language may be, and indeed is, this ‘fossil poetry’; but it may be af firmed of it with
exactly the same truth that it is fossil ethics, or fossil history. Words quite as often and
as ef fectually embody facts of history, or convictions of the moral common sense, as of
the imagination or passion of men; even as, so far as that moral sense may be per
verted, they will bear witness and keep a record of that perversion.29
Trench expands on the figure of language as a geological formation in the

third lecture ‘On the History in Words’:
You know how the geologist is able from the dif ferent strata and deposits…to con-
clude the successive physical changes through which a region has passed…Now with
such a composite language as the English before us, we may carry on moral and his-
torical researches precisely analogous to his. Here too are strata and deposits, not
of gravel and chalk, sandstone and limestone, but of Celtic, Latin, Saxon, Danish,
Norman words…30
Such tropes were common in Victorian philology, and underwrote the nar-
rative by which language study understood itself as becoming scientific in
the nineteenth century; the study of words would now claim a full-f ledged
objective historicity, drawing a paradigm from the natural sciences.31
29 Hill, ‘“Thus my noblest capacity…”’, p. 3. For the Emerson quotation, see ‘The Poet’,
in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Works, III: Essays: Second Series, ed. Alfred R.
Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press),
pp. 1–24: ‘Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of
infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images, or
tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their
poetic origin’ (p. 13). Hill also includes this passage on the Hopkins hand-out.
30 Trench, Study, pp. 57–8.
31 On the geological metaphor, see Aarslef f, Study of Language, pp. 207–8, and Tony
Crowley, Standard English and the Politics of Language, second edition (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 48–50.
Trench’s refinement of Emerson’s ‘fossil poetry’ trope has a strong pull

on Hill’s imagination partly as it recalls formulations of Hill’s own: not just
‘the deep strata of language’, but the declarations in separate interviews that
‘Language contains everything you want – history, sociology, economics’,32
or that ‘etymology is history’,33 or that
The poet’s true commitment must always be to the vertical richness of language. The
poet’s gift is to make history and politics and religion speak for themselves through
the strata of language.34
Hill’s outward move to include the trivium of ‘history, sociology, econom-

ics’, or of ‘history and politics and religion’, reproduces Trench’s manoeuvre
of broadening out from ‘fossil poetry’ to ‘fossil ethics’ and ‘fossil history’.
And the same idea is brought to full imaginative life in Hill’s poetry, where
suddenly we can observe these strata being dug into with a set of syntactic
and lexical tools, with the leverage of rhythm and line-break, in a way that
has a far greater power than the prose declarations:
Whatever may be meant by moral landscape,
it is for me increasingly a terrain
seen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary,
conglomerate, metamorphic rock-
strata, in which particular grace,
individual love, decency, endurance,
are traceable across the faults.
(TL, LI)
32 Michael Dempsey, ‘Literature Comes to Life…’ (interviews with Hugh MacDiarmid,

Geof frey Hill, and Jon Silkin), Illustrated London News, 6629, Saturday 20 August
1966, 24–5 (25).
34 Blake Morrison, ‘Under Judgment’, interview with Geof frey Hill, New Statesman,
99:2551 (8 February 1980), 212–14 (214).
The next section in The Triumph of Love calls into question what Christo-
pher Ricks names the ‘felicitous geological terms’35 of this moral landscape,
by admitting its ‘vexations’: ‘Admittedly at times this moral landscape / to
my exasperated ear…’ (TL, LII). But nonetheless this etymological landscape
contains many of Hill’s thematic and intellectual resources: fossil ethics,
fossil history, and fossil poetry. Hill’s notion of the ‘moral landscape’, how-
ever, suggests one dif ference between the poet’s relationship to the strata
of historical usage and the linguist’s claims to scientificity. The qualities of
‘particular grace, / individual love’, and so on, are not often felt to be amena-
ble to the methodologies of empirical science; the ‘faults’ here are not just
the dislocations in rock-strata, but the failings and points of neglect which
keep us from a recognition of love, grace, or decency. Indeed, the slippage
between the vocabulary of the earth sciences and the vocabulary of human
values, set in two parallel lists which never quite overlay, counterfactually
emphasises the dif ficulty of imagining a natural history of morality.
The same seeming contradiction obtains already in Trench. As well
as being the age’s foremost British advocate of a descriptive and objective
lexicology, Trench was a theologian of language, and a diagnostician of the
sinfulness and moral decline registered in linguistic change and usage:
But has man fallen, and deeply fallen, from the heights of his original creation? We
need no more than his language to prove it. Like everything else about him, it bears
at once the stamp of his greatness and of his degradation, of his glory and of his
shame. What dark and sombre threads he must have woven into the tissue of his
life, before we could trace those threads of darkness which run through the tissue
of his language!36
For Trench, the signs of man’s divine origins, his fallenness, and his pro-
gressive moral debasement, are present on the most local level of semantic
change, and the results of objective philological investigation into the nature
of this change can be read back to reveal the markings of original sin on
human history. In his lecture ‘On the Morality in Words’ this methodology
35 Christopher Ricks, True Friendship: Geof frey Hill, Anthony Hecht, and Robert Lowell
Press, 2010), pp. 52–3.
36 Trench, Study, pp. 26–7.
is starkly revealed, as when Trench interprets the derivation of the word
‘pain’ from Latin poena, ‘punishment’, to mean that pain is ‘the correlative
of sin’, that ‘Pain is punishment’; or when he argues that plague means (or
rather, ‘properly’ means) the ‘“blow”, or “stroke”…inf licted by God on a
guilty or rebellious world’.37 To historians of linguistics, these have often
seemed rather implausible lines along which to analyse historical sense-
developments, and Trench’s writings on language have been subject to a
deal of adverse criticism.38
In the closing section of his sermon, Hill cites William Empson, in The
Structure of Complex Words, ‘derid[ing]’ Trench for his ‘simplistic punitive
pietism, his smooth and slippery equation…that “pain is punishment”’;
Empson retorts that a man, coming ‘fresh from the factory conditions of
the time’ and hearing this, ‘might perhaps have tried kicking that important
figure’, who ‘might then have found himself claiming that though in pain
he did not deserve to suf fer’.39 But Hill takes Trench’s side:
Trench has ‘slipped up’. Yet he remains exemplary. He has established the method
by which he can be corrected. He has prepared the ground for his own humiliation.
Empson’s critical and moral insight is more penetrating than that of Trench, but the
‘rational and scientific study of language’ undertaken by The Structure of Complex
Words, or in J. L. Austin’s How To Do Things With Words, depends to a significant
extent upon the evidence accumulated in the OED and, therefore, upon Trench’s
‘original suggestion’ of the way in which the manifold versions and perversions of
the moral sense may be etymologically embodied and revealed. It is not unlikely that
Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose own poetry burrows deeply among the strata of lan-
guage, who conceived of words as ‘heavy bodies’, each with its own ‘centre of gravity’,
was himself inf luenced by the work of ‘the great popularizer of English wordlore’.
37 Ibid. p. 36.
38 See, for instance, John Bromley, The Man of Ten Talents: A Portrait of Richard
Chenevix Trench, 1807–86, Philologist, Poet, Theologian, Archbishop (London: SPCK,
1959), on the ‘reductio ad absurdum of this perverse attempt to mix theology with
etymology’ (p. 230); or Roy Harris, ‘Introduction’ to Trench, On the Study of Words,
facsimile edition in the series British Linguistics in the Nineteenth Century (London:
Routledge / Thoemmes Press, 1994), pp. v–xi, on Trench’s ‘ability to tailor a view of
language so as to fit racial and religious preconceptions’ (x).
39 See William Empson, The Structure of Complex Words (London: Chatto and Windus,
1951), pp. 81–2.
Karl Barth says somewhere that sin is the ‘specific gravity of human nature as such’.
My own view of the matter, and here I declare myself for better or worse a follower
of Trench, is that the ‘pull’ of language is implicated with, compounded with, that
‘specific gravity’ which Barth says sin is. This may be another smooth and slippery
equation; but here I stand, or fall.40
For Hill, then, the indebtedness of later visionary philologists such as
Empson and Austin to the OED secures their indebtedness to the moral
sense of the man whose philological work underlay it, even as the lexico-
logical principles he lay down are at odds with that moral sense. Language
is ‘implicated with, compounded with’, original sin; Trench’s understanding
that ‘Pain is punishment’ may prove his humiliation as a linguist, but in
‘prepar[ing] the ground’ for this humiliation he humbles himself before his
own radical imperfection. What emerges from this account is a theological
historicism, which takes in diverse energies from the nineteenth-century
discourse on language (organicism, scientific inf luence, historical discov-
ery) but which combines them with impulses that have a much longer
and more continuous history. Hill may write ‘here I stand, or fall’, but his
point already stands on an understanding of fallenness as a constitutive
condition of language, as of being human.
The convergence between Trench’s work on language and Hill’s writing
is not confined to these critical encounters. Hill’s poetry often draws on the
powers of etymology in a manner distinctly parallel to Trench. This is not
to say that Trench is the source for any of Hill’s etymologies, but rather that
Hill’s thinking in and about language and etymology, its theological and
moral significances, is enough in tune with Trench’s modes of thought, that
the same word-histories independently snag at, or spark of f, something in his
moral imagination. Striking shared instances include the words atonement,41
40 Hill, ‘“Thus my noblest capacity…”’, p. 3.

41 See Trench, A Select Glossary of English Words Used Formerly in Senses Dif ferent from
their Present (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1859), pp. 11–12: ‘the word may be
divided “at-one-ment”…in harmony with its etymology’ (s.v. ‘atone, atonement’);
and compare Hill: ‘an act of atonement, in the radical etymological sense – an act
of at-one-ment’ (CCW, p. 4).
obnoxious,42 and the sensuous/sensual distinction;43 but here I want to look

at one of the keywords of Hill’s moral discourse: reduce. Trench takes up
the word in his Select Glossary of English Words Used Formerly in Senses
Dif ferent from their Present (1859), which expands upon the arguments of
On the Study of Words and English Past and Present by accumulating abun-
dant data to illustrate the ‘creation and debasement’ of words:44
REDUCE. That which is ‘reduced’ now is brought back to narrower limits, or lower
terms, or more subject conditions, than those under which it subsisted before. But
nothing of this lies of necessity in the word, nor yet in the earlier uses of it. According
to these that was ‘reduced’ which was brought back to its former estate, an estate that
might be, and in all the following examples is, an ampler, larger, or more prosperous
one than that which it superseded.45
The meaning of the word reduce and its related forms is central to Hill’s
later writing both in poetry and prose, and this centrality dates from
‘Common Weal, Common Woe’, where Hill engages with the OED entry
for ‘reduce’ in the course of his own meditation on ‘the application of the
word “reduce” to a variety of editorial activities’: he contrasts ‘the OED’s
reductive method’ with Hopkins’s ‘model reduction’ of his own senses; he
mentions the dictionary-makers’ onerous task of ‘reducing to alphabetic
order…three and a half millions of slips’, and praises Murray for ‘resisting
demands that the scope of the Dictionary should be drastically reduced’;
and he notes that ‘the Dictionary copes well with the reductive uses of
private’ (CCW, pp. 267, 273). Having thereby used reduce and its deriva-
tive forms across a range of the senses of the word, the essay turns its focus
onto the OED’s own ‘reduction’ of the word:
42 Trench, Select Glossary, pp. 136–7: ‘it is properly applied to one who on the ground
of a mischief or wrong committed by him is justly liable to punishment’ (s.v. ‘obnox-
ious’); and compare TL, CXLVIII: ‘Obnoxious means, far back within itself, / easily
wounded’.
43 Trench, Select Glossary, pp. 178–9 (s.v. ‘sensual, sensuality’); and see Michael Molan’s
essay in this volume.
44 For ‘creation and debasement’, see Hill in Haf fenden, Viewpoints, p. 88.
45 Trench, Select Glossary, p. 167 (s.v. ‘reduce’).
The entry for the word reduce (in the July 1904 fascicule, edited by W. A. Craigie and
his assistants) is an exemplary ‘reducing’ (as in: ‘reduce. 14a-c’) of its own ‘series of
significations’, running to just under seven columns of print. It may justly be added,
however, that among the many consequences and ef fects of such ‘reduction’ one is
as likely to encounter those which ‘break down’ and ‘lessen’ as those which ‘refer
(a thing) to its origin’ or ‘bring to a certain order or arrangement’. Murray and his
colleagues strike one as being finely attuned to English usages which are themselves
reductive, collocative, analytical…When they are presented with ‘the assimilative
and…the modifying faculties’ at work in language, when they encounter reciprocity
or simultaneity, the outcome is sometimes less happy. (CCW, pp. 273–4).
So the whole burden of the OED might be understood as a task of reduc-

tion, but reduction is a mixed and dif ficult task, since the word reduce itself
contains irreducible complexities such as those the OED’s etymology for
‘reduce’ records:
The original sense of the word, ‘to bring back’, has now almost entirely disappeared,
the prominent modern sense being ‘to bring down’ or ‘to diminish’. A clear arrange-
ment of the various uses (many of them found only in the language of the 15–17th
centuries) is rendered dif ficult by the extent to which the dif ferent shades of meaning
tend to pass into or include each other. (OED, s.v. ‘reduce, v.’)
This sense of the graded possibilities of the word, passing into and includ-
ing each other, becomes a repeated trope within Hill’s later poetry. First,
in Canaan, the poem ‘Dark-Land’ asks ‘Are these last things reduced / to
the imagining / of shadow-eternals?’ (C, p. 54). Later, in The Orchards of
Syon, we get irreducible straddling the ambiguities: ‘nothing of ours is irre-
ducible / though passion of failed loves remains / in its own selving’ (OS,
LXX). In these two instances the senses of bringing to order, or restoring
to origins, add a distinct layer of ambiguity. But in between these instances
come sections in Speech! Speech! and Scenes from Comus which each boldly
insist on ‘reducing’ the word to its etymology:
Diminishment | the long-withheld secret

of dying. The mind’s threatened attention spared
by what it gives up; as by these dark
roses in rain-bleached tubs. Things to be taken
further | let me confess. Strategies
are not salvation: fár fróm it. Even so

REDUCE means LEAD BACK (into the right way),
mortal self-recognition. Patience
is hard, reductive. What comes next?
(SS, 24)
To reduce is to lead back,
to rectify; also, to diminish.

(SC, 1.15)
The insistence of that first instance may seem somewhat wilful and defen-
sive, with the upper case type berating the word into meaning what it used
to mean, but now primarily doesn’t; there is a sermonizing tone here which
may strike many readers as oppressive (and the parenthetical insistence,
‘into the right way’, only adds to this). ‘REDUCE means LEAD BACK’: this is
precisely the prescriptivism that modern principles of lexicology had ruled
out of court. But the question which comes next – ‘What comes next?’
– undercuts this. Since Speech! Speech! is a book composed in dif ferent
voices, the irruption of otherwise proscribed tongues is always prone to
of fer strategic challenge to the prescriptivism of moral and verbal certainty.
Here the poem attempts to transform the ‘diminishment’ of ageing, and
the prospect of death it augurs, into the saving etymological recognition
that a single word, reduce, can govern both diminishment and leading back;
but the larger structure of the book meaningfully forbids the reader from
being led back ‘(into the right way)’ out of the traf fic of broken down,
lessened, diminished possibilities. The second instance, from Scenes from
Comus, makes this ambivalence clearer, opening out into an admission of
both possibilities, on syntactically equal terms (‘also’). One might be led
back, into the right way, or one might be diminished. If the didacticism of
the Speech! Speech! example is characteristic of the blunt rhetorical force
the book sometimes has recourse to, and is, we might say, a bit deliberately
‘reductive’, in several senses, then the easier-going Scenes from Comus exam-
ple allows both senses, and lets them contend among themselves.
All of which is far from unpolitical. The relation of present sense to past
usage, and the consequences a writer derives from this relation, model a
politics of language in miniature. Coleridge’s organicist notion of words
as living powers, and not arbitrary tokens of exchange, served powerfully to
oppose his conservatism to the philosophical radicalism whose inheritors
were the utilitarians. Trench followed him on this path, and his insistence
that the signs of fallenness and immorality are marked into linguistic change
was fully instinct with his own social conservatism, his sombre pessimism;
each of the instances I have cited from him conceives of sense-development
as loss, or falling from a better state.46 ‘To reduce is to lead back’ may be,
from this point of view, a master-trope of nostalgia. It is striking, then, that
Eric Grif fiths makes the comparison between Hill and Trench in terms
that draw a very dif ferent picture of the latter:
Hill does not have Trench’s hospitable fervour over the language, like a housewife
laying out a good spread, for the poet, knowing the brutalities and cussedness of his
material at first hand, cannot rejoice in the language so artlessly and wholeheartedly
as did the Dean of Westminster.47
But Grif fiths’s insight might be adapted to register the degree of dissent

from Trench present in Hill’s version of reduce; less ‘wholeheartedly’ than
Trench, he brings the former sense into contention with the present. The
point of Trench’s reductive method is that it tends to mean a leading back
towards God, or to the godly; but despite Hill’s wish to lead the word back
46 See Crowley, Standard English, pp. 43–76, on the politics of Trench’s relation to ques-
tions of ‘nationalism and social unity’ (44). For a recent assessment of the politics
of philology in general, see Geof frey Galt Harpham, ‘Roots, Races, and the Return
to Philology’, Representations, 106 (Spring 2009), 34–62.
47 Eric Grif fiths, ‘Hill’s criticism: a life of form’, in Peter Robinson (ed.), Geof frey Hill:
Essays on his Work (Open University Press: Milton Keynes, 1985), pp. 172–84 (177).
Charles Lock also makes mention of Hill’s interest in Trench, in ‘Weighing Words’
(review of CCW), Essays in Criticism, 60:4 (2010), 389–400.
to the sense ‘LEAD BACK (into the right way)’, at other times he lays out
its nuances with a precision and ascertaining power that belies any simple
conception of nostalgia. Elsewhere in this volume Michael Molan describes
‘pressure points’ in Hill’s writing ‘where the reader might choose between
nostalgia and critical history’; Hill’s etymologizing on reduce is such a
moment. To write, as Hill does, with a diligent alertness to the history of
words, their birth and derivation, and to bring to mind all that it hurts to
know about these things, allows the possibility of a ‘radical’ insight – allows
the writer to strike at the root of things – as much as it signals yearning
for a lost golden age of lexical perfection, since the messy interim history
of sense-development, and the bloody human contestations it records, are
both worked into the matter of Hill’s etymologically modified language.
Marcus Waithe
Hill, Ruskin, and Intrinsic Value
In the essay ‘Poetry and Value’ (2001), Geof frey Hill makes the surprising
admission that ‘Until recently I was essentially an adherent of “intrinsic
value” as delineated by Ruskin’ (CCW, pp. 485–6). ‘I am’, he adds, ‘now
much less sure of my position’. The remark puzzles because it announces
a change of attitude that is hard to discern: while Ruskin has evidently
been on Hill’s mind for decades, there is little in his poetry and criticism to
suggest prior adherence or unqualified admiration. Ruskin has not ranked
among the body of martyrs – religious, political, artistic – that one asso-
ciates with Hill’s memorial work. The few references to him in the early
poems are in fact markedly critical and distanced.
One might expect Ruskin’s struggle with mental illness and the post-
humous trials of his reputation to endear him to Hill: many of his poetic
subjects possess a similarly ‘brave’ and ‘beleaguered’ status.1 But Hill
does not relate to Ruskin in this way. He seems more disposed to cast
him as a perpetrator of rhetorical coercion than a fellow combatant in the
war on cliché. Ruskin emerges not as the martyr to an especially digni-
fied cause, but as the symbol of something disappointed; and he appeals
to Hill’s position of dif ficult and doubting faith, to the sense of yearning
for an obsolete and impermissible object. He possesses an instrumental
significance in this regard, channelling Hill’s need to upset the certitudes
to which he is most drawn.
1 Alexandra Bell, Rebecca Rosen, and Edmund White, ‘Strongholds of the Imagination’
(interview with Geof frey Hill), The Oxonian Review, 9:4 (18 May 2009), available
online at <http://www.oxonianreview.org/wp/geof frey-hill/>, accessed 5 July 2011
(paragraph 10 of 13).
134 Marcus Waithe
Though Hill has lodged various complaints against Ruskin over the
years, it is important at the outset to indicate the range of their shared
concerns. Ruskin famously wrote in Modern Painters (volume three, 1856)
that ‘To see clearly is poetry, prophecy, and religion, – all in one’.2 This prin-
ciple found practical expression in his promotion of the benefits yielded
by meticulous botanical drawing; it emerged, too, in his social criticism.
Ruskin challenged the selective vision that blinds the rich to the suf fering
of the poor, a principle implicit in the observation that ‘we never thor-
oughly feel the evils which are not actually set before our eyes’.3 Related
perceptual sympathies emerge from certain of Hill’s poems. Consider,
for instance, these lines from The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy:
‘Landscape is like revelation; it is both / singular crystal and the remot-
est things’ (CP, p. 188). Hill’s evocation of Péguy’s mystical conservatism
recalls Ruskin’s adaptation of a motif derived from Wordsworth’s natural
theology, namely his conception of nature as a book wherein one may
read eternal truths.4 And the reference to ‘revelation’ reminds us that Hill
takes the social with the perceptual, the word insisting on a link between
perceptual unveiling and the re-ordering of society or reality. ‘Prophecy’
often operates for Ruskin as a faculty removed from religious faith; Hill’s
form of poetic revelation is similarly fugitive. His poems are not cries of
despair settled and secured by their own orthodoxy. They find little suste-
nance beyond themselves. The approximation betokened by ‘like’ and the
superlative distance of ‘remotest’ signal a necessary frustration. We have
the sense of a poet forced to rely on his own resources.
In Hill’s recent books, the ‘singular crystal’ of sharpened form pro-
vides the basis for poetry of striking beauty. A poem from Without Title
called ‘In Ipsley Church Lane 1’ finds Hill confiding, ‘More than ever I
2 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, III, in The Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin,
ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols (London: George Allen, 1903–12),
V, p. 333.
3 John Ruskin, ‘The Opening of the Crystal Palace’, in Works, XII, p. 430.
4 ‘With such a book / Before our eyes, we could not choose but read’, William
Wordsworth, The Prelude, VI, in Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest
de Selincourt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), pp. 473–4.
see through painters’ eyes’ (WT, p. 6). There is a poignancy Ruskin would
have recognised in the ‘Clogged thorn-blossom sticks’ that form below the
‘Storm cloud’ in the same poem. Commenting on the sublime inf luence
of plants and f lowers, Ruskin remarks in similar terms on the manner of
‘Their shudder at the approach of storm, – their apparent rejoicing in the
light and colour of heaven’.5 In both cases, the symbolic threat of storm is
achieved without losing the physical immediacy of an atmospheric event.
A comparable eye for locality – its history fraught with its meteorology
– emerges in the ‘smoke / engrossed, cloud-cumbered’ England of ‘Dark-
land’ (‘Wherein Wesley stood…’; C, p. 26). This poem from Canaan has
much in common with the ominous prophecy of moral pollution outlined
by Ruskin in ‘The Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century’ (1884). In that
lecture, Ruskin identified a uniquely modern ‘plague-wind’.6 It is a ‘wind’
that ensures ‘the sun is choked out of the whole heaven’, and which lacks
the redemptive qualities of a ‘good, business-like fog’ capable of turning the
sun red.7 Hill glosses this disturbing vision in the essay ‘Translating Value’
(2000) as the point at which ‘Nature itself is now poisonously, blightingly,
implicated in the evil reversal of natural process brought about by human
greed and ingratitude’ (CCW, p. 388). Ruskin insists that this ‘scraggy,
filthy, mangy, miserable cloud’8 has not been in existence for more than
twenty years: ‘Chaucer has no word of them, nor Dante; Milton none, nor
Thomson’.9 The poison of the cloud is material and moral, but its capacity
to isolate the beholder from the company of past authors – to insist on
the singularity of modern vision – is its cruellest legacy, realising Ruskin’s
sad assurance that ‘The other name of death is “separation”’.10 The sense of
belatedness that infuses Canaan is characterised by a similar consciousness
5 John Ruskin, ‘The MSS. of “Modern Painters,” Vol. II, with Additional Passages’, in
Works, IV, pp. 359–83 (370).
6 John Ruskin, ‘The Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century’, in Works, XXXIV,
pp. 1–80 (32).
7 Ibid. p. 39.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid. p. 9.
10 John Ruskin, Modern Painters, V, in Works, VII, p. 207.
136 Marcus Waithe
of ‘separation’. It springs variously from the paternal landscape that prompts

the poet to ponder, ‘perhaps I too am a shade’ (C, p. 52), and from the litany
of predecessors invoked across the pages of the collection. Hill is not alien-
ated from the ‘traditions of the air’11 in the manner of Ruskin; but one sees
in his poetry a cognate despondency, a mood that depends on the related
sense of a new and ineluctable atmosphere. The human predicament is
evoked through the spectacle of an ‘evil reversal’ in nature.
While Hill has proven consistently wary of poetry that claims a pro-
phetic function, his attention to crises of ‘civil polity’ also suggests connec-
tions with the work of Ruskin (CCW, p. 525). Ironically distanced or not,
titles and epigraphs from Pugin, Disraeli, Cobbett, and more recent laments
for the ‘archaic laws / and hymnody’ of a ‘Respublica / brokenly recalled’
(C, p. 29), associate Hill’s poetry with the concerns of the Tory Radical
tradition to which Ruskin belonged. Hill’s expression of guarded admira-
tion for that tradition is sometimes misunderstood.12 For instance, there
is no obvious connection between such admiration and the ‘Thatcherite
“unthinkable”’ of deregulation.13 Hill’s public references to the ascendancy
of ‘plutocratic anarchy’ are notable for their Ruskinian, even Carlylean
tone.14 As such, they seem far removed from the neo-liberal philosophy of
the New Right. Indeed, his confession that ‘I thought that I had invented
the term plutocratic anarchy’ indicates a deep af finity with the Ruskinian
tradition of social criticism, confirmed by the revelation that the phrase
actually ‘originated with William Morris’.15 Hill explains that Ruskin –
11 Ruskin, ‘The Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century’, p. 10.

13 Sean O’Brien, The Deregulated Muse (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1998),
p. 10.
14 Hill used this expression while in conversation with Rowan Williams at ‘Geof frey
Hill and His Contexts’, Keble College, Oxford, 2 July 2008; see also Geof frey Hill,
‘Civil Polity and the Confessing State’, The Warwick Review, 2 (2008), 7–20.
15 ‘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 “anarchi-
cal Plutocracy”’, in Bell et al., ‘Strongholds of the Imagination’ (paragraph 12 of 13).
whom Morris described as his ‘master’ in the struggle against ‘Whiggery’16

– had been chair of the session at University College, Oxford, at which
Morris used the phrase ‘anarchical Plutocracy’.17 This was also the occasion
at which Morris first publicly announced, ‘I am “one of the people called
Socialists”’.18 The provenance Hill attaches to ‘plutocratic anarchy’ is salu-
tary, registering the politically diverse legacy of Ruskin’s Tory Radicalism
and indeed the danger in assuming equivalence between current political
categories and Victorian ones.19
In rhetorical terms, the phrase ‘plutocratic anarchy’ invites partici-
pation in the indignation of inf lated description; appealing to a prior
conception of public decency, it belongs to the same oratorical tradition
that informs Ruskin’s allusion to the ‘common sense’ understanding that
‘We do not sell our prime-ministership by Dutch auction’,20 and echoes
Ruskin’s stirring formulation, that ‘Government and co-operation are in all
things…the laws of life. Anarchy and competition…the Laws of Death’.21
The kind of ‘anarchy’ in question grants privilege to the unbridled free-
dom of a ruling economic interest. The condition is anarchic because it
resigns the ‘true’ task of government in favour of freedoms determined
by power-relations rather than the commonweal. For Hill, as for Ruskin,
government is a moral science that should be judged against fiduciary
standards of probity and prudence.
The theory and practice of commemoration emerges as an additional
shared concern. This is not commemoration as social nicety; for both men,
16 William Morris, ‘How I Became a Socialist’, in The Collected Works of William Morris,
ed. May Morris, 24 vols (London: Longmans Green and Company, 1910–15), XXIII,
pp. 277–81 (279).
17 William Morris, ‘Art Under Plutocracy’, in Collected Works, XXIII, pp. 164–91
(191).
18 Morris, ‘Art Under Plutocracy’, p. 172.
19 Ruskin himself found consistency in describing himself as ‘a Communist of the old
school – reddest also of the red’ (Letter, 7, Fors Clavigera, in Works, XXVII, pp. 115–31
(116)) and a ‘violent Tory of the old school;– Walter Scott’s school, that is to say, and
Homer’s’ (Praeterita, in Works, XXXV, p. 13).
20 John Ruskin, Unto this Last, in Works, XVII, pp. 1–114 (33).
21 Ruskin, Modern Painters, V, in Works, VII, p. 207.
138 Marcus Waithe
earnest remembrance issues challenges, not palliation. Ruskin wished to

protect the imprint of the medieval craftsman against the insensitive inter-
ventions of architectural ‘restoration’.22 This human imprint, this sense of
people living on through buildings, lends to preservation the quality of
commemoration, and casts ‘restoration’ as a violent species of false memory.
Hill is similarly concerned with the ethics of remembrance. One sees this
in ‘Funeral Music: An Essay’, which insists on the ‘fury’ of a distant battle,
a ‘holocaust’ that ‘commands one’s belated witness’ (CP, p. 200). The Tri-
umph of Love alludes to ‘a nation / with so many memorials but no memory’
(TL, LXXVI), a sentiment echoed more recently in Hill’s assertion that
‘Anarchical Plutocracy destroys memory and dissipates attention’.23 The
notes to The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy clarify our responsi-
bility to register the moral complexity of the past. They concede the claim
that ‘“Péguy’s socialism re-emerged as the national-socialism of Barrès and
Sorel”’, but add the crucial qualification that ‘fascism, in whatever form,
is a travesty of Péguy’s true faith and position’ (CP, p. 206). One might
understand Hill’s relationship with Ruskin in similar terms. In Without
Title, he notes that Cesare Pavese ‘blamed Ruskin for the fascist state’
(WT, p. 52). No denial follows, but the words ‘Intrinsic value’s at the root
of this’ hint at a witch-hunt, resisted in the following line by the qualifica-
tion and defence, ‘it can branch either way’. Just as Péguy’s inf luence on
fascists need not in itself condemn, these words allow Ruskin the latitude
of an unforeseen and unruly inf luence.
None of this has prevented Hill from criticising Ruskin. The first
poetic allusion occurs in section XXV of Mercian Hymns (1971). Here we
find the poet ‘Brooding’ on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, Ruskin’s
series of open letters to workmen, whose title means, among other things,
The Strength of the Nail-bearer (CP, p. 129).24 In this letter from 1877,
Ruskin describes being shown a piece of land in the Worcestershire neigh-
bourhood of Bewdley: ‘As we drove down the hill a little farther towards
22 Ruskin, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, in Works, VIII, p. 242.

23 Bell et al., ‘Strongholds of the Imagination’ (paragraph 13 of 13).
24 John Ruskin, Letter 2, Fors Clavigera, in Works, XXVII, pp. 27–44 (28).
Bewdley’, he recalls, ‘my host asked me if I would like to see “nailing”’.25
Ruskin is taken ‘into a little cottage where were two women at work’, one of
whom he describes as ‘intelligent of feature’, and both as ‘gentle and kind’.
As they fall to work with ‘ancient Vulcanian skill’, he wonders at the ‘Foot
and hand in perfect time’, and proposes that there is ‘no dance of Muses on
Parnassian mead in truer measure’.26 He is ‘surprised and pleased to find…
the women still prefer to cut by hand’.
Ruskin’s host in Bewdley was George Baker, then the Mayor of Bir-
mingham. Baker had given land from his Wyre Forest estate to the Guild
of St George, an organisation Ruskin founded in 1871 to oversee experi-
ments in land husbandry and the revived crafts. Bewdley is only a few miles
west of Hill’s home town of Bromsgrove, and it is mentioned by him in
the early poem, ‘To William Dunbar’.27 It therefore represents a point of
conf luence between the personal histories of the two men. In interview
with John Haf fenden, Hill explains ‘I’m descended from artisans in the
traditional cottage-industry of nail-making’.28 This connection informs
the interest, and presumably sympathy, that sees the poet ‘brooding’ in the
first place. Such brooding is itself a tribute to the characteristically af fective
thought processes that one associates with Ruskin’s mind. It also recalls the
mood of Ruskin’s modern storm-cloud, so unlike past weather that ‘didn’t
sulk for three months without letting you see the sun’.29 The poem is in
this respect a place of repose and of storm, a refuge that may yet harbour
dark emotion. Asked about ‘brooding’ by Haf fenden, Hill responds that
it ‘is a useful word because of its range of connotation: it can suggest both
an outward-turned creativity and an inward-turned depression’.30 When
Valentine Cunningham explores the Ruskinian provenance of Mercian
Hymns XXV, he focuses on the ‘chain of ref lections’ that the ‘sight of the
25 John Ruskin, Letter 80, Fors Clavigera, in Works, XXIX, pp. 173–80 (173).
26 Ibid. p. 174.
27 ‘Here, on Bewdley Bridge, / I think of you, as of my heritage’: Geof frey Hill, ‘To
William Dunbar’, The Clock Tower, 8:1 (Michaelmas Term, 1951), 14.
29 Ruskin, ‘The Storm-cloud of the Nineteenth Century’, p. 10.
140 Marcus Waithe
two women nailers provokes in Ruskin’.31 We are left with a sense of Hill’s
sympathetic intention to re-enact Ruskinian reading habits, to brood with
an ‘outward-turned creativity’. Less is said of the contrary impulse towards
‘inward-turned depression’. Cunningham does not query the sceptical strain
in the poem, or the possibility that Hill wants to puncture the pretensions
of a piece of labour tourism.
For Ruskin, Bewdley is a site of utopian hopes possessed of a sugges-
tively idyllic name (‘Worcestershire for “Beaulieu,” I find’).32 It is ‘happily far
away…from all that is our present England’s life’. For Hill, the area possesses a
personal and visceral significance that calls into question the tastefulness of
Baker’s neo-feudal tour. The preferring ‘to cut by hand’, the measured dance
of the Muses, and the secure agency of Vulcanian skill, combine to exact a
cost in physical mutilation that makes a mockery of the ‘gospel of labour’
and of the land’s status as a sylvan sanctuary. In the words of the poem, ‘It
is one / thing to celebrate the “quick forge”, another / to cradle a face hare-
lipped by the searing wire’ (CP, p. 129). The reported dialogue is jocular,
signalling Ruskin’s awareness that there must be a degree of absurdity in
‘seeing’ nailing, at least if the spectacle is to be ‘diverting’. Of course seeing
need not imply a resignation of social responsibility, and Ruskin makes it
clear that admiration is tempered by painful appreciation of labour’s cost.
We are alerted to the financial hardship suf fered by the worker’s family of
‘eight souls in their little Worcestershire ark’.33 This does little to satisfy the
brooding poet, who detects the tone of patronage, the condescension in
references to the ‘little cottage where were two women at work’.34 Ruskin’s
case is not helped by his admission that ‘it was not chief ly their labour in
which I pitied them’.35 He is more perturbed by signs that their ‘beauty…was
marred by the labour’. It is this conception of labour – a noble endeavour
31 Valentine Cunningham, ‘“In the Darg”: Fiction Nails the Midlands Metal-worker’,
in H. Gustav Klaus and Stephen Knight (eds), British Industrial Fictions (Cardif f :
University of Wales Press, 2000), pp. 36–53 (41).
32 John Ruskin, Letter 80, Fors Clavigera, in Works, XXIX, p. 173.
33 Ibid. p. 174.
34 Ibid. p. 173.
35 Ibid. p. 175.
with certain inconvenient ef fects – that emerges as the most likely cause
of Hill’s ancestral retort. Ruskin wishes for a change that would keep the
hammer in the labourer’s hand without damaging her aesthetic appeal. The
primacy of labour as an ideal is thereby upheld at the cost of any individual
labourer’s prospects of ‘escape’ from grimy circumstances.
The next allusion to Ruskin occurs in ‘Churchill’s Funeral’, a sequence
from Canaan whose second part includes an epigraph taken from the
preface to Unto this Last (1862). The poem as a whole is sceptical of ‘The
spouting head / spiked as prophetic’ (C, p. 49). Ruskin is but one of several
prophets or ‘Maestros’ invoked in the course of this work. His plea for a
reformulation of economics that would return it to its supposed roots in
‘House-law (Oikonomia)’ (C, p. 45), to a solid basis in wealth calculated by
intrinsic rather than exchange value, loses its way amid the insubstantial
ghosts and wraiths of the stanzas that follow.36 The tone here is less critical
than unconvinced, and it is notable that the sequence shares the resigned
pessimism that one associates with Ruskin’s later works. The ‘shining air’
of an air raid, and the lost souls in particular, recall the plague-cloud that
troubled Ruskin in the last phase of his life.
In recent years, Hill has used essays and lectures as a forum in which
to advance a more developed critique of Ruskin’s work. Before address-
ing the question of intrinsic value in ‘Poetry and Value’, he takes issue
with the ‘rhetorical mannerism’ he detects in Letter 12 of Fors Clavigera
(CCW, p. 389). The objection centres in particular on ‘Ruskin’s choice of the
name “Judas” for the national betrayal of the values of a true commonweal
by estimating wealth as commodity values’. Hill complains that Ruskin’s
‘undeniable eloquence of beauty’ is dangerously applied to a ‘mysterious
intransitive quality…thereafter to be received – and not questioned – by us
as “intrinsic value”’ (CCW, pp. 485–6). As he puts it in ‘Rhetorics of Value
and Intrinsic Value’ (2008), Ruskin’s ‘rhetorical currency’ is ‘debased with
vituperation’ (CCW, p. 466). The result is a tendency towards ‘disproportion’,
36 For a detailed analysis of this poem, see my earlier article, ‘“Whose Jerusalem”?
– Prophecy and the Problem of Destination in Geof frey Hill’s “Canaan” and
“Churchill’s Funeral”’, English, 51:201 (Autumn, 2002), 261–76.
142 Marcus Waithe
the significance of which is pregnant in Hill’s deliberate use of the word
‘debased’, and in Ruskin’s having occasion to remark on the ‘evils neces-
sarily resulting from the use of baseless currencies’.37 Hill finds in Ruskin’s
‘rhetorical currency’ an element that compromises its stability, its capacity
to support the purported correspondence between signalled and embodied
value (CCW, p. 466). By way of illustration, he adduces the statement that
‘“It does not in the least af fect the intrinsic value of the wheat, the air, or
the f lowers, that men refuse or despise them”’ (CCW, p. 487). More than a
mere oversight, Ruskin’s confidence that value can exist beyond the sphere
of human estimation is seen as the consequence of rhetorical inf lation in
conf lict with sound reason.
When Hill addresses Ruskin’s ‘intrinsic value’ directly, he explains
that it ‘does not guarantee, or even have a direct relation to, the presence of
intrinsic value’ (CCW, p. 383). The phrase f loats freely of its referent: it is
‘at best a promissory note, at worst a semantic relic to ward of f the evil eye
of commodity’. From this choice between faithful but deferred provision,
and groundless superstition, the common theme emerges of inef fectual
confidence. An additional complaint follows: we are assured that ‘Any study
of the early fiscal terminology will demonstrate the historical inaccuracy
of taking Ruskin’s adoption of it in any absolute sense’ (CCW, p. 389).
The grounds for a charge of historical inaccuracy go unspecified for half a
page, but receive some clarification when Hill explains that Ruskin’s ‘closest
approach to…“due thought given to [the] meaning and history” of intrinsic
value is in Letter 37 of Fors ( January 1874)’, and that here he ‘seems to be,
intentionally or unintentionally, in the line of Locke’s thinking on this sub-
ject in the Second Treatise of Government’ (CCW, p. 389). Hill explains how
‘Locke argues that although two pieces of land may have “the same natural,
intrinsick Value”, it is “Husbandry”, “Labour…which puts the greatest part of
Value upon land, without which it would scarcely be worth any thing”’. He
then quotes Ruskin’s ‘not dissimilar terms’, in hoping to improve a piece of
near worthless ‘“marsh land”’, ‘“by wage-labour, under the best agricultural
advice”’. The comparison is aimed at exposing Ruskin’s inconsistency. One
moment he asserts the possibility of value removed from human inf luence;
37 Ruskin, A Joy For Ever, in Works, XVI, pp. 1–169 (137).

the next, he relies on the labour theory of value that was initiated by Locke,
and developed by the very classical economists he has attacked.38
Apart from insisting on consistency of method, one may wonder why
in purely conceptual terms Hill requires Ruskin’s intrinsic value to be rooted
in previous usage. The objection seems to be that Ruskin uses ‘“Intrinsic
value”’ in a way that is ‘emphatic but not precise’ (CCW, p. 388). That
shortcoming is exacerbated by the phrase’s obvious ‘capacity to suggest
precision,’ a capacity that gives an impression of particularity unwarranted
by its field of reference. Its meaning turns out to be so f luid that it can be
‘whatever we desire…as the moral opposite of illth and collective national
bad faith.’ Hill thus disregards the promise Ruskin uttered in the face of his
opponents’ accusations of insuf ficient logic, to ‘use a little more than they
will like’ and eschew the use of ‘loose terms’.39 Ruskin is also charged with
the fault against which Coleridge warns in Aids to Ref lection (1825), when
he of fers a definition of sophistry.40 Hill reads this definition as ‘a prescient
description of that f law in Ruskin’s argument…which I now attribute to
the term “intrinsic” occurring in one sense in the premise and in another
sense in the conclusion’ (CCW, p. 488). The Triumph of Love airs related
doubts about the wandering precision of Ruskin’s phraseology: ‘Intrinsic
value / I am somewhat less sure of. It seems / implicate with active virtue
but I cannot / say how, precisely’ (TL, LXX). The expressive nub is in the
‘seeming’, in not being able to say quite ‘how’. It hints that Ruskin’s ‘pater-
nalistically benevolent’ views exist ‘in his social writings as an aura, rather
than a realization, of language’ (CCW, pp. 389–90).
38 ‘You are living in the midst of the most perfectly miscreant crowd that ever blas-
phemed creation. Not with the old snap-finger blasphemy of the wantonly profane,
but the deliberate blasphemy of Adam Smith: “Thou shalt hate the Lord thy God,
damn His laws, and covet thy neighbour’s goods”’, John Ruskin, ‘Letter 72’, Fors
Clavigera, XXVIII, pp. 756–67 (764).
39 ‘[T]his business of Political Economy is no light one’, he ref lects, ‘and we must allow
no loose terms in it’: Ruskin, Unto this Last, p. 86.
40 ‘The toll is most severe in the case of Ruskin and is the ef fect of a cause that Coleridge
precisely anticipated, in Aids to Ref lection when defining sophistry: “For the juggle
of sophistry consists, for the greater part, in using a work in one sense in the premiss,
and in another sense in the conclusion”’ (CCW, p. 488).
144 Marcus Waithe
One must necessarily ask whether in these various criticisms Hill is fair
on Ruskin. To insist on historical or etymological accuracy may be missing
the point. A utopian premise need not call on precedents; nor must it be
consistent or fully developed to achieve its ef fect. Ruskin’s understand-
ing of practices among the medieval cathedral builders is exemplary in
this regard. In common with his many etymologies, that understanding
could be partially or wholly erroneous. No doubt its accuracy conditions
its persuasiveness as a point of contrast, but in certain respects Ruskin’s
representation of the past does not depend upon that criterion. However
misconceived as historical analysis, one can salvage from his work a sug-
gestive vision of unalienated labour. Equally, Ruskin’s false etymologies
may tell us little about the history of words and yet remain an intriguing
and challenging kind of thought. Seen this way, they practise a method of
argument that alters present perceptions by means of a disciplined disclo-
sure of supposed origins. Hill’s concern about the ‘historical inaccuracy’ of
Ruskin’s etymological procedure sits strangely with his evident fondness
for such musing in his own poetry. His recurrent employment of defini-
tion and lexical arcana in poems and essays of fers a reminder that he is not
entirely out of sympathy with Ruskin’s habitual search for fitting origins.
Two poems from Canaan – ‘Sorrel’ and ‘Sobieski’s Shield’ (C, pp. 40,
3) – dwell on the names of plants in a way that recalls Ruskin’s ethically
directed attention to the roots of things. In the botanical realm, this project
is epitomised by Proserpina (1875–86), a work in which Ruskin pledges to
interpret for the aid of young readers the ‘European Latin or Greek names
of f lowers’, ‘to make them vivid and vital to their understandings’.41 His
commentary moves from the familiar word ‘root’, to the Latin illustration
of ‘Radix’ as “the growing thing”,42 to a mood of af fect that culminates in
the reference to ‘the melancholy humour of a root in loving darkness’.43 This
thematic progression recalls Hill’s musing on the Worcestershire voicing
41 John Ruskin, Proserpina: Studies of Wayside Flowers, While the Air was Yet Pure, in
Works, XXV, pp. 189–570 (201).
42 Ibid. p. 219.
43 Ibid. p. 227.
of ‘Sorrel’ as ‘sorrow’, a coincidence of sound that evokes a landscape of

feeling. Taking these contexts into account may lead us to suspect that it
is the proximity of Ruskin’s method to Hill’s processes of thought, rather
than the distance, that conditions the need to be strict with him, to insist
on precision and ‘accuracy’.
Similar complications apply to the question of intrinsic value. Hill sees
Ruskin erring in presenting ‘intrinsic currency value…as underpinning and
validating intrinsic ethical or aesthetic value’ (CCW, p. 466). The objec-
tion seems less certain when one considers Ruskin’s more developed view
that ‘The use of substances of intrinsic value as the materials of a currency’
would, and should, cease with ‘the extension of civilization, and increase
of trustworthiness in governments’.44 A worthless base metal becomes in
this model an emblem of trust, not a betrayal of intrinsic currency value.
In ‘Poetry and Value’, Hill concedes this point, but reformulates Ruskin’s
incidental reference to the pragmatic grounds for retaining precious metals
– ‘a mechanical check on arbitrary issues’ and ‘a means of exchanges with
foreign nations’45 – as a programmatic principle ‘demanded by the con-
ditions of life’ (CCW, p. 485). Aware of the shifting ground, Hill ensures
that his thesis is not dependent on Ruskin’s conception of ‘the specific
weight of the word “intrinsic” as applied to precious metals employed in
the manufacture of coins’ (CCW, p. 479). He concentrates instead on a
sublimation of that interest in the habit of ‘using a monetary trope’ as a
‘vital referent’ (CCW, p. 486).
Either way, one may argue that Ruskin formulates something power-
ful in proposing a common standard capable of bringing intangible goods
and customary exclusions into the evaluative fold. And while Ruskin’s
thinking may be muddled on the question of agricultural land, it need not
follow that, by recognising the value added by husbandry, he negates the
premise that certain resources are intrinsically valuable. The intrinsic value
of water, for instance, is already guaranteed by the principle that Ruskin
44 John Ruskin, Munera Pulveris, in Works, XVII, pp. 117–293 (159).

45 Ibid.
146 Marcus Waithe
articulates in Unto this Last, that ‘THERE IS NO WEALTH BUT LIFE.’46

When explaining the relationship between wealth and life, he resorts again
to an etymological illustration. Wishing that ‘our well-educated merchants’
would recall their ‘Latin schooling’, he notes that ‘the nominative of val-
orem (a word already suf ficiently familiar to them) is valor; a word which,
therefore, ought to be familiar to them’.47 As noted previously, the ‘ought’
supplied by the etymological method is more important than its status as a
guide to the history of words. ‘Valor’ is ‘from valere, to be well or strong’, he
explains, a specification that results in the sadly unfamiliar conclusion that
‘To be “valuable”…is to “avail towards life”’.48 ‘Towards’ allows for degrees
of value, raising the possibility that water is at once intrinsically supportive
of life and susceptible to improvement. Its health-giving properties may be
enhanced by purification, its usefulness channelled by a system of irrigation.
Seen in this light, Ruskin’s theory of value allows for Locke’s conception of
husbandry, even as it recognises that water may ‘avail towards life’ without
previous enhancement.
The dif ference between Ruskin’s position, and what Hill describes as
Locke’s conception ‘that intrinsic value is only latent, dormant even, in a
piece of land until or unless human labour develops it by work of hand’,
seems less troubling in the light of this analysis (CCW, p. 472). Hill lays
emphasis on the distinction between George Eliot’s capacity to understand
that ‘intrinsic value is not so much in things, or even in qualities, as in a
faculty’, and Ruskin’s purported removal of value from human processes.
But even Ruskin’s position can begin to seem distinctly Lockean when one
considers his parallel emphasis on the nobility of human labour, and the
preoccupation with husbandry that he inherits from Carlyle. The definition
from which Hill quotes includes the attendant category of ‘Ef fectual value,
or wealth’.49 Ruskin explains that ‘Ef fectual value’ combines ‘intrinsic value’
with the human capacity to use it (its ‘acceptant capacity’). The existence
of this category challenges the validity of Hill’s claim that Ruskin keeps
46 John Ruskin, Unto this Last, p. 105. My analysis of these issues is indebted to sugges-
tions made by Clive Wilmer in response to an early draft of this essay.
47 Ibid. pp. 83–4.
48 Ibid. p. 84.
49 Ruskin, Munera Pulveris, p. 154.
value sealed from the human taint. In fact, Ruskin allows for an essence
that is both pre-existing and open to improvement or destruction. And
he draws a distinction between ‘value’ and ‘wealth’ that is reminiscent of
Locke’s distinction between latency and husbandry. His position also looks
dif ferent if we focus on the ‘f lowers’ mentioned in the passage that Hill
quotes from Munera Pulveris (CCW, p. 486). It makes little economic or
biological sense to consider them pure aesthetic devices, but one can see
the practical and ethical sense in allowing them the possibility of a value
not determined by instrumental human concerns. Thus we may owe it to
Ruskin to focus on the ends towards which his method looks.
Hill’s objections to Ruskin’s economic theories would be less notable
were it not for their remorseful tone. He condemns ‘rant’, but regrets to
declare its presence (‘with sorrow I say it’; CCW, p. 389). He criticises
Ruskin’s rhetoric, but does so less because it is politically pernicious, than
because it is inef fectual and ‘self-stultifying’ (CCW, p. 466). It is ‘a mark of
futility’, he explains sympathetically, ‘to project an exhausted rage against
a largely unspecified and unrealizable enemy’. To borrow a phrase from
‘Redeeming the Time’, Ruskin’s failure seems more one of ‘proper strat-
egy’ than of principle (CCW, p. 94).50 The passage already quoted from
‘Translating Value’ opens by declaring ‘it took rather longer than I care to
admit before I was prepared to concede…’ (CCW, p. 383). Prefatory refer-
ence to intellectual inertia suggests competing emotional investments; and
even when the shift in thinking is accepted, it is framed as a concession,
a grudging acceptance of the unavoidable. These comments are followed
by one of those declarations of interest that simultaneously presses claims:
‘It would be less than honest not to acknowledge that there is a personal
edge to my academic concern with the nature of the intrinsic’, it being not
‘always easy to maintain…disinterestedness of observation’. These forms of
admission, confession and self-censorship announce commitments and
af fections that the speaker refrains to indulge explicitly. Ironically, it is
the naming of these impulses that generates their allure, the potency that
warrants their suppression.
50 A similar concern at a failure to ‘transfigure some of the negative liability of speech’

informs Hill’s ‘admiration for [Richard] Oastler’, in Haf fenden, Viewpoints, p. 86.
148 Marcus Waithe
In his description of Ruskin’s abiding ideas, Hill often turns to spectral

imagery. ‘Translating Value’, for instance, makes explicit the association
between the ‘ghosting’ of the ‘uncanny wraith’ mentioned in Part II of
‘Churchill’s Funeral’ (C, p. 45) and the Ruskinian preoccupation with the
nature of wealth. Hill concedes ‘that most attempts to embody “the long-
ing” [for something indispensable] create metaphysical wraiths’ (CCW,
p. 390). He then adds that ‘Ruskin’s “intrinsic value” is, in and of itself,
such a wraith’. Having declared that ‘I do not myself see that a longing
for something indispensable is per se misguided’, he explains that it is the
attempt ‘to embody’ that longing which leads to spectral ef fects. This is
despite the allowance that ‘intrinsic value’ ‘remains a term which points in
the right direction, towards semantic realizations that have some substance’.
Hill even provides an example of Ruskin getting it right, citing Ruskin’s
praise of Turner’s facility in combining the quotidian and the sublime
in ‘The Pass of Faido’ (1842–3) (CCW, p. 392). Ruskin’s dismissal of ‘the
objection of Taste and Sensibility’ is construed as a sign of his ‘purchase on
the method by which Turner separates true from false vision’. But it is not
particularly easy to see at what point a gesture ‘towards semantic realiza-
tions’ of substance ends, and a false embodiment begins.
The more Hill quibbles the more one senses his regret for ‘the extinc-
tion of…inherency’ (CCW, p. 388). Indeed, it seems no accident that he
privileges those works, such as Leviathan, in which ‘the “inhaerent”…is
praised in an elegiac context’ (CCW, p. 479). This ‘context’, of course, does
not ultimately exclude Ruskin. When the question of ‘precious metals’ has
receded, Hill willingly grants that ‘Ruskin’s was a great and scrupulous
mind’ (CCW, p. 488). The power of that mind is measured according
to the manner of its frustration, its having been ‘overcome…as we are all
overcome…by a kind of neutral, or indif ferent, or disinterested force in the
nature of language itself ’. There may be sentimentality in the idea of digni-
fied failure, but the hint of the sublime in ‘overcome’ introduces a sobering
discrepancy between will or desire and the unforgiving world. Spectrality
re-emerges, but less as an emblem of fuzzy thinking than as a concession
to the deep humanity of attempts to heal the rift between the material
and the symbolic. The failed transfiguration of intrinsic currency value, it
would seem, can ‘branch either way’, ending in intellectual resignation, or
in an awareness of aborted faith that mixes consolation with disappoint-

ment. A similar sentiment emerges in the eighteenth of the ‘Pindarics’ in
Without Title (2006). In response to the quotation from Pavese, which
‘blamed Ruskin for the fascist state’, we are informed that ‘The nature it
seems of that intelligence / is to be compromised’ (WT, p. 52). In other
hands, earnest questioning of Hume’s ‘appeals’ to ‘“durable admiration”’
and of Hobbes’ trust in ‘“inhaerent”’ virtue could seem a commonplace of
modern relativism (CCW, p. 388). Hill’s declarations attract renewed inter-
est precisely because they are reluctant. He writes that ‘Ruskinian secular
attestations of value are tinged with the sardonic and elegiac’, and in this
matter it seems fair to draw a parallel between the writer and his subject.
Hill’s renunciations are also tinged by the elegiac, by a consciousness of
mourning that expresses dissenting attraction to the intrinsic.
Sheridan Burnside
The ‘Tenebrae’ Poems of Paul Celan

and Geof frey Hill
The first clear connection between the work of Geof frey Hill and Paul Celan
is to be found in Tenebrae (1978), Hill’s fourth volume of poetry. Tenebrae
includes free translations of two poems from Celan’s Die Niemandsrose (The
Noonesrose, 1963), which Hill collectively terms ‘Two Chorale-Preludes: on
melodies by Paul Celan’ (CP, pp. 165–6). E. M. Knottenbelt considers these
to be a ‘double elegy’ for Celan,1 while Andrew Michael Roberts discusses
the significance of musical form in Hill’s interpretation of Celan’s texts.2
A second substantial connection between Hill and Celan is felt through-
out The Orchards of Syon (2002), where six of the sequence’s poems make
explicit reference to Celan. He is named in poems XXVIII and LIII, and
Hill refers repeatedly to ‘Atemwende’, which is the term Celan uses to define
poetry in his Georg Büchner Prize speech of 1960, ‘Der Meridian’,3 and
also the title of a volume of his poetry from 1967.4 The German word is a
neologism and Hill remarks that it ‘beggars translation’, while experiment-
ing with various possible renderings: ‘breath-hitch’ (XXVIII); ‘catch-breath,
breath-ply’ (XXXI); ‘breath-fetch’ (XXXII); ‘turn / of breath’ (XXXVI);
‘breath-glitch’ (LI). Among other things, Celan’s ‘Atemwende’ refers to the
1 E. M. Knottenbelt, Passionate Intelligence: The Poetry of Geof frey Hill (Amsterdam:

Rodopi, 1990), pp. 249–52.
2 Andrew Michael Roberts, Geof frey Hill (Tavistock: Northcote House, 2004),
pp. 25–7.
3 Paul Celan, Gesammelte Werke, in fünf Bänden (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1983), III, p. 195.
4 Paul Celan, Die Gedichte, ed. Barbara Wiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
2003), pp. 173–214.
152 Sheridan Burnside
poetic negotiation between voicing and voicelessness, between speech and

silence, and Hill’s focus on the formulation suggests a shared fascination
with this aspect of poetic function.
In this essay I will focus on a dif ferent connection between Hill and
Celan, suggested by the fact that the title of Hill’s volume Tenebrae, which
is also the title of its final poem, is shared with the title of one of Celan’s
poems in Sprachgitter (Speech-Grille, 1959). Another reference to Tenebrae
also occurs in Celan’s poem ‘Benedicta’ in Die Niemandsrose.5 ‘Tenebrae’ is
the Latin term for ‘darkness’ as well as the name for the of fice of matins and
lauds said by Christian priests during Holy Week, which may be incorpo-
rated into public church services.6 I will consider the various ways in which
Celan’s and Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ poems work to reconfigure the confessional
modes of address involved in the Tenebrae of fice in order to formulate a
disconsolate remembrance of the Holocaust. In Celan’s poem the failed
theological address becomes a means of bearing witness to Jewish suf fering
during the Holocaust, whereas in Hill’s poem the inability to make con-
fession of faith which it shares with Celan’s text is implicitly part of the
post-Holocaust context of Judaeo-Christianity. In his lecture ‘Poetry and
Value’, Hill ref lects that ‘forced to respond to the disputatious “relevance
of poetry after Auschwitz” question, [I] would think immediately of Paul
Celan’s “Todesfuge” but only belatedly of the Psalms and the Prophets’
(CCW, p. 480). My discussion of Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’ poem will show how
his own poetic response to Auschwitz involves a response to the psalms
and the prophets. I will consider the significance of Celan’s position within
the portrayal of Judaeo-Christian faith and unfaith after the Holocaust in
Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ poem.
The word ‘tenebrae’ occurs in the account of Jesus’ crucifixion in
the Vulgate Gospel of Matthew (27:45): ‘A sexta autem hora tenebrae
factae sunt super universam terram usque ad horam nonam’ (‘Now from
the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land unto the ninth hour’).
Hill’s ‘Canticle for Good Friday’ in For the Unfallen (1959) refers to an
5 Ibid. p. 145.
6 Herbert Thurston, Tenebrae (London: Catholic Truth Society, 1946), p. 4.
‘unaccountable darkness’ during the crucifixion (CP, p. 38). The Tenebrae

service is conceived of as a funeral service for Christ, which both antici-
pates and remembers the crucifixion, as participants are consumed by grief
and lamentation. The nocturnal of fice of matins and lauds now counts as
a single of fice but originally formed two of the seven of fices within the
daily sequence of prayer. Tenebrae is the of fice of matins and lauds cor-
responding to the last three days of Holy Week: Maundy Thursday, Good
Friday, and Easter Saturday. As at most other festivals, the Tenebrae matins
is divided in the breviary into three periods of nocturnal prayer known as
‘nocturns’. Each nocturn comprises three psalms and three lessons, which
may be taken from the Lamentations of Jeremiah, Saint Augustine’s com-
mentary on the psalms, or New Testament texts.7 The lauds during Ten-
ebrae retain something of their customary anticipatory quality, looking
forward to the dawn, although the Miserere (psalm 51) is substituted for
more joyous psalms and the antiphons which precede and succeed each
psalm are full of mourning.8
The Tenebrae psalms establish a connection with penitence, confession,
and remembrance which is significant for a consideration of Celan’s and
Hill’s poems. Of the group of seven penitential psalms (6, 32, 38, 51, 102,
130, 143),9 three are habitually used in the Tenebrae services. Psalm 38 is
the first psalm of the second nocturn of matins and psalm 143 is the second
psalm of lauds on the service for Good Friday, while psalm 51 is recited twice
– at the beginning and end of lauds – on each day of Tenebrae.10 Michael
Travers describes how in Christian tradition the penitential psalms, which
are also referred to as the psalms of confession, help believers to confess
7 Ibid. p. 5.
8 Ibid. p. 9.
9 A. F. Kirkpatrick (ed.), The Book of Psalms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1951), p. 26.
10 C. C. Martindale, Tenebrae: Thursday Evening (London: Catholic Truth Society,
1935). Martindale’s orders of service for Tenebrae are for Roman Catholic usage
and all references to psalms in his texts use the numbering in the Roman Catholic
Psalter. My references follow the numbers of the psalms in the King James Version
of the Bible, which is the Bible text used throughout this essay.
their sins to God and to seek forgiveness.11 The Orchards of Syon contains
three explicit references to the penitential psalms: a passing reference in the
fortieth poem; a simile in the forty-fourth poem involving the sequence of
prints by the French artist Georges Rouault entitled Miserere, after psalm
51; and a longer reference in the sixty-first poem: ‘Good to hear / the seven
Hebrew-Latin Penitential Psalms, / after some lapse, claim for despair a
status, / something I cannot do’ (OS, LXI). Hill’s reference here might be
to Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, when all seven psalms are used
in the Anglican liturgy: the first three are recited at matins, the Miserere
at the Commination or collective act of confession, and the last three at
evensong. All seven psalms embody Old Testament ideas about human
sin and divine forgiveness of sin, made possible through the act of confes-
sional remembrance, and these ideas anticipate Christian thinking about
the sacrament of penance. Hill’s recognition that the penitential psalms
‘claim for despair a status’ which he cannot claim himself might refer to
the Judaeo-Christian association of penitence with subsequent absolu-
tion which is contested in some of his poems. Absolution is postponed
in Hill’s poetry, since the ongoing expression of contrition in the act of
confession is itself the only form of satisfaction which can be tendered as
penance in response to the crimes of the Holocaust. Hill’s remarks on the
forgiveness entailed by absolution in The Triumph of Love make explicit
why confession in response to the Holocaust cannot end: ‘the Jew is not
beholden / to forgiveness’, and later ‘I find it hard / to forgive myself ’ (TL,
XIX, CXLIX).
Arnold Stadler, in his study of the relationship between Celan’s poetry
and the psalms, describes Celan as being less concerned with the formal pos-
sibilities of psalmic address than with a challenge to their theological stance.
Stadler recognises that this challenge forms part of the poetic response
to the Holocaust in Celan’s texts.12 But in fact a formal attention to the
11 Michael Ernest Travers, Encountering God in the Psalms (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel
Publications, 2003), pp. 51–2, 250.
12 Arnold Stadler, Das Buch der Psalmen und die Deutschsprachige Lyrik des 20.
Jahrhunderts (Cologne and Vienna: Böhlau Verlag, 1989), p. 2.
linguistic and metrical operation of the psalms is integral to Celan’s – and

Hill’s – engagement with them. Such a formal consideration is insepara-
ble from their thematic encounter with the psalms, including the ways in
which the Biblical texts are invested with Holocaust remembrance. It is no
coincidence that Hill’s The Triumph of Love (1998), in which his answer to
the forlorn question ‘What remains?’ is ‘the Psalms – they remain’ (TL,
XXIII), comprises 150 sections, the number of psalms in the Psalter.
Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’, which opens the third of five cycles of poems in
Sprachgitter, can be read as a bitter parody of the voices raised in psalmic
prayer during the Christian remembrance service. John Felstiner describes
how in ‘Tenebrae’ Celan ‘sets that sombre of fice of Holy Week above his
own verses depicting the Jews’ excruciating death’.13 The full text of the
poem is given here in German (with Michael Hamburger’s English trans-
lation below):
TENEBRAE
Nah sind wir, Herr,

nahe und greifbar.
Gegrif fen schon, Herr,

ineinander verkrallt, als wär
der Leib eines jeden von uns
dein Leib, Herr.
Bete, Herr,
bete zu uns,
wir sind nah.
Windschief gingen wir hin,

gingen wir hin, uns zu bücken
nach Mulde und Maar.
Zur Tränke gingen wir, Herr.
13 John Felstiner, ‘Mother Tongue, Holy Tongue: On Translating and Not Translating
Paul Celan’, Comparative Literature, 38 (1986), 113–36 (125).
Es war Blut, es war,

was du vergossen, Herr.
Es glänzte.
Es warf uns dein Bild in die Augen, Herr.

Augen und Mund stehen so of fen und leer, Herr.
Wir haben getrunken, Herr.
Das Blut und das Bild, das im Blut war, Herr.
Bete Herr.
Wir sind nah.14
TENEBRAE
We are near, Lord,

near and at hand.
Handled already, Lord,

clawed and clawing as though
the body of each of us were
your body, Lord.
Pray, Lord,
pray to us,
we are near.
Askew we went there,

went there to bend
down to the trough, to the crater.
To be watered we went there, Lord.
It was blood, it was

what you shed, Lord.
It gleamed.
14 Celan, Gedichte, p. 97.

It cast your image into our eyes, Lord.

Our eyes and our mouths are so open and empty, Lord.
We have drunk, Lord.
The blood and the image that was in the blood, Lord.
Pray, Lord.
We are near.15
In contrast to Celan’s poem ‘Psalm’ from Die Niemandsrose, which con-

tains the line ‘Gelobt seist du, Niemand’ (‘Praised be your name, No one’),
‘Tenebrae’ is addressed to God as though in prayer. Yet in the third and
final stanzas, God is commanded to pray to those speaking in the poem.
‘Herr’ (‘Lord’) is the most frequently used term of address to God through-
out the psalms in German and since the Tenebrae services during Holy
Week are primarily comprised of psalms – each contains fifteen – there
can be no doubt as to their significance within the poem. ‘Tenebrae’ can
be read as a reversal of the psalmic relations of intercessor and object of
remembrance in the Tenebrae service. In the Christian service, worship-
pers address God – largely through Old Testament texts – on behalf of his
dead son, Jesus. In Celan’s poem, it is the dead who speak the address to
God on their own behalf. The dead are numerous and represented by the
first person plural pronoun, ‘wir’ (‘we’), which is also used in some of the
psalms. The frequency with which ‘wir’ (‘we’) and ‘uns’ (‘us’) are repeated
helps to generate a more powerful sense of urgency than would be feasible
from a single intercessor, suggesting that the poetic voice is not a single
individual representing many others but rather a multitude of dead speak-
ing in chorus. The communal address is a distorted echo of the collective
recital of prayers of confession during the Tenebrae service.
The dead in this poem are Jews murdered in the Holocaust, who have
appropriated the most solemn service of mournful remembrance in the
Christian calendar through which to call themselves into God’s remem-
brance. The psalmists frequently appeal for God’s remembrance; the third
15 Paul Celan, Poems of Paul Celan, trans. Michael Hamburger (London: Anvil Press
Poetry, 2007), p. 129.
penitential psalm which is used during Tenebrae for Good Friday, psalm 38,
is called ‘A Psalm of David, to bring to remembrance’. Death is dreaded in
the psalms as the conclusive sign of having been forgotten and abandoned
by God. Hence proximity to God is particularly important during life, and
the psalms are full of instances in which the psalmists measure their suf fering
in terms of separation from God and pray that they might be brought near
to him again.16 Stadler remarks on the well known congruity between the
first line of Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’ and the opening lines of Friedrich Hölderlin’s
‘Patmos’: ‘Nah ist / Und schwer zu fassen, der Gott’ (‘Near and / hard to
grasp is the god’). He suggests a shared reference to psalm 145:18, ‘The Lord
is nigh unto all them that call upon him, to all that call upon him in truth’.
Stadler states that Celan’s reversal of the biblical meaning is a consequence
of his poetic technique of paradoxical expression rather than a blasphemous
challenge to God.17 I agree with Alvin Rosenfeld that this is instead a literary
‘repudiation’ by Celan of Hölderlin’s poem and the wider religious mean-
ing.18 In Celan’s poem, the nearness of the speakers to God is meant to be
threatening. ‘Nah’ (‘near’) is the first and last word of the poem. It is one of
four monosyllabic words from the poem’s beginning which are repeated in
reverse sequence at its end: the poem opens ‘Nah sind wir, Herr’, and closes
with ‘Herr. / Wir sind nah’. In the Tenebrae service, short verses known as
antiphons are recited before and after each psalm. These are adapted from
a significant passage of the psalmic text and are intended to focus worship-
pers’ attention on the most fitting interpretation of the psalm’s meaning for
the context of Christian remembrance.19 The first and last lines of Celan’s
poem perform an antiphonal function in terms of the distillation of crucial
meaning: the dead are near and they are speaking to God.
16 See, for example, psalms 10:1; 22:11; 27:4, 9; 38:21; 51:11; 73:27. Psalm 27 is the second
psalm of the second nocturn in Tenebrae for Holy Saturday. Psalm 38 is the third
penitential psalm and is the first psalm of the second nocturn in Tenebrae for Good
Friday. Psalm 51, the Miserere, is the fourth penitential psalm and is recited twice
during lauds in each Tenebrae service.
17 Stadler, Das Buch der Psalmen, p. 124.
18 Alvin H. Rosenfeld, A Double Dying: Ref lections on Holocaust Literature (Bloomington
and London: Indiana University Press, 1980), p. 30.
19 Thurston, Tenebrae, p. 7.
Celan’s unquiet dead are also disquieted. They are not in a distant,
ethereal resting place, but ‘nahe und greifbar’ (‘near and at hand’). Hill’s
‘September Song’, subtitled ‘born 19.6.32 – deported 24.9.42’, contains the
comparable phrase ‘untouchable / you were not’, where ‘touchable’ would
be a possible translation of ‘greifbar’ (CP, p. 67). The uneasy register of
Celan’s opening stanza becomes one of abject terror in the following stanza,
as the speakers reveal that they are
Gegrif fen schon, Herr,

ineinander verkrallt, als wär
der Leib eines jeden von uns
dein Leib, Herr.
Handled already, Lord,

clawed and clawing as though
the body of each of us were
your body, Lord.
These lines bring to mind the horrific contortions of the human corpses
piled up in the concentration and death camps. Comparable images of
physical suf fering occur in the third penitential psalm used in the Tenebrae
of fice for Good Friday (Ps. 38:2, 5–8), but the crucial dif ference between
Celan’s poem and the psalm is that, in accordance with the custom in the
Hebrew Bible, the psalmist believes his suf ferings are the deserved con-
sequences of his past sin, whereas the suf ferings of the Jewish victims of
the Holocaust are manifestly unjust and unjustifiable. This fatal disparity
is emphasised in the stanza’s final two lines, in which the appalling mean-
ing is overlaid by a mocking tone which had first been established in the
rhythm of the opening line. The stresses of the first lines of the first and
second stanzas are similar, falling on the first and fourth syllables of, ‘Náh
sind wir, Hérr’, and on the second and fifth of ‘Gegríf fen schon, Hérr’,
where the first syllable ‘Ge-’ is almost elided in order to echo the rhythm
of the opening line. The rhythmic echo is intended to provoke the poem’s
divine addressee, whose name is given particular emphasis in each case by
means of the caesura preceding his name.
Whereas the psalmists whose words are heard in the Tenebrae serv-
ice are even in the complaint psalms subject to God’s will, the accusatory
speakers in Celan’s poem seek to make God compliant with their will. The
taunting, irreverent tone of those parts of the second stanza which refer
to God contrasts with the tone of appalled respect which is reserved for
the reference to suf fering Jewish bodies. The jeering tone is established
by means of the balance between caesura and enjambment in the stanza’s
final two lines, so that the words stop and run on unexpectedly to create
an irregular rhythm which is unlike the measured, short phrases of popular
Christian prayers such as the ‘Our Father’ and also unlike the more lyri-
cal construction of many of the psalms. The stresses of the last two lines
emphasise their scepticism, culminating in the final line in which all three
words are stressed: ‘dein Leib, Herr’. The speakers suggest that each of their
tortured bodies is identical with the body of God, establishing a connec-
tion with the Christian sacrament of the Eucharist. The Jewish speakers
address the Christian God, but without the faith of either the psalmists
or the Christians. In the context of the Tenebrae service, the implication
here is that the Jews who suf fered and died in the Holocaust and who
are interceding for their own remembrance share in the bodily suf fering
undergone by the Son of Man – God made f lesh – on the cross, whose
death is remembered by Christian worshippers during Tenebrae, and in
the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist. Occasions of ritual Christian
remembrance become occasions for Jewish remembrance. The poem asks
how the suf fering body of Jesus may be remembered without also remem-
bering the countless suf fering bodies of the murdered Jews. These dead have
experienced their own resurrection, one which enables them to speak in
the poem but which remains far removed from the glorious resurrection of
Christ. Their return is all too painfully embodied in the terms of ongoing
physical suf fering described in the second stanza; their haunting is to com-
mand an unfulfilled duty of prayerful remembrance which is articulated in
the third stanza’s request not that God pray for the dead, but that he pray to
them. The speaking dead address God in order to ef fect a substitution with
him. Unlike the suf fering recorded in the psalms of the Tenebrae service,
the suf fering of the Jewish dead in the Holocaust will not be alleviated by
any action of God’s except his supplication to them.
The remainder of the poem develops the connection with the Eucha-
rist as the speakers drink from a trough which contains God’s blood. The
word ‘vergossen’ (‘shed’) which occurs here is used in the three Gospel
accounts of the institution of the Eucharist (Matt. 26:28, Mark 14:24, Luke
22:20). The glistening blood presents God’s image to the speakers and they
drink up the image along with the blood. The speakers do not drink the
blood willingly. They drink humiliatingly from a trough, and following
their experience of being painfully crushed together they are bowed and
desperate. The consumption of blood contravenes the Jewish dietary laws
but there is no other way for the dead to assuage their raging thirst. One
of the psalms used in the Tenebrae services rejects sacrificial of ferings of
blood as inappropriate forms of devotion to the Hebrew God.20 Having
identified with the Christian God’s body in the earlier stanza, the dead
now complete the reluctant act of communion by drinking his blood; the
‘sacrament’ is complete and all that remains is the enjoinder for God to
pray to the speakers in the final stanza.
While Hans-Georg Gadamer’s extensive interpretation of Celan’s
poem rightly emphasises its connections with the Christian service, his
analysis fails suf ficiently to acknowledge the Jewish perspective in the
poem.21 His question as to whether in reading the poem one should think
of the suf fering and death of the Jews in the Nazi camps is posed in passing
and does not receive the emphatically af firmative answer which I think
is due.22 Gadamer does not take account of the numerous ways in which
‘Tenebrae’ demonstrably alludes to the Holocaust, many of which are
elucidated in John Felstiner’s analysis of the poem.23 Gadamer proposes
that ‘Tenebrae’ refers not just to the death of Jesus on the cross, but to
20 See 16:4 – this psalm is used as the final psalm of the first nocturn for the matins in
Tenebrae for Holy Saturday (said in Church on Friday evening).
21 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Poetica: Ausgewählte Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag,
1977), pp. 119–34.
22 Ibid. p. 122.
23 John Felstiner, Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1995), pp. 101–5.
the death of all people.24 This claim, which extends to his identification of
the poem’s speakers with all humanity, elides and excludes the specifically
Jewish character of the suf fering and death in the text. Gadamer interprets
the poem’s repeated address to the ‘Herr’ as an appeal to Christ and ignores
the Jewish origin of the psalms.25
In Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’, as in the Christian of fice, Jesus’ sacrificial death
is remembered by means of a confessional appeal to God derived from the
penitential psalms. Christian remembrance is contingent upon remem-
brance of those who died in the Holocaust. The poem borrows the psal-
modic techniques of the repeated invocation of the ‘Herr’ and the antiphon,
and subverts common themes of the psalms such as the benefit of proximity
to God and the rejection of blood sacrifices, so that remembrance is asso-
ciated with sacramental qualities which have been perversely distorted in
the context of the Holocaust. In the acts of Christian worship the psalmic
address enables penitents to seek God’s forgiveness, but the implication
in Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’ is that it is God who needs to petition for human
forgiveness and to make confession of his failure to intervene during the
Holocaust. A deformed version of the traditional confessional relation-
ship is established between speaker – or speakers – and addressee. While
the confessional poetic address establishes a possible way of remembering
suf fering during the Holocaust and seeks to make that suf fering matter
again in the present, it does so partly by calling into question the value of
the confessional relation after the Holocaust, in the context of an impotent
God who failed to prevent Jewish suf fering. The poetic demonstration
of the failure of the traditional confessional address is part of the literary
response to the duty of remembering the dead, which involves articulating
the knowledge that available linguistic resources, including those repre-
sented by Judaeo-Christian forms of remembrance, will never be suf ficient
for the fulfilment of that duty.
24 Gadamer, Poetica, p. 124.

25 Ibid. p. 130.
The possibilities for sacramental remembrance are extended beyond

the confessional recitation of the psalms and lessons in the Tenebrae of fice
by means of the dysfunctional Eucharistic ritual which is described. Here,
remembrance also extends to the Jewish dead who intercede on their own
behalf. Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’ suggests that the darkness which overcame the
world as Jesus was dying on the cross was not unique, by presenting the
darkness of Jewish deaths during the Holocaust. It asks about the nature
of the relationship between the death and suf fering of millions of Jews,
and the death and suf fering of the single Jew who became the Christian
Messiah. It is a more specifically contextualised re-positing of Job’s funda-
mental question about the existence of evil in a divinely created universe,
a question which also appears in one of the psalms recited in the Tenebrae
service on Good Friday evening (Ps. 92:7). Celan’s version of the question
is more specific because it identifies both particular suf fering (the Jews
during the Holocaust) and particular divinity (Christ on the cross) and
thus brings to bear a political dimension upon Job’s eternal moral ques-
tion, namely, the extent of Christian responsibility for the defining evil of
the twentieth century.
Hill’s poem ‘Tenebrae’ is the last in his volume of the same name. It is
a longer poem than Celan’s, including two complete sonnets which form
the second and fifth of its eight sections. Hill’s poem is also concerned with
the death of Christ in the context of remembrance of the Tenebrae service.
In an interview following his being awarded the Duf f Cooper Memorial
Prize for Tenebrae, Hill discusses the associations of the Christian of fice:
Tenebrae [sic]26 is a ritual, and like all rituals it obviously helps one to deal with and
express states which in that particular season of the church’s year are appropriate –
suf fering and gloom. Tenebrae does at one level mean darkness or shadow; but at
another important level it clearly indicates a ritualistic, formal treatment of suf fering,
anxiety and pain.27
26 In both instances of the word ‘Tenebrae’ in this quotation Hill is referring to
the Christian service, not to his volume of poetry, and so the text should not be
italicised.
27 Blake Morrison, ‘Under Judgment’, interview with Geof frey Hill, New Statesman,
99:2551 (8 February 1980), 212–14 (213).
Vincent Sherry describes Hill’s poem as a ‘series of devotional and liturgical

lyrics’ which explores ‘suf fering human isolation and estrangement from
the divine’.28 Given that the poem shares a title with Celan’s poem, and
occurs in a volume in which Hill translates two texts by Celan, its engage-
ment with and estrangement from the Christian faith must necessarily be
understood in the post-Holocaust theological context. The voices in Hill’s
‘Tenebrae’ reinterpret the Christian penitential ritual; their confession is
partly a confession of inability, following the Holocaust, straightforwardly
to confess the Christian faith. The damaged theological relation evident
in the confessional address in Hill’s text establishes an alternative com-
municative possibility, however, in which the alienated divine addressee
is substituted for a human one.
The suf fering of the speaker in Hill’s second stanza results from appar-
ent bondage to an unnamed lover, whose Christian identity gradually
emerges; the poem’s opening quatrain describes the initially redemptive
relationship between speaker and lover:
And you, who with your soft and searching voice

drew me out of the sleep where I was lost.
who held me near your heart that I might rest
confiding in the darkness of your choice:
(CP, p. 172).
The tone here is tender, the string of predominantly monosyllabic words

running through the first three lines suggesting easy communication and
ref lecting the comfort af forded to the speaker at the beginning of this loving
relationship. The speaker has been rescued from a disorientating sleep and
transferred to a place of safety, ‘near your heart’, which, like the psalmists’
concept of refuge subverted by Celan in his ‘Tenebrae’, is measured in terms
of closeness to God. In the fourth line, however, a note of qualification is
introduced with the word which translates the Latin title, revealing that
the resting place near to the beloved does not of fer light, but ‘darkness’
28 Vincent Sherry, The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geof frey Hill
(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1987), p. 188.
conferred by him. This prefigures the sinister tone in which the relationship
of elective bondage is described in the poem’s second quatrain. This tone
is established by the sibilant sounds of the opening word, ‘possessed’:
possessed by you I chose to have no choice,

fulfilled in you I sought no further quest.
You keep me, now, in dread that quenches trust,
in desolation where my sins rejoice.
The word ‘fulfilled’, like ‘possessed’, sounds a repeated consonant in which

its meaning appears to be inscribed; the pair of doubled consonants in
‘possessed’ ref lect one another, while the repeated alternation of ‘f ’ and
‘l’ sounds in ‘fulfilled’ resolve into one another, like the actions which the
words describe. Both words emphasise the hermetic relationship between
the speaker and addressee. In the speaker’s state of bondage the only relief
from the prevailing desolation is in sinfulness. The paradoxical phrase, ‘sins
rejoice’, anticipates the sado-masochistic nature of the relationship which
is outlined in the sestet:
As I am passionate so you with pain

turn my desire; as you seem passionless
so I recoil from all that I would gain,
wounding myself upon forgetfulness,
false ecstasies, which you in truth sustain
as you sustain each item of your cross.
The speaker’s passion is met with pain, and the addressee’s indif ference
causes the speaker to injure themselves, the resulting wounds inducing a
state of ecstasy in a sado-masochistic cycle in which sexual pleasure and
pain overlap.
The final line contains the definitive proof of the revelation which has
been hinted at throughout by the words ‘your cross’. The poem’s addressee
is Jesus Christ. As with Celan’s poem, the address here is a distorted ver-
sion of the psalmists’ addresses to God which form part of the Tenebrae
services. Like the psalmists, the speaker in Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ is in awe of
God, but unlike them, proximity to God does not af ford any sense of
liberation. Neither is there any of that trust between God and the poem’s
speaker which pervades the psalms, since the speaker has embarked upon
a slavish, sexualised relationship to God which deprives them of free will.
Most strikingly, in the second quatrain, the speaker’s close relationship
with God finds expression in sinfulness which is generally abhorred as the
reason for the psalmists’ separation from God. While the psalms in general
provide Jewish and Christian worshippers with poetic textual forms for
confessing their faith in God, the penitential psalms, some of which are
used in the Tenebrae service, form one of various possible contexts for the
confession of sin within these faiths. The versions of the psalmic confes-
sional address in Celan’s and Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ poems are made after the
Holocaust and, as such, exclude traditional conceptions of faith and any
attendant prospect of absolution.
The third stanza of Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ continues the subversion of Chris-
tian relationships in its presentation of dif ferent senses of the current impos-
sibility of making a confession of faith:
Veni Redemptor, but not in our time.

Christus Resurgens, quite out of this world.
‘Ave’ we cry; the echoes are returned.
Amor Carnarlis is our dwelling-place.
(CP, p. 173).
The stanza’s opening line quotes from the hymn composed by St Ambrose
of Milan, ‘Veni, redemptor gentium’. Hill substitutes the final word of the
Latin with ‘but not in our time’, words which oppose the Latin meaning,
ef fectively denying the practical possibility of earthly redemption. A similar
process of Latin invocation and subsequent denial in English is repeated
in the three following lines. The ‘Ave’ of the third line is an abbreviation of
‘Ave Maria’, the greeting given by the angel Gabriel to the Virgin Mary in
the description of the annunciation in Luke’s Gospel (1:28). ‘Ave Maria’ is
used as a devotional recitation, but in Hill’s poem the speakers’ devotions
are echoed back to them. Eleanor McNees describes how ‘Hill views prayer
as twisting back on itself unanswered’,29 while Vincent Sherry posits this
29 Eleanor McNees, Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John
Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geof frey Hill (Lewisburg:
Bucknell University Press, 1992), p. 168.
stanza’s rejection of the ‘incarnational myth’ in terms which evoke post-
Holocaust Judaeo-Christian theology, cataloguing the ‘delayed’ Messiah,
‘hidden God’, and devotional cries which ‘go nowhere’, and arguing that
‘Tenebrae’ is also a call for a new version of moral redemption residing in
poetry itself.30 The stanza’s final line refers back to the preceding sonnet
in which the relationship between the worshipper and Christ is figured in
unfruitful physical terms. ‘Amor Carnarlis’ was often contrasted by medieval
thinkers with the more proper Christian attitude of ‘caritas’, although Hill’s
‘Funeral Music’, written for English noblemen executed in the fifteenth
century, is sceptical of caritas as a genuine Christian motivation: ‘we are
dying / To satisfy fat Caritas’ (CP, p. 71). Christopher Ricks quotes Hill
on this fraught inter-relationship: ‘Many of the poems in Tenebrae are
concerned with the strange likeness and ultimate unlikeness of sacred and
profane love’.31 In the third stanza of ‘Tenebrae’, carnal love is the earthly
compromise which must be acceded to after the rejection of any prospects
of spiritual redemption, resurrection and devotion.
There is some consolation to be gleaned from God’s absence, however.
Sherry interprets the theological doubt in Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ as an opportu-
nity for human endeavour, specifically via the poetic commitment to and
within the ‘active life’ of language, to create new possibilities for ethically
responsible relationships.32 The unresponsive divinity in the third stanza of
Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ may be replaced by a human addressee, establishing the
prospect of a new orientation of the poetic voice. Post-Holocaust religious
uncertainty thus potentially generates the possibility for intersubjective
ethical relationships instantiated in acts of poetic saying, in what Emmanuel
Levinas describes in his essay on Celan as ‘A seeking, dedicating itself to the
other in the form of the poem’.33 While the Christian confession of faith
30 Sherry, The Uncommon Tongue, p. 188.

31 Christopher Ricks, ‘Tenebrae and at-one-ment’, in Peter Robinson (ed.), Geof frey
Hill: Essays on his Work (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), pp. 62–85
(67).
33 Emmanuel Levinas, Proper Names, trans. Michael B. Smith (Stanford, California:
Stanford University Press, 1996), p. 46. See David Sherman, ‘Elegy under the Knife:
Geof frey Hill and the Ethics of Sacrifice’, Twentieth-Century Literature, 54:2 (2008),
1–27, for analysis of the implications of Levinas’s philosophy for Hill’s work.
after the Holocaust is untenable, for the various reasons suggested here,
the possibility at least remains – via the reconfiguration of the structure of
address in the failed act of confession in relation to a human subject – of
articulating something of what has been lost, and thereby taking on some
measure of responsibility for that loss.
Religious scepticism prevails throughout much of the remainder of
Hill’s poem, although with dif ferent inf lections and to varying degrees
according to the dif ferent organisation of each section. The fourth section
is addressed to God and opens with a line which sounds like it might be
from a simple children’s prayer or song: ‘O light of light, supreme delight’.
In accordance with its lilting form, this verse is more brightly hopeful than
almost any other, ending with a comment on the value of the Tenebrae
service for Christian believers: ‘our faith is in our festivals.’ Sherry links
this back to the psalmic context of the Tenebrae service in his characterisa-
tion of its various alliterative repetitions as ‘a sort of antiphonal formula’.34
The fifth section resumes the sonnet form and can be read as a reply to
the second, the rhyme scheme of which it echoes. The poetic voice here is
that of a frustrated male who wants to be rid of a clinging lover and thus
might be construed as that of Jesus eschewing the slavish devotion of fered
to him in the earlier sonnet. After four sections in which the poetic voice
has spoken either in the singular or collective first person, the next two
sections resume the more objective third person address of the opening.
The sixth and seventh sections are both lists of attributions, describing
first the crucifixion which is remembered during Tenebrae, and then the
figure of Jesus on the cross.
Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’ assumes a number of dif ferent postures in relation to
the Tenebrae service of Christian remembrance. McNees discusses ‘Ten-
ebrae’ as participating in an ‘ambivalent quest for faith’.35 Much longer
than Celan’s poem of the same name, it has space to explore a wider range
of attitudes to Christ’s passion, including incredulity, simple trust, and
sexual devotion and bondage. The Holocaust, which is central to Celan’s

35 McNees, Eucharistic Poetry, pp. 183–6.
poem, does not form a conspicuous part of Hill’s ‘Tenebrae’, but part of the
context for its religious scepticism is clearly the theological uncertainty of
post-Holocaust Judaeo-Christianity. Although it is less radically altered
than in Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’, the expression of faith in Hill’s poem is far from
straightforward. When the poetic voice is close to God, as in the second
section, devotion – even if it is not reversed like Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’ – is
severely distorted. Jef frey Wainwright describes the relationship between
what he terms the ‘great explanatory power’ of religion and Hill’s poetic
form:
None of the meanings or ‘truths’ which might render this world orderly that are
inspected in Tenebrae – not sexual love, or religion, which in any case fall upon
each other, not England in its redolent and resonating nationhood, nor the tran-
scendence of the martyr – none of these can escape the debilitating styles of their
expressions.36
Wainwright’s analysis applies equally to the single poem ‘Tenebrae’, which

serves as a microcosm of the volume as whole.
The various poetic styles which Hill explores in the dif ferent sections of
the poem – sonnet, song, list, paean – are all set against the predominantly
psalmic context of the Tenebrae service. Psalms, whatever else they may do,
always act as confessions of faith, in which the psalmist strives to express
the overwhelming strength of his belief in God. The dominant impulse in
the psalms is that of confession of belief in God. In the f lawed accounts of
Christian relations in Hill’s poem, none of the voices articulate such depths
of faith. Even Hill’s fourth section, which tries to articulate a naïve trust in
God, or the sixth, which enumerates interpretations of Christ’s passion, are
not without their complications. The expression of faith in Hill’s poem is
obviated by the poetic voices themselves which cannot successfully apply
themselves to traditional devotional utterance or fulfil the expectations of
traditional poetic forms. The religious disconsolation which is conveyed
in the denial of confessional possibilities in Hill’s poem potentially leads
36 Jef frey Wainwright, Acceptable Words: Essays on the poetry of Geof frey Hill (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005), pp. 15, 38.
to a heightened awareness of responsibilities towards human subjects, who

occupy the position of the estranged divinity in the confessional address.
While the poem is, in Hill’s words, deeply ‘fascinated by the existence of
religion as a historical fact, as a power in the lives of men and women’,37
each of its words is an agonising act of speech which, after the Holocaust
and after Celan’s ‘Tenebrae’, confesses its own inability to confess to the
Christian faith in the way the psalmists did. Precisely this non-confession
in relation to a distant and possibly absent God creates the possibility for
a confessional encounter in the poetic text with a human addressee of
the kind embodied by Celan’s posited addressee, the ‘ansprechbares Du’
(‘addressable you’),38 and a corresponding reorientation of intersubjective
relationships.
37 In Morrison, ‘Under Judgment’, 212.

38 Celan, Gesammelte Werke, III, p. 186.
matthew paskins
Hill and Gillian Rose
In a review of Geof frey Hill’s book A Treatise of Civil Power, Neil Powell
was troubled by what he took to be Hill’s presumption of private knowl-
edge: ‘to understand “In Memoriam: Gillian Rose”’, he wrote, ‘we need
to know not only that Rose was a philosopher who died in 1995, which is
public, but also why Hill quarreled with her, which isn’t’.1 This asks too
much from the poet, and too little about the poem. Hill’s elegy is a deeply
felt and imagined response to Rose’s work, alive with many energies, and
as such it is neither wholly public nor altogether private. The poem itself
is a kind of meeting between them, irrespective of biographical detail. To
adopt one of Rose’s key terms, which Hill guardedly praises in the poem, it
is an agon (section 12) – a term whose etymology simultaneously suggests
gathering, dispute, and prize-contest. My goal in this essay is to suggest
some of the af finities between her work and what his elegy makes of it,
indicating some direct allusions and common themes. I also argue that in
the specific details of his adaptations of passages from Rose’s work, Hill
shifts her sense in a way which is contrary to the spirit of her argument.
Thus, I suggest, the explicit argument which he stages also operates on a
subterranean level, in the relation of his poem to her memoirs and philoso-
phy. This runs the risk of making Hill sound like he writes his poems ‘on
graph paper’, to adopt his own memorable complaint – as neat moves in
a game which is primarily philosophical and discursive. Hill’s own poetics
do not support such readings: as I discuss below, he has described him-
self as a ‘blind-mouthed, blind-understanding poet’, concerned with, but
sometimes bewildered by, unexpected linguistic energies.
1 Neil Powell, ‘How far should poets go to meet their readers’, The Daily Telegraph, 31
August 2007. For Hill’s poem, see TCP, pp. 35–8; references to the poem are incor-
porated parenthetically into the text, giving its section numbers.
172 matthew paskins
Gillian Rose was a philosopher alive to ‘the thrill of learned hetero
doxy’.2 Her works drew on the continental tradition, primarily Hegel and
Kierkegaard, but also ranged into theology, social theory, and memoir.
Howard Caygill summarises her achievement and some of the challenges
her readers have faced:
Rose’s own Hegelianism was always indirectly communicated by means of masks,

some of which, much to her delight, were taken at face value. Indeed, the mask and
the masked are in a continual state of alternation and free play in Rose’s writings,
producing a parodic phenomenology which on occasion verges upon comedy.3
Phenomenology, as Rose practices it, is an exultant and unsettling enter-

prise, beset by error. As she describes the Hegelian ‘play of personae’, it
relates
the story of how natural consciousness acquired ‘personality’ – legal, aesthetic, moral
– a story itself fitfully comprehended by philosophical consciousness which then
proceeds unevenly through the stumbling blocks of personified aporia after personi-
fied aporia as each configured concept is mismatched to its object and corrected by a
newly configured concept mismatched to its object, again – and then again.4
In this context, ‘personified aporias’ are the works of earlier philosophers.

It is a comedy of misrecognition, where error gives way to error – but also
to learning and growth. It has a history (consciousness acquired ‘person-
ality’) but also a logic: the concepts are configured and reconfigured, can
be spoken of and understood in terms of the relations between singular,
particular, and universal. These relations are reconfigured, as conscious-
ness comes to recognise its mistakes and earlier misrecognitions, but it is
a fitful and dif ficult process. Aporia, Rose says elsewhere, is the ‘Janus-face
of the universal’.5
2 Gillian Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1996), p. 127.
3 Howard Caygill, ‘Obituary: Gillian Rose’, Radical Philosophy, 77 (May/June 1996),
56.
4 Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 10.
5 Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 10.
Where Hill mentions Rose’s work in his criticism, it is as a theorist of

aporia. Brief ly in ‘Rhetorics of Value and Intrinsic Value’ (CCW, p. 465),
and then more fully in ‘A Postscript on Modernist Poetics’, he discusses
her theory in a literary context, and provides a parenthetical gloss which
gives his understanding of her use of the term:
The existence or absence of a middle ground is an argument associated in recent

years with the late Gillian Rose and with her book The Broken Middle. Most defi-
nitions of the function of literature in our time assume the existence of a middle
ground. I am not convinced that a middle ground is necessary, or that its postulation
as a necessity is even required. For as Rose says: ‘How to represent the aporia [the
no-way, the impasse, the broken middle] between everyone and every “one” is the
dif ficulty’. (CCW, p. 569)
This representational dif ficulty can be seen as a question of how to bridge

the gap between community, polis, politics, institution, city (everyone), and
the individual (every ‘one’). For Rose, it is also a metaphysical dif ficulty,
stemming from the mismatch between universals and particulars. For her,
metaphysics
is concerned with the relation between the universal ‘nose’ and the sheer snubness of
a nose, which no term can capture, this remote-sounding metaphysics is the perplex-
ity, the aporia, at how to find the path from the law of the concept to the peculiarity
of each instance, from ‘the nose’ to the snub.6
The distance cannot be bridged, but the ways in which it fails can be learned,
and that can lead to movement and re-creation. In Rose’s late work – Love’s
Work (1995), the posthumously published Mourning Becomes the Law
(1996), and Paradiso (1999) – there are further ‘personified aporias’: her
friends, family, colleagues, doctors, and herself. They are figured allegori-
cally, as instances of the crisis of authority, the risk of love, and the ways
in which contradiction, devotion, and struggle are lived through without
resolution. Love’s Work, the memoir written after Rose had been diagnosed
with the ovarian cancer which was to kill her, wrestles with the experience
and knowledge of abandonment, friendship, vocation, and illness.
6 Gillian Rose, Love’s Work (London: Chatto and Windus, 1995), p. 124.
174 matthew paskins
It looks at first as though Hill’s poem to her will also be a memoir,

perhaps expounding his experience in a way which draws on hers:
I have a question to ask for the form’s sake:

how that small happy boy in the seaside
photographs became the unstable man,
hobbyist of his own rage, engrafting it
on a stock of compliance, of hurt women.
You do not need to answer the question
or challenge imposture.
Whatever the protocol I should still construe.
(1)
The first line makes a very stark beginning, as if the poem’s inner work-
ings were on show. It picks up the dif ficulty of how to begin, how to relate
memorialising poem to apostrophised authorship. The word ‘form’ does
very particular work in the poem, and it is worth glancing ahead to see its
other appearances. In the twelfth section Hill describes the suf ferer’s ‘formal
agon’, which is her ‘self-knowledge’, and which Hill glosses as ‘a standard
term / but not despicable in context of Love’s Work’ (12). In the final section
he writes, ‘Di-dum endures formally; and the pre-Socratics’ (14). Rose said
that to do philosophy was to ‘fall in love with Socrates’7 – in this view the
Pre-Socratics are the remainder, making formal metaphysical statements
before philosophy’s works of love and risk begin. Their statements endure
formally perhaps because they are remembered in the tradition as the point
of origin. ‘Di-dum’ is of course the iamb, a formal metric unit, which, thus
baldly stated, trivialises poems as bouncy jangles of syllables. Yet iambs also
endure formally: counting syllables, and checking sound against sense, is an
inescapable part of writing poems. Thus in each case what endures formally
is a kind of remnant origin, which needs to be worked upon – the ‘broken
springs’ (9) on which the work lurches.8
7 Anthony Mahoney, ‘Interview with Gillian Rose’, transcribed and introduced by

Vincent Lloyd, Theory, Culture and Society, 25:7–8 (2008), 203–20: ‘If you fall in love
with Socrates, then you’re a philosopher. And you’ll always be a philosopher’ (208).
8 Those ‘broken springs’ also, of course, sound like bed-springs.
In the first half of the cited passage, the tone of narration is posses-
sive and distanced. The speaking ‘I’ has a question and its own rage, but
is identified with neither the small happy boy, the photographs, nor the
man. The three barbing Latinate words in the last two lines – imposture,
protocol, construe – introduce a pained note of deception and of reading
through deception, since a personal meaning cannot fully be separated
from each word’s legal sense.9 Such a poetic ef fect introduces dif ficulties;
it initially seemed that ‘I’ could simply address ‘you’, but now the diction-
ary has come between ‘us’. This resembles the unsettling, defamiliarising
ef fect of phenomenology, posing the question of who we are, for such
exchanges to be possible.
With the second section, the poem seems almost to begin again, with
an indicative sentence:
There is a kind of sanity that hates weddings

but bears an intelligence of grief
in its own kind.
(2)
The repeated ‘kind’ echoes ‘stock’ from the first section (‘a stock of compli-
ance’), while ‘bears’ has a connotation of both carrying and bringing forth
(bearing a burden; bearing a child), and is of a piece with other moments in
the poem where active and passive are borne by a single word. A few lines
later Hill wonders about ‘a healing of broken love’ (7), leaving an ambiguity
as to whether this is healing by broken love, or from it, at once action and
predicament. The sense is of dif ficult position and traditions.
The hatred of weddings alludes to a passage from the fourth chapter of
Love’s Work, in which Rose describes living among the Lubavitch Habad –
a community of Hasidic Jews – in Stoke Newington. She sees an ‘ordinary
9 ‘Imposture’ is both ‘the action or practice of imposing upon others’ and ‘wilful and
fraudulent deception’; ‘protocol’ is both ‘the accepted or established code of behav-
iour in any group, organisation, or situation’ and ‘a formal or of ficial statement of
proceeding’; and ‘to construe’ is ‘to interpret, give a meaning to, put a construction
on (actions, things, or persons)’ and ‘to explain or interpret for legal purposes’ (OED,
s.vv. ‘imposture, n.’, ‘protocol, n.’, ‘construe, v.’).
176 matthew paskins
English wedding’ and writes that ‘What struck me at once was the light-
ness of the vision’ – a ‘vivacious contrast between the environing Judaism
and this epiphany of protestants.’10 The vision is interrupted by a bestial
howling which Rose eventually recognises as her own, ‘in utter dissociation
from myself.’ The passage concludes ‘to this day, I cannot go to family wed-
dings’, though it should not be read as siding with one against the other:
the contrast is vivacious, not the wedding-party, and the polarisation of the
everyday piety which surrounds her and the spontaneous vision. Caught
between the ‘clandestine pious’ and the ‘weightless redeemed’, Rose’s nar-
rator is in the middle position – bearing (enduring), and bearing witness,
with great grief.
Transferred from such family occasions to the vocations and relations
of philosophy and the encounter between the self and the state, the word
‘wed’ reappears in Hill’s poem some lines later:
unlike metaphysics which you had time for,
re-wedded to the city, a salutation
to Pallas, goddess of all polemics
(6)
Like all the encounters in this poem, this wedding – which alludes to the
‘classical analogy of the soul, the city and the sacred’11 – is not an easy
identification or reconciliation: there remains a gap between metaphysics
and the city. I will return to this point shortly. The phrase ‘which you had
time for’ slangily means ‘which you thought was a worthwhile pursuit’, but
it also rather uncannily suggests that Rose had enough time to dedicate
herself to metaphysics – perhaps unlike the narrator of the poem. The
question of how syntax ‘sets time against eternity…the determinate against
negation’, by imagining the future as ‘the time in which we may not be, and
yet we must imagine we will have been’, is the subject of the final chapter
of Mourning Becomes the Law:
10 Rose, Love’s Work, p. 44.

11 Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. i.
I may die before my time.

I may live before my time.
The second ref lection overcomes the pusillanimity of the first: the idea of ‘living
before my time’ expands my mind beyond the scale and confines of ‘dying before my
time’ It makes the lesser or greater bourns of my time within eternity negligible.12
Hill’s poem performs a tribute along similar lines, in describing Rose’s

three last books as
a good legacy which you should be proud of

except that pride is forever irrelevant
where you are now.
(9)
Here, the terrible force of ‘forever irrelevant’ is mitigated by the fact that it
does not qualify ‘a good legacy’, only pride. The legacy is still good, no matter
what else is irrelevant ‘where you are now’. That last phrase is ambiguous:
‘where you are now’ is no represented place, not Elysium or the pearly gates,
but equally it is not nothingness. Hill is not saying ‘now you are gone’. In
this way, Hill’s lines also gently play the determinate against negation, in a
way which honours the bourns of Rose’s legacy, within eternity.
In Love’s Work, Rose describes the pathos of ageing as its intensification
of the sensibility of mortality and of eternity, a hiddenness which allows
for alertness and noticing. As such it is a kind of gift:
I like to pass unnoticed, which is why I hope that I am not deprived of old age. I
aspire to Miss Marple’s persona: to be exactly as I am, decrepit nature, yet supernature
in one, equally alert on the damp ground and in the turbulent air. Perhaps I don’t
have to wait for old age for that invisible trespass and pedestrian tread, insensible of
mortality and desperately mortal.13
Hill adapts these lines in terms of his poem’s emphasis on dif ficult
meeting:
12 Ibid. p. 126.
178 matthew paskins
You asked not to be

cheated of old age. No kidding, it is an
unlovely parley, although you
could have subdued it and set it to work,
met it without embracing. Edna
with her prosthetic jaw and nose
prevails over these exchanges.
(4)
The ‘it’ in the second of these lines is indeterminate – old age itself might
be the parley; but ageing might be something to be parleyed with.14 The
whole stanza gently suggests Hill’s own dif ficulties and parleys with old
age, without obtruding them into the tribute to Rose. All this can be read
without knowing who Edna is, but the poem is here making a direct allu-
sion to the opening chapters of Love’s Work. There, Rose’s friendship with
Edna is at once particular and allegorical: we see ‘her tiny, wrinkled round
face dominated by a false nose, which lacked any cosmetic alleviation what-
soever’. Rose understands Edna to be both a living presence and a death’s
head, almost but not quite a memento mori. Rose goes on to ask how it is
that Edna has continued to live, despite the fact that ‘she had first been
diagnosed as having cancer when she was sixteen years old – in 1913.’ Her
answer to this question is itself a question:
Could it be because she has lived sceptically? Sceptical equally of science and of faith,
of politics and of love? She has certainly not lived a perfected life…She has been able
to go on getting it all more or less wrong, more or less all the time, all the nine and a
half decades of the present century plus three years of the century before.15
The anger which Hill projects onto Rose throughout the poem stems from
real dif ferences of ethos, and representational approach. To see the argument
between them, we need to read them both. And the argument stems not only
14 ‘Parley’ is ‘Speech; conversation; a debate or argument’; and also ‘A meeting between

opposing sides in a dispute…a conference with an enemy, under truce, for discussing
the mutual arrangement of matters such as terms for an armistice, the exchange of
prisoners, etc.; a discussion of terms’ (OED, s.v. ‘parley, n.’).
from the global question of the opposition between poetry and philosophy,
but also inheres in local moments, singular allusions. Paying tribute can also
be a form of ‘engrafting’ or ‘welding together’ (9). This was perhaps most
clearly evident in the concluding lines of the second section:
There are achievements

that carry failure on their back, blindness
not as in Brueghel, but unfathomably
far-seeing.
(2)
These lines allude to Pieter Brueghel’s painting ‘The Parable of the Blind’,
in which a group of men led by one of their own number stumble into a
ditch. It is in one sense a tribute to Rose’s emphasis on failure and getting
it wrong. But the terms of praise are made more ambiguous by the other
contexts in which Hill uses them. Elsewhere in A Treatise of Civil Power, in
‘To the Lord Protector Cromwell’, Hill imagines Cromwell’s ‘blindness as
the reach of vision’ (TCP, p. 14), a vision of the commonwealth with unin-
tended political consequences. Hill has also adapted this image to describe
a branch of the Miltonic tradition in English poetry, passed down through
Wordsworth and alert to the darkness and recalcitrance of Milton’s work;
he argues in a lecture on Milton that ‘blind understanding is in Wordsworth
both baf f lement and groping intuition’, before placing himself into such a
tradition: ‘I think I have always felt myself to be a kind of blind-mouthed,
blind-understanding poet.’16 To be such a poet is to encounter the power
of words without necessarily having a sense of where those words will lead.
The tribute to Rose is not the same as the one to Cromwell or Wordsworth
(or to Hill himself ), but it does suggest that the special place she assigns
to philosophy might be undermined. In context, I do not think that this
happens: but later in the poem, where Hill adapts Rose’s words about phi-
losophy to describe the special privilege of poetry, Hill writes that
16 Geof frey Hill, ‘Milton as Muse’, Lecture delivered at the University of Cambridge,
29 October 2008, available online at <http://www.christs.cam.ac.uk/milton400/
hill.htm>, accessed 5 July 2011.
180 matthew paskins
Poetry’s its own agon that allows us

to recognise devastation as the rift
between power and powerlessness.
(13)
The italicised words are adapted from Rose’s preface to Mourning Becomes
the Law:
it takes three to make a relationship between two: the devastation between posited
thought and posited being, between power and exclusion from power, implies the
universal, the third partner, which allows us to recognise that devastation.17
In Hill’s revision, poetry takes the place of Rose’s universal: ‘when I / say
poetry I mean something impossible / to be described, except by adding
lines / to lines that are suf ficient as themselves’ (13). What is at issue here is
how the poem ‘allows the recognition’, and this is a matter of its authority.
Hill’s appropriation also raises the question of whether poetry can contain
the criticism and self-criticism which is needed for the kind of recognition
Rose intends, especially if its ‘abdication / of self-censure indeed hauls it
/ within your long range of contempt’ (5). In his Collected Critical Writ-
ings, Hill quotes a phrase of Charles Williams in considering this question:
‘Poetry has to do all its own work; in return it has all its own authority.’18
But this is problematic because Williams says neither how poetry does its
work, nor how its authority is derived. This conf lict about authority can
be seen in this poem in two ways: first, in the anger which Hill explicitly
projects onto Rose; second, in the ways the poem’s later sections shift her
meaning away from mediating social figures and towards singular heroes
and resistance. These shifts are commensurate with his critical sense of
what her ‘broken middle’ means.
The city to which metaphysics is ‘re-wedded’ in Rose’s work is typi-
cally an imaginary figuration of certain philosophical, religious, and ethi-
cal traditions. The first chapter of Mourning Becomes the Law is ‘a tale of

18 Charles Williams, The English Poetic Mind (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1932), p. 126;
cited in CCW, p. 573.
three cities’: old Athens as ‘the city of rational politics’; new Jerusalem ‘the
imaginary community, where they seek to dedicate themselves to dif fer-
ence, to otherness, to love’; and ‘the third city – the city of capitalist private
property and modern legal status.’19 The purpose of this drama is to chal-
lenge the new redeeming ‘phantasy life of community’ which all the New
Jerusalems she detects in postmodern and communitarian literature seem to
project. Yet in accordance with her method of personifying philosophical
dif ficulties, the city can also be actual. In her elegy to her friend and lover
who died of AIDS, Rose writes a tribute to New York, too:
He belonged body and soul, in his manner of living and in his manner of dying, to
the polis. According to Plato, the tripartite soul, which consists of reason, appetite,
and Thumos, the principle of high spirits, ally or enemy of reason and desire, corre-
sponds to the inner constitution and inner warfare of the city. We always knew we
owed the purity and the contamination of our love to the splendour and the misery
of the city – to its laws and to its anarchies.20
Hill’s poem seems to be discontent with Rose’s abstract philosophical

cities, picturing ‘the city that is not just, has never / known justice, except
sporadically’ (10), and saying that the just city is ‘finally of some interest /
chief ly in the base senses of curiosity / and self-serving’ (8). This ‘just city’
sounds selfish and particular: the City of the Royal Courts of Justice, of
property and libel law. For Rose, the universal – ‘transcendent but mourn-
able justice’21 – can be configured through political risk. The context of
these discussions is one of Rose’s allegories of political justice, which Hill’s
poem adapts in its sixth section:
to Phocion’s wife – who shall be nameless –

in Poussin’s painting, gathering the disgraced
ashes of her husband. As you rightly said,
not some mere infinite love, a finite act
of political justice. Not many would see that.
(6)

20 Ibid. p. 102.
21 Ibid. p. 26.
182 matthew paskins
Later, Hill adds: ‘A familiar rare type of resistance / heroine, like that
woman, is required by justice’ (11). The story of Phocion’s wife is at the
heart of Mourning Becomes the Law; it was originally recorded by Plu-
tarch in his Lives, where he describes Phocion as a general who was killed
and whose ashes were buried outside the city wall at a time when tyranny
usurped the rule of Athens:
The wife of Phocion, however, who was present with her maid-servants, heaped up
a cenotaph on the spot and poured libations upon it; then, putting the bones in her
bosom and carrying them by night to her dwelling, she buried them by the hearth,
saying: ‘To thee, dear Hearth, I entrust these remains of a noble man; but do thou
restore them to the sepulchre of his fathers, when the Athenians shall have come
to their senses.’22
The bones are given a definite place, in the hearth, until such time as they
can be ‘buried honourably at the public charge’.23 This is a drama of the
city and the established state; it is unlike the story of Antigone, where the
state could be identified with the family and its whimsical tyrannies. Rose
relates that she came to the story through Poussin’s ‘Landscape with the
Ashes of Phocion’, drawing on the discussion of the painting by the anchor-
ess Sister Wendy Beckett in her television series ‘Sister Wendy’s Odys-
sey’, where Rose first encountered the painting. It was Sister Wendy who
described Phocion as performing an act of ‘infinite love’, but Rose detects
in this reading a longing for a community of perfect love divorced from
the city’s domination, stating: ‘to oppose the act of redeeming love to the
implacable domination of architectural order – here, pure individual love
to the impure injustice of the world – is completely to ef face the politics
of this painting’.24 The reasons for this turn out to rely not solely on ‘that
woman’, but on her companion, the serving-woman whose head is turned
back towards the city on the look-out, and it is from Rose’s analysis of her
that Hill takes the phrase ‘finite act / of political justice’:
22 Plutarch, Plutarch’s Lives, ed. and trans. Bernadotte Perrin, 11 vols (London: William
Heinemann, 1919), VIII, p. 233.
23 Ibid.
Phocion’s condemnation and manner of dying were the result of tyranny tempo-
rarily usurping good rule in the city. The tension of political defiance appears here
in the figure of the woman servant, whose contorted posture expresses the fear of
being discovered. The bearing of the servant displays the political risk; her visible
apprehension protects the complete vulnerability of her mourning mistress as she
devotes her whole body to retrieving the ashes. The act is not therefore solely one of
infinite love: it is a finite act of political justice.25
There is infinite love in Rose’s reading, but it is mediated by the companion

who is torn between the claims of the city and the needs of loving-justice; it
is she and not her mistress who knows the full risk. Hill’s description of ‘A
familiar rare type of resistance / heroine’ thus fits them both. The ‘integral
gestus’ is only possible because of the accomplice. Those women; not that
woman. And this intensifies the pathos of the allegory: the wife’s devotion
is partially unknowing, ignorant of political risk. Her singleness is sheltered
and sustained by her servant. The absence of the serving-woman from Hill’s
poem may seem a minor matter – a dramatic heightening achieved by focus-
ing on the individual – but it also removes the spiritual-social context of
the act of Phocion’s wife, as it is represented by Rose following Plutarch. It
makes an individual the instrument of justice – and while Phocion’s wife
is heroic, she is not alone.
The sheltering, mediating role of the companion resembles a pas-
sage in Love’s Work in which Rose discusses her medical treatment, and
describes how the authority of the surgeons is shored up by the activity
of the nurses:
To their bastion of superfemale skill, their power and love, may be attributed the pro-
tection of the surgeons from the crisis of authority that otherwise troubles modernity.
Only the Bishop of Coventry, my bemused, stumbling friend…had more inviolable
authority bestowed by the nurses on to him and his pathetic posy of fragrant garden
f lowers, which nestled humbly among the hosts of assertive bouquets.26
25 Ibid. p. 25; compare also p. 103.

184 matthew paskins
Hill extracts from this comedy of authority bestowed and souls pledged
the stumbling figure and the personal meeting earlier described in the
poem: ‘I did not blunder into your room with f lowers’ (3). The nurses’
bestowing is a mediation which protects the surgeons from having to face
the meaning of their acts:
‘Nurse,’ who invariably enters without putting on the lights, is a supernatural being.
She executes endless good works, and she of fers her soul as well as her skill. She, too,
has turned anguish into care; but she has not been spoilt by status into imagining
that she decrees destiny. Unfortunately, she believes that the surgeon does…27
As with the companion of Phocion’s wife, the role of the nurses is enabling,
ambiguous, and ultimately political. That they are there to shelter their
superiors is not very consoling; but once it has been recognised, it allows
some equivocation in the face of the surgeons’ unassailable authority. Hill
alludes to Rose’s struggle with her surgeons:
though medics call the chances symbiosis

in their brusque insolent manner that denies
self-knowledge as the suf ferer
(12)
Hill’s poem here draws on a passage in which Rose describes a dispute

between her two surgeons, Dr Wong and Mr Bates. Dr Wong tells her that
her chemotherapy has failed, and she describes her gratitude for his forth-
rightness, as well the overwhelming nature of this unequivocal information.
Mr Bates then comes and tells her that things are no worse and no better
than they were before, ‘Then he said a beautiful thing: “You are living in
symbiosis with the disease. Go away and continue to do so.”’28 When sur-
gery later fails, they get into a screaming row about who is right, coming
eventually to a compromise position. Rose struggles to locate herself within
the diagnosis – while her surgeons are not unassailable authorities, they
provide forms of care and even, she reports, forms of words which help her
to continue to live as fully as she can. A consultant tells her ‘“Well you are
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid. p. 100.
going to be very severely tried.” I liked him for putting it like that. It leaves
me be’.29 In Love’s Work the medics’ judgements are not only ‘brusque’ and
‘insolent’. Hill’s rephrasing in his poem is polarised and unequivocal; it
gives too much over to violent chance. The equivocations which Rose is
desperate to hear in her surgeons’ voices so that their verdicts do not have
complete determination over her, and her relation with ‘laconic and legiti-
mate’ Dr Lord are now absent. It also neglects the relations which Rose
describes with her doctors and nurses, ‘whose names I always request and
learn immediately, so that we may also exist for each other as single beings
as well as impersonal functions’.30
In the last two lines, we again have to ask who ‘we’ are:
I find love’s work a bleak ontology

to have to contemplate; it may be all we have.
(14)
There has been no movement worked out from the ‘I’ of the first stanza
to this ‘we’ at the end – it might refer to Hill and Rose, or to Hill and the
reader, or to human beings in general. Two senses can be heard in that first
‘have’: ‘to have / to contemplate’ may be an unloved duty to contemplate
something, or may be something which one possesses as an object for con-
templation. The final line seems to settle on possession. And so the poem
concludes, as it began, with a note of possessiveness – here, a rhyme on
‘have’. I find this ending mordant and unworked, after the extraordinary
meetings of its earlier lines. To say this is not to reject Hill, nor to claim that
he demands privileged knowledge which his readers cannot be expected
to know. This poem is in a rich sense agonistic, at once meeting, struggle,
and game; and it is the struggle to honour, interpret, rework, and recog-
nise dif ferences among contrary pulling powers which here as elsewhere
in Hill’s work has ‘not the last…but the continuing word’.31
29 Ibid. p. 84.
30 Ibid. p. 82.
31 Rose, Mourning Becomes the Law, p. 14: ‘Rumi and Rilke, my favourite poets, are
here given – I hope not the last – but the continuing word.’
hugh haughton
‘Music’s Invocation’:
Music and History in Geof frey Hill
Geof frey Hill’s work gives evidence of a passionate investment in music.

As a poet, he is the composer of a requiem (‘Requiem for the Plantagenet
Kings’), a book of songs (‘The Songbook of Sebastian Arruruz’), two
‘Chorale-Preludes’, and a sequence entitled ‘Funeral Music’. He has writ-
ten several poems with the titles of musical pieces, including, in Tenebrae,
‘The Herefordshire Carol’ and ‘Lachrimae: or Seven tears figured in seven
passionate Pavans’ (after John Dowland). More recently he has published
Scenes from Comus, which takes its title from Hugh Wood’s 1965 composi-
tion, and, in A Treatise of Civil Power, ‘G. F. Handel, Opus 6’ and ‘Johannes
Brahms, Opus 2’. Such titles echo and mirror those of musical composi-
tions, insisting on poems as responses to and analogues of music. His later
poems and essays are also shot through with musical terms. Words shared
between musicology and poetics foreground the relationship of poetry to
musical form, and play a significant part both in poems and the intricate
commentaries on poetry in his essays, many of which turn on questions of
‘voice’, ‘pitch’, and ‘cadence’. Cumulatively, such words confirm an allusive
undertow to the fraught structural analogy between poems and musical
compositions. Like poetry, music turns on performance, and Hill’s poems
are replete with references to musical as well as oratorical performance.
Many poems invoke specific instruments such as viols and violins, trum-
pets and drums, while others name dance-measures from courtly ‘pavanes’
to vernacular ‘clog-dances’, and others again refer to religious ceremonies,
all of which, like the many references to songs and hymns, conjure up the
ghost of live occasions.
188 hugh haughton
The names of numerous composers weave through Hill’s later poems.

Historical figures include not only Handel and Brahms but Henry Lawes,
Purcell, J. S. Bach, Beethoven and Elgar, while modern musicians include
Olivier Messiaen, Schnittke, Frank Martin, Ernst Krenek, György Kurtág,
Bartók, Hugh Wood, Jimi Hendrix, and Elton John. When Hill raises
such names, it is not in a spirit of casual allusion but informed intellec-
tual engagement. Of the modern composers he draws on, most have been
caught up in the cultural and political crises of the twentieth century to
which Hill has been most intensely attuned, including the Second World
War and its aftermath; and, like him, most have been moved by the fate of
traditional Judeo-Christian religious culture while committed to aesthetic
modernism.
These many kinds of reference are an outward and visible sign of Hill’s
inward and audible attention to music across his work. In an interview with
John Haf fenden, he spoke of his ‘deep and passionate love of music’ and
his ‘envy of the composer’ for the way ‘he unites solitary meditation with
direct, sensuous communication to a greater degree than the poet’.1 Gilles
Couderc has written a valuable study of Hill in the guise of musician in
the context of Tenebrae, attempting, as he says, to define the characteristics
of his composer’s art.2 In this essay I want to look at the way Hill draws
upon music in his work since Canaan, and argue that his ‘love of music’
and ‘envy of the composer’ lie at the heart of that work, though always in
tension with his interest in ethical and political contestation.
In ‘Tenebrae’, Hill wrote that ‘Music survives, composing her own
sphere’ (CP, p. 174), but in his later work that privileged aesthetic sphere is
always implicated in the realities of civil power (or, worse, uncivil power).
Milton invokes ‘Voice, and Verse’ as ‘Sphere-borne harmonious sisters’,3

2 Gilles Couderc, ‘Liturgie et musique dans Tenebrae de Geof frey Hill: le poète musi-
cien’, in Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec and René Gallet (eds), La Poésie de Geof frey Hill
et la modernité (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2007), pp. 139–67 (139: ‘Mon but ici est…de
définir les caractéristiques de son art comme compositeur’).
3 John Milton, The Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, revised second edition
(Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2007), p. 168.
but the relationship between music and poetry is not always harmonious,
and varies drastically between historical periods. That relationship has
rarely been as close as in the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation period,
which so profoundly engages Hill’s poetic imagination, and is at stake in
Scenes from Comus as in ‘Tenebrae’. Discussing Milton’s tribute to Henry
Lawes, Hill comments that ‘the musician, spanning words “with just note
and accent”, shows his mastery in acknowledging the poet is master’ (CCW,
pp. 192–3). Hill often returns to this historical conjuncture of words and
music, and the dif ferent kinds of mastery of poet and musician; but, more
crucially, he is interested in the shared relationship of poet and musician
to religion, and the ways they interpret and mediate the sacred texts of
Judeo-Christian Europe. Music, as much as poetry, plays out the vexed but
founding relationships between art and culture that Hill explores under
the critical rubric of Style and Faith.
In common with Milton, many of the poets who mean most to Hill
were interested in music. These include Hopkins (who paid memorable
tribute to Purcell and himself composed), Gurney (a song-composer as
well as war poet), and Ezra Pound. In the twentieth century it was Pound
who more than anybody foregrounded the relationship between words
and music, insisting on their fundamental af finity, and bringing renewed
attention to the ways in which poetry can imitate the formal and acoustic
language of music. Hill’s essay on Pound’s ‘“Envoi (1919)”’ demonstrates
an uncanny inwardness with the music of Pound’s verse, discussing its
‘lyric sublimation’, ‘rhythm’, ‘melody’, and historical self-consciousness,
and implicitly aligning his own thinking with Pound’s. The author of Four
Quartets of fered a rather dif ferent twentieth-century precedent for Hill’s
regular poetic overtures to music, but in this, as in so much else, Eliot’s
example is one of which he is notably wary. Hill quotes with particular
disapprobation Eliot’s ‘bathetic locution’ in ‘Poetry and Drama’ about the
‘margins of language’ where ‘we touch the border of those feelings which
only music can express’:
As Eliot well knew, however, a poet must also turn back, with whatever weariness,
disgust, love barely distinguishable from hate, to confront ‘the indefinite extent’ of
language itself and seek his ‘focus’ there. In certain contexts the expansive, outward
gesture towards the condition of music is a helpless gesture of surrender, oddly
190 hugh haughton
analogous to that stylish aesthetic of despair, that desire for the ultimate integrity
of silence, to which so much eloquence has been so frequently and indefatigably
devoted. (CCW, p. 11)
Given his scepticism about Eliot’s ‘gesture towards the condition of music’,
we might ask what is at stake in Hill’s own reiterated gestures towards
music, and how they might be distinguished from Eliot’s. For Hill, as
for Eliot, music is aligned to the sacred, but in Hill’s case it also involves,
in addition to that ‘focus’ on ‘language itself ’, the ‘historical sense’ Eliot
thought essential to poetry (but not, apparently, to music). In recreating
his own poetry of music Hill insists that we understand music not only as
sensuously immediate but also historically mediated.
Canaan of fers some characteristic examples of the poet bringing his ‘his-
torical sense’ to bear on music. In ‘Respublica’ Hill speaks of the republic
being ‘brokenly recalled, / its archaic laws / and hymnody’ (C, p. 29).
‘Hymnody’, like ‘Respublica’, is particularly important to Hill. Accord-
ing to the OED, the term brings together ‘the singing of hymns or sacred
songs’, ‘the composition of hymns for singing’, and ‘the body of hymns
belonging to any age, country, church etc’ (OED, s.v. ‘hymnody, n.’). Hill’s
broken recollection of it here binds music to ‘archaic laws’, typically inter-
weaving secular and ecclesiastical history. A more complex instance of
musical recall occurs in ‘De Jure Belli ac Pacis’, his sequence in memory
of Bonhoef fer and his associates who lost their lives because of their role
in the of ficers’ plot against Hitler. In the fifth section Hill evokes the
pastor’s imprisonment in terms that are inherently and eerily musical,
while also registering the jarring dissonance of historical terror: ‘Not
harmonies – harmonics, astral whisperings / light-years above the stave;
groans, murmurs, cries, / tappings from cell to cell’ (C, p. 34). Politics
and metaphysics are always inseparable from notions of ‘harmony’ in
Hill, and here the term is dissolved into ‘harmonics’, ‘light-years above the
stave’. The technical musical terms appear against the non-musical audi-
tory world of ‘groans, murmurs, cries’ in prison cells. These ‘harmonics’
conjure a specific but possibly inaudible musical ef fect that survives, like
Bonhoef fer’s prison writings and example, long after the notes have been
struck, as articulations of human solidarity and suf fering. Hill goes on
to invoke ‘time’s inchoate music’, heard among these prison sounds, but
charges his metaphysical metaphor with historically specific allusions, in
this case to a musical performance by Bonhoef fer’s son-in-law (another
of those executed with him in 1944):
Slurred clangour,
cavernous and chained haltings, echo from time’s
inchoate music, the theme standing proclaimed
only in the final measures –
Vexilla Regis
uplifted by Rüdiger Schleicher’s violin.
(C, p. 34)
‘Time’s inchoate music’ counterpoints the earlier ‘astral whisperings’ above

the stave, while both ‘the theme’ and ‘final measures’ simultaneously and
unnervingly refer both to musical terms and grimly non-musical ones. ‘Final
measures’ refers not only to the last bars of the composition played by the
violinist, but the ‘final measures’ of the Nazis who sentenced Schleicher and
others to death. It also suggests the ways we finally measure the actions of
Bonhoef fer and other participants in the plot. The term ‘measures’ brings
together musical composition, verse form, and ethical value, as well as sug-
gesting political and judicial actions.
Hill’s words are also charged with biographical specificity. Bonhoef fer
was an accomplished musician with a life-long interest in music, and, as
Jeremy Begbie has argued, music played an increasingly important part in
his prison writings when he was deprived of access to it.4 Hill’s reference
here is probably to Bonhoef fer’s father’s seventy-fifth birthday concert, in
4 Jeremy S. Begbie, ‘Theology and Music’, in David Ford and Rachel Muers (eds), The
Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology Since 1918, third edition
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 719–35 (724–7).
192 hugh haughton
which the theologian played the piano and Schleicher the violin, just two
weeks before Bonhoef fer’s arrest, on a day planned for a bomb-plot against
Hitler.5 The Vexilla Regis that was ‘uplifted’ may have been Bruckner’s last
motet, a setting of Fortunatus’s great Latin hymn (‘The standards of the
king are raised’) traditionally sung at Vespers from Palm Sunday to Holy
Thursday. Speaking of ‘Vexilla Regis / uplifted’ suggests both the music
and the banners of Christ of which it sings, both of which Bonhoef fer
here represents. Looking back on the concert from prison, Bonhoef fer
said he could ‘still hear the hymns we sang in the morning and evening,
with all the voices and instruments.’6 The ‘uplifted’ music is charged with
a long liturgical, ecclesiastical, and musical history but it also represents
a theologically inf lected aesthetic defiance of the Third Reich, ascribed
to ‘Schleicher’s violin’, sounding out the early Christian hymn against the
dissonant ‘slurred clangour’ of a Nazi prison. Though the instrument does
not make Hill’s metaphor of time’s music less ‘inchoate’, it brings it into
sharp historical focus. Eliot’s 1942 notion of ‘feelings which only music
can express’ materialises in a context in which musical transcendence is
counterpointed by the history of human agents in extremis.
Canaan includes a poem for the composer Hugh Wood’s sixtieth
birthday, ‘Ritornelli’. Addressing the composer, Hill invokes the angelic
figure already conjured in his earlier ‘Tenebrae’, an ‘Angel of Tones’ who
is described as ‘exacting mercies’ and ‘answerable / to rage as solace’ (C,
p. 8). The broken and dispersed text of fers Wood an embodiment of the
‘answerable’ artist, who exacts mercies as others would ‘exact’ payment or
punishment, and whose art is answerable to ‘rage as solace’. This suggests
not only anger and consolation but also the solace of rage itself in the
political climate represented by poems such as ‘Mysticism and Democracy’
and ‘To the High Court of Parliament’. Hill speaks of Wood’s (and/or
music’s) ‘crowns of redress’, and writes at the end of a figure who may be
the composer or the Angel of Tones or Christ, who ‘goes down / among
5 See Eberhard Bethge, Dietrich Bonhoef fer: Theologian, Christian, Contemporary,

trans. Eric Mosbacher et al. (London: Harper Collins, 1970), p. 685.
6 Dietrich Bonhoef fer, Letters and Papers from Prison, ed. Eberhard Bethge, trans.
Reginald Fuller et al. (London: SCM Press, 1953), p. 28.
water and ash’ where ‘wailing sounds’ mix with ‘sounds of joy’. This of fers
a troubled but potentially redemptive figure of the musician in time of
political extremity, of fering a complex ‘redress’.
The Triumph of Love is, among other things, a response to the atrocity
of the world wars, like the tribute to Bonhoef fer in ‘De Jure’, and in section
XIII the poet remembers the hidden dead ‘ditched, divested, clamped,
sifted’ or ‘tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up / with Baltic
sludge’. In response, he invokes a musical requiem:
committed in absentia to solemn elevation,

Trauermusik, musique funèbre, funeral
music, for male and female
voices ringingly a capella,
made for double string choirs, congregated brass,
choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting,
like glassblowers, inventions
of supreme order?
(TL, XIII)
Hill had earlier written a self-suspecting poem entitled ‘Funeral Music’,

and this later invocation to a musical requiem for the dead of World War
II has a title that resonates across three languages. Its ef fect, however, is to
question the ‘inventions / of supreme order’ written in absentia, which in
their ‘elevation’ risk travestying the buried realities they are designed to
commemorate. Hill’s words conjure a large-scale choral and symphonic
work on the lines of Benjamin Britten’s War Requiem, embodying a ‘solemn
elevation’ that jars with the presence of the dead ‘rotted down with leaf-
mould, accepted / as civic concrete’. Such funeral music, he suggests, might
be simultaneously commemorative and amnesiac.
The invocation of music in later Hill is bound up with such ques-
tions about religious belief, modernity, and conf lict. When Hill invokes
modern composers, they are almost without exception caught up in these
same questions. At various points Hill returns to the music of earlier peri-
ods, as did the composer Alfred Schnittke, whose ‘polystylism’ involves
pastiche of and allusion to innumerable periods. Scenes from Comus of fers
one model of this, again in dialogue with Hugh Wood, but elsewhere Hill
returns time and again to religious music, the psalms in particular. For all
194 hugh haughton
his distrust of the appeal to music, it continues to be a recurring religious

resource, and Hill invokes Philip Sidney as a paradigm:
Sidney: best realizer and arguer

of music, that ‘divine
striker upon the senses’, steady my
music to your Augustinian grace-notes,
with your high craft of fret. I am glad
to have learned how it goes
with you and with Italianate-
Hebraic Milton: your voices pitched exactly –
somewhere – between Laus Deo and defiance.
(TL, CXVIII)
Sidney portrayed music as ‘the most divine striker of the senses’ in the Defence
of Poetry.7 Hill seeks to align his own halting, syncopated music with Philip
Sidney’s ‘Augustinian grace-notes’ (which bring together ornamental musi-
cal ‘grace-notes’ and theological ‘grace’), while also conjuring his ‘craft of
fret’ (which, in similar punning vein, associates ‘fret’ as ‘agitation of mind’
with the ridged finger-board of a lute). The poet F. T. Prince has written
of The Italian Element in Milton’s Verse, but other critics have stressed the
‘Hebraism’ of Milton’s verse-music and intellectual stance, against which
Hill counterpoints it.8 The address to Sidney’s and Milton’s ‘voices pitched
exactly’ equates music and public eloquence within the tradition of ‘Laus et
vituperatio’ espoused earlier in the sequence, as well as remembering Haydn’s
practice of putting ‘Laus Deo’ at the end of his scores. This not only establishes
Sidney and Milton as precursors but brings together the ideas of the poet as
simultaneously a ‘realizer’ and ‘arguer’ of music, ideas which are at the heart
of Hill’s notably argumentative musical realizations in his later work.
7 Philip Sidney, An Apology for Poetry, or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geof frey Shepherd
and Robert W. Maslen, third edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2002), p. 50.
8 See entry on ‘Hebraism’ in William B. Hunter (ed.), A Milton Encyclopedia,
9 vols (Lewisburg, PA: Associated University Presses 1980), III, which refers to
Kermode’s account of the inf luence of the psalms and Hebrew parallelism on Milton’s
versification.
Sidney translated the Psalms, and to the question ‘What remains?’ Hill,
who included his own ‘Psalms of Assize’ in Canaan, answers ‘the Psalms –
they remain; and certain exultant / canzoni of repentance’ (TL, XXIII).
Dante and Petrarch wrote canzone designed for musical setting, with the
latter’s Vergine Bella being set by Dufay and figuring in The Triumph of Love:
‘Vergine bella – it is here that I require / a canzone of some substance’ (LV).
‘Psalms’ and ‘song’, as religious forms uniting music and poetry, hold a privi-
leged place in Hill’s repertoire. Music, text, religion, and history converge
again in the reference to the ‘long-exiled Salve Regina’ being ‘sung / in the
crypt at Lastingham on the threshold / of a millennium’ (XXXVIII); while
the later citation of ‘Amarilli, mia bella’, the Guarini text set by Giulio Cac-
cini and published in 1601, leads on to the following assertion:
We
are to keep faith, even with self-pity,
with faith’s ingenuity, self-rectifying cadence,
perfectly imperfected: e.g., the lyric
art of the Spanish baroque, seventeeth-
eighteenth-century Italian song,
which so aspires to be adamant I
am melting, the erotic, thrilled and chaste.
(End with that reference, in the Ludlow masque,
to haemony, plant of exilic virtue).
(TL, CXV)
This reference to ‘lyric / art’ as an instance of ‘faith’s ingenuity’ is defined

in primarily musical terms at a particular moment in the history of Spanish
and Italian song. Hill’s sense of baroque lyric as an instance of ‘self-rectifying
cadence’ brings together ideas of artistic completion and moral or spiritual
self-correction. ‘Adamant’, originally a diamond-like stone, came figuratively
to mean ‘A magnet, centre of attraction’ (OED, s.v. ‘adamant, n.’), but also
its opposite, ‘unshakeable, inf lexible’. To be ‘adamant I / am melting’ is a
paradox, like Hill’s idea of something which is simultaneously ‘erotic’ and
‘chaste’, while the final parenthetical self-referential ‘reference’ to ‘haemony’
anticipates his return to Milton in Scenes from Comus, another sensuous
celebration of music and chastity.
196 hugh haughton
Such erotics of music weave through The Triumph of Love, but later in
a self-ref lexive philosophical return upon himself, Hill invoking a dif ferent
kind of music when he notes that ‘An actual play-through / from the Last
Quartets could prove superf luous, / except to a deaf auditor’ (CXXV). This
resonates with Bonhoef fer’s remark in the Letters and Papers from Prison
about the ‘few pieces of music’ he knew well enough to hear inwardly:
‘my appreciation of the music Beethoven composed after he went deaf has
become more “existential”’.9 Given that Hill raises his own partial deafness
in the same sequence (CV), the reference to the ‘deaf auditor’ of the Last
Quartets suggests an analogue for his own complex late work.
In Speech! Speech! musical analogies are again to the fore, with passing
references to ‘Handelian measures’, ‘Holst’s Jupiter’, Schubert’s Winterreise,
the Irish composer Seán O’Riada, and, more unexpectedly, Elton John,
as well as an anonymous ‘RAPMASTER’. The sixth poem brings this into
early focus, where after mentioning ‘Rorke’s Drift’ and the ‘great-furnaced
/ ships of f Jutland’, Hill says:
They have their own

grandeur, those formal impromptus played
on instruments of the period (speech! speech!).
(SS, 6)
‘They have their own / grandeur’ might first be construed as referring back
to the ships in the Battle of Jutland of 1916, but the mention of ‘formal
impromptus’ invites us to ref lect in musical terms on the sequence itself (as
the reference to the book’s performative title ‘speech! speech!’ suggests). The
musical term ‘impromptu’, associated with Schubert and Chopin, appears to
have been first used by the Czech composer Vořišek in 1817, and according
to Grove ‘probably derives from the casual way in which the inspiration for
such a piece came to the composer.’10 Though poems or speeches can both
be ‘impromptu’, the idea of ‘formal impromptus’ is inherently paradoxi-
9 Bonhoef fer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 115.

10 Maurice J. E. Brown, ‘Impromptu’, Grove Music Online, available online via <http://
www.oxfordmusiconline.com>, accessed 5 July 2011.
cal, but also invites us to think of the poem as transforming the casually
improvised into a self-establishing form, acting historically as one of the
‘instruments of the period’.
In poem 20 of Speech! Speech! Hill invokes Walter Pater’s claim that
‘All art constantly aspires to the condition of music’, only to qualify it with
‘Not / music. Hebrew. Poetry aspires / to the condition of Hebrew’. The
‘un-musical’ enjambment and telegrammatic abruptness here counter Pater’s
eloquent claim, setting Arnoldian Hebraism against Paterian Hellenism.
We hear of Hannukah and ‘the menorah’s one-octave / chant of candles’
(29), though also that the ‘vibrant Yiddish Theatre’ of East London ‘was
not / music to all ears’ (27), including Isaac Rosenberg’s. The replacement of
Pater’s idea of art aspiring to the condition of ‘music’ by ‘Hebrew’ transposes
his argument to a sterner religious register, but reminds us that Hebrew
has been one of the great sources of music in the psalms and elsewhere.
Poem 52 turns on one of the most expressive of twentieth-century psalm-
settings, Charles Ives’ choral rendition of Psalm 90. The poem begins with
a ref lection on how the body ‘knows / its ówn tíme’, before citing the psalm
from the King James Version:
LÓRD |
THOÚ HAST BEEN OUR DWELLING PLÁCE – FROM ÓNE
GENERÁTION | TO ÁNOTHER (lento). So barely
out of step | bow and return. Charles Ives’s
Ninetieth Psalm, found late, as grief ’s thánksgiving;
as full-tide with ebb tide, the one in the other,
slow-settling bell arpeggios. Time, here renewed
ás tíme, hów it páces and salútes ús | in its wáys.
(SS, 52)
The first verse of the psalm is stretched across three verse lines, punctuated
by diacritical marks, placing the original text on the page in a way that is
conspicuously ‘out of step’. Ives’s setting begins with four chords, symbolising
‘The Eternities’, ‘Creation’, ‘Prayer and Humility’, and ‘Rejoicing in Beauty
and Work’, and is followed by a quiet choral rendition of the quoted verse
(marked Largo, not ‘lento’, in the score). The phrase ‘found late’ presumably
refers to the poet’s discovery of Ives’s great work, but applies also to the
198 hugh haughton
composition itself: though Ives apparently began it early in his career, he

only completed it in 1923, making it ef fectively his last completed work.11
Built around a constantly reiterated C major played by the organ in the
bass, Ives’s large-scale setting ebbs and f lows, as Hill’s poem intimates, build-
ing to a dissonant ‘f lood’ in verse 5 (setting the psalmist’s ‘Thou carriest
them away as with a f lood’), and then, from verse 14 (‘Rejoicing in Beauty
and Work’), modulating into a serene chorale-like mood, with the last
verses accompanied by bells (‘as church bells in the distance’), evoking an
American Protestant church in New England, where Ives began his musical
career. Hill’s phrase ‘slow-settling bell arpeggios’ of fers a precise evocation
of the overall structure and final mood of Ives’s setting. The Psalm takes us
through many versions of human time, as Ives’s music does, and as Hill’s
account of time ‘renewed / ás tíme’ suggests.
In poem 54, the text is interrupted by a quotation in italics and German:
‘Mein / Ariel, hast du, der Luft, nur ist…? ’ This comes from Schlegel’s
translation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and forms part of the text of the
Swiss composer Frank Martin’s Suite from Der Sturm. Hill cites this three
times in the sequence (54, 65, 79), the second time in a poem which begins:
‘Fragments of short score: inspirational I / find them.’ Hill’s poem works
by way of short fragments, and Martin’s score must be one of those he has
in mind here. After stormy references to ‘clouds’ and a ‘rainbow’, he echoes
Prospero’s words, ruminating that ‘It is not nature but nurture | brings /
redemption to mind’ (recalling the description of Caliban as ‘a born devil,
on whose nature / Nurture can never stick’).12 The section ends ‘You can
have / life if you want it | appeal to music’, and this collocation of ‘life’
and ‘music’ reminds us that music plays a crucial role in the ‘redemption’
engineered by Prospero in Shakespeare’s play. Like most of his references
to music, it also makes us ref lect on Hill’s self-conscious ‘appeal to music’
at this point. Here the poet characteristically invokes Shakespeare’s late
romance via Martin’s orchestral setting of Schlegel’s translation, allusively
refracting text through music and vice versa.
11 Charles Ives, Psalm 90 for Mixed Chorus, Organ and Bells, ed. John Kitzpatrick and
Gregg Smith (Bryn Mawr, PA: Merion Music), p. 3.
12 William Shakespeare, The Tempest, ed. Stephen Orgel (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1987), IV.i.188–9, p. 183.
Later in the poem Hill speaks of poetry being ‘created neither tó music,
nor / from music, nór, altogether, fór silence’ (73), worrying about the
prepositional force of the relationship between words and music, sound
and silence in his own later work. In doing so, he insists on a founding
structural perplexity, in which text and score invoke each other, and ref lect
upon each other, within the Baroque music of his precisely pitched and
paced verse. He invites us to ref lect on what might be meant by ‘the con-
dition of music as well as the condition of poetry itself ’.
The fifth section of The Orchards of Syon begins with a ref lection
on ‘Baroque’ as implying ‘nothing broken’, which prompts the statement
that he wants to ‘clinch this / as music’s invocation’, giving a more precise
musical inf lection with the appeal to ‘the tuned / drums glissando.’ The
following section of fers a more specific instance of ‘baroque’ music with
the claim: ‘The Art of Fugue resembles / water-springs in the Negev.’ The
Art of Fugue is secular Bach, an unfinished encyclopaedic set of variations
for no specific instrument that demonstrates the range of human invention
and counterpoint. Hill’s reference to the Negev desert in southern Israel
gives it a Hebraic resonance. The New American Standard Bible translates
Joshua 15:19 as: ‘Then she said, “Give me a blessing; since you have given
me the land of the Negev, give me also springs of water.” So he gave her
the upper springs and the lower springs.’ Bach’s polyphony becomes the
equivalent of that biblical spring. Bonhoef fer spoke of ‘fragments whose
importance lasts for centuries, because their completion can only be a matter
for God, and therefore they are fragments which must be fragments – I
am thinking for example of The Art of Fugue.’13 Hill goes on to refer to
‘lost achievements, music lost among them, / deeper than we imagined’,
before appropriating the epithet used of music by Pericles and Prospero,
‘Heavenly music!’14 The phrase could apply here to The Art of Fugue, or, in
the context of late Shakespeare, to music itself as potentially restorative,
like the spring of Negev.
13 Bonhoef fer, Letters and Papers from Prison, p. 106.

14 ‘Most heavenly music / it nips me unto listening’ (William Shakespeare, Pericles, V.i.);
‘when I have required / Some heavenly music, which even now I do’ (Shakespeare,
Tempest, V.i.).
200 hugh haughton
In the following poem, the religious dimension is given a further theo-

logical twist, when the poet says: ‘Music arguably / not implicated in the
loss of Eden, / held to its resolution. No / question an af firmation’ (OS,
VII). The notion of music having access to a state of prelapsarian perfec-
tion is longstanding, but Hill’s phrase ‘held to its resolution’ can be read
in two ways. It asserts that music, even after the Fall, maintained its deter-
mination (‘resolution’) to continue, but also that it held to its ‘resolution’
in the musical sense, which according to The Oxford Companion, refers to
‘The process by which dissonant elements in intervals move to consonant
ones’.15 ‘Held to’ could either be active or passive. In either sense, music is
not implicated in the fall but continues to be an ‘af firmation’ of harmony
in a now inharmonious world. Hill goes on to speak of Lear’s response to
‘the sour-sweet music of viols, / as some to oils of unction or to Gospel’.
This refers to the scene where the mad Lear is discovered asleep by Cord-
elia and she hopes soft music will be therapeutic, an ef fect captured in the
assonantal play of ‘viols’ and ‘oils’. In Hill’s poem, the viols then give way
to ‘Gospel’:
Tune him to GOSPEL: Over my head

I hear music, music in the air. That
Gospel? Súre that Gospel! Thát sure
Gospel music in my head.
The italicised words are the opening of one of the greatest of American
spirituals, performed by Sister Rosetta Tharpe among others (perhaps
remembered in the address to Hill’s ‘sole / sister’ and ‘sister-my-soul’).16
Hill uses line-breaks and diacritical marks to vary the beat, as he plays on
the idiom of Afro-American gospel, and in shifting the place of the word
‘Gospel’ in the line, tunes himself to Gospel in many senses. The appear-
ance of black gospel music in the States coincided with the beginnings of
15 Arnold Whittall, ‘Resolution’, The Oxford Companion to Music, ed. Alison Latham,
available online via <http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com>, accessed 5 July 2011.
16 J. Jef ferson Cleveland and Verolga Nix (eds), Songs of Zion (Nashville, TN: Abingdon
Press, 1981).
ragtime, blues, and jazz, accompanying the rise of the Pentecostal churches
at the end of the nineteenth century. The term covers American evangelical
hymnody of the nineteenth century but takes in black Pentecostal song
and its many commercial incarnations. The final words, ‘thís sure músic in
mý head’, mark Hill’s appropriation of gospel music, linking up with the
earlier remark that ‘He may / respond to that’. The ‘sure’ assures us it really
is music, but also that ‘Gospel’ is a particularly ‘sure’ (and assured) kind.
Taken together, ‘music’s invocation’ in these three poems occurs in a
range of contexts, but with an overwhelmingly religious inf lection. In a later
poem, Hill speaks of ‘gypsylike / klezmer’ as ‘soul music / not everywhere
unheard, not at all times / accusingly silent’ (XV), remembering klezmer’s
association with Ashkenazi Jews, so many of whom, like the gypsies, were
exterminated by the Nazis. It appears to be taken up later in the reference
to ‘the same / postlude of nightmare’, making the aftermath of a nightmare
a musical postlude, which Grove defines as ‘the equivalent of a coda, conclu-
sion or epilogue’.17 Music comes explicitly to the fore in the fortieth poem,
which opens: ‘Still, gratitude to music for making / us vocal: music to find
its place here’ (XL). Making place for music, the poem names ‘Estimable
Saint-Saëns’, Meyerbeer, and Widor, three popular composers associated
with ‘firework cadenzas’, before turning to one of Hill’s contemporary
masters: ‘Here’s late Schnittke now, auditor / pro defunctis and all-present,
resuscitating / organum’. The reference to the Russian composer’s Requiem
(1975) is followed by one to his ‘Penitential / Psalms on dot edu’, an allusion
to his 1988 choral work (typically based on psalms), presumably accessed via
a university website. When Hill calls Schnittke’s Zion ‘more Prussian than
Russian’, he recalls the composer’s early immersion in the Austro-German
musical tradition in Vienna, where he studied after World War II. The
idea of ‘resuscitating organum’ involves a complex pun, since ‘organum’,
though it originally meant a musical instrument, came to refer (in the ninth
to thirteenth centuries) to the ‘practice of polyphony, both improvised
and written, in two, three, four, or five parts, and usually decorating an
existing plainchant or other melody’ (OED, s.v. ‘organum, n.’). Schnittke
17 Michael Tilmouth, ‘Postlude’, Grove Music Online.

202 hugh haughton
was an extravagantly allusive composer, and many of his works are built
around references to earlier works, with his Fourth Symphony built around
Gregorian chant, Lutheran chorale, and Synagogue vocal declamations,
and his Requiem drawing on Catholic liturgical music. ‘Organum’ also, of
course, refers to ‘An instrument of thought or knowledge’, and Hill’s use of
it clearly aligns Schnittke’s resurrection of earlier musical idioms with an
instrument of thought, a type of discourse comparable to the poem’s own
polyphonic palimpsest. The poem ends with a tribute to ‘Schnittke and
his music multiform, / struck of f in mean unpropitious time’. While the
poem questions ‘Does music / know or care how it sounds?’ Hill’s sense of
‘gratitude to music’ here shows both knowledge and care. The poem’s men-
tion of ‘aleatoric light’ suggests Schnittke’s experimentation with aleatoric
techniques in works like the Serenade of 1968, while ‘multiform’ alludes to
the ‘polystylism’ of such works as Concerto Grosso No. 1, with its parodic
commentary on a Baroque concerto. Hill’s ‘gratitude’ to Schnittke’s music
is precisely tuned to his actual oeuvre, as well as his working in the ‘unpropi-
tious time’ of Stalinist and Soviet Russia. It also suggests a mirror of Hill’s
idiom in the sequence. Schnittke, who became a Roman Catholic in 1982,
is a composer who, like Hill, was devoted to generating a new ‘soul music’
that drew wittily and plangently on the complex legacy of the musical past
within an unpropitious present.18
Eastern European composers figure again later: ‘In Terra Pax packed
with low-level shots / of the reduced city, laid-waste battery cells, / unroofed
dead wasp-combs, gutted termite towers’ (XLVII). The language here
suggests a documentary, but In Terra Pax recalls Frank Martin’s ‘Orato-
rio Breve’, commissioned by Swiss Radio for broadcast on Armistice Day
1945. Based on biblical texts, the first part ‘expresses the gloom of wartime,
the second the joys of earthly peace, the third forgiveness among human
18 Alex Ross speaks of Schnittke, with his ‘polystylistics’, in terms suggestive of Hill’s
project: ‘gathering up in a troubled stream of consciousness the detritus of a mil-
lennium of music; medieval chant, Renaissance mass, Baroque figuration, Classical
sonata principle, Viennese waltz…twelve-tone writing, aleatory chaos, and touches
of modern pop’, in The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century (London:
Fourth Estate, 2008), p. 529.
beings, while the last refers to divine peace’.19 Hill’s interests in ‘funeral
music’ and war converge here with his investment in biblical settings. His
grim acknowledgement of the aftermath of war leads to the following
admission:
I had been blown apart

by universal pity trumpeting
con sord. to triple forte. Krenek
or Kurtág I’ll scatter around this,
anything from HUNGAROTON; In Terra Pax
dark in itself but sighted, as dead stars
that overlook us with a splittering light.
(OS, XLVII)
Ernst Krenek (1900–91) was a prolific Austrian composer, who left his
native country after the Nazi annexation, went on to compose a Cantata
for Wartime (1943), and had a long career in exile, while György Kurtág
(1926–) is a Hungarian composer and pianist who lived through the entire
communist regime. One of the most wittily inventive of avant-garde musi-
cians from central Europe, he wrote pieces inspired by Beckett, Hölderlin,
and Kafka, among others. Though Hill’s musical allusion is unusually gen-
eralised, he follows the Miltonic image of ‘universal pity trumpeting’ with
small musical directions, as if quoting an actual score (‘con sord. to triple
forte’), suggesting a composer’s text as well as actual trumpets and meta-
phorical pity, and giving the ef fect of a listener being figuratively ‘blown
apart’. Hill’s throwaway reference to ‘Anything from HUNGAROTON’ refers
to the premier Hungarian music label, and reminds us again of the way he
accesses his musical material. It doesn’t, however, prepare us for the reprise
of the In Terra Pax, or the arresting image of ‘splittering light’, where the
rare word ‘splitter’, meaning ‘to break into fragments’ (OED, s.v. ‘splitter,
v.’), casts its own light on the compositional procedures not only of Krenek
and Kurtag but of Hill himself.
19 Bernhard Billeter, ‘Martin, Frank’, Grove Music Online.

204 hugh haughton
In the penultimate poem of the sequence, Hill takes up the trumpets

again: ‘In Goldengrove the full / trees trumpet their colours: earth-cas-
ualties / majestic; unreal as in life they build / riches of cadence, not yet
decadence, / ruin’s festival’ (OS, LXXI). Here the music is natural, yet the
trumpeting trees suggest not only the ‘cadence’ of falling leaves (derived
from the Latin cadere, ‘to fall’) but musical and poetic cadences, which are
‘forever tangling with England / in her quiet ways of betrayal’. The poem
then attributes to England a ‘haunted music’, in a rare moment of relatively
unmisgiving recognition of music’s power to haunt (and to be haunted),
a recognition that goes deep, as I hope I have shown, in Hill’s later verse.
Even here, however, ‘Ways of betrayal’, ‘not yet decadence’, and ‘ruin’ cast
a monitory shadow over that ‘haunted music’.
I have already mentioned Scenes from Comus (2005) a number of times.
Dedicated to Hugh Wood on his seventieth birthday, the whole sequence
dwells on Milton’s Ludlow Masque, situated in its historical moment but
re-situated through Hugh Wood’s Scenes from Comus (1966), and Hill’s
response to both. Wood’s work has been described by Stephen Walsh as ‘not
so much a musical representation’ of Milton’s story as ‘a tone poem based
on certain elements of it’.20 This makes Hill’s sequence a poetic response to a
contemporary tone poem written in response to a dramatic poem by Milton.
Hill’s account moves between the casually anecdotal (‘He was a cheerful
soul and loved your music, / Hugh’) and the intricately meta-poetic. In the
second of its three sections, Hill writes, ‘bring on music, sonorous, releasing’
(SC, 2.8), and the whole poem is a ref lection on the conditions and limits
of music’s sonorous release. Again af firming his ‘envy of the composer’, Hill
asserts that ‘from this noise, this mêlée, there issues / a grand and crabby
music’, declaring ‘I / want my piece of it. Even when not mine’ (1.19).
20 Stephen Walsh, Recording notes to Hugh Wood, Symphony / Scenes from Comus,
BBC Symphony Orchestra (NMC Recordings: NMC D070, 2001).
The poet’s instrument is his voice, which in this sequence is indeed

both ‘grand and crabby’, in ways which shape the appeals to music:
There are times

when I consort with music so to speak.
Speaking of which there’s your reluctant gift – of
sorrow so prolific – and my own
fortune spent in mishearings; our voices pitched,
our minds of penury poised upon excess.
(2.42)
The phrase ‘I consort with music’ speaks of the poet’s predilections ironically,
as people speak derogatively of ‘consorting with prostitutes’, but it also recalls
when music was conceived in terms of ‘consorts’ or ‘companies of musicians’, as
in Milton’s ‘till God ere long / To his celestial consort us unite’ (‘At a Solemn
Music’).21 The lines remind us that speaking of the analogy between music
and poetry is a manner of speaking (‘so to speak’), but also, with the refer-
ence to ‘voices’ being ‘pitched’, that in his criticism Hill speaks frequently
of poetry in terms of ‘pitch’, as when he admonishes Eliot for a critical style
of address that ‘is a matter of tone’ when it should be ‘a question of pitch’
(CCW, p. 375). ‘Penury poised upon excess’ presumably implies a historical
vision of the resources of the present, poised upon and against those of the
more af f luent past (in this case, implicitly, Milton’s seventeenth century).
Hill of fers his poem as a poetic counterpoint to Wood’s Scenes:
whereas, what I believe I give you here

I take as the counterpoint to your own
caustic attrition and noble rest-
oration of music’s power to console.
Whereas, thus, in proclaiming, in oration.
Seventeenth-century torch-songs did things well.
(2.48)
The broken ‘rest- / oration’ changes ‘noble rest’ into ‘restoration’ but also
suggests an ‘oration’ and the Restoration. In speaking of his verse as the
‘counterpoint’ to Wood’s music, Hill appropriates a musical term for literary
21 Milton, The Complete Shorter Poems, p. 170.

206 hugh haughton
art, as he had done in ‘Redeeming the Time’, where he described George

Eliot denying the ‘counterpoints which ought…to be part of the structure
of such argument’ and appealed to the ‘antiphonal voice of the heckler’
(CCW, p. 94). Hill’s counterpoint here is not that of the heckler, but a
panegyrist of ‘music’s power to console’ – a rare acknowledgement of
unambiguous aesthetic power, given historical focus by the reference to
those generic ‘torch-songs’, defined by the OED as ‘a popular song on the
subject of unrequited love’. Milton refers to a ‘Nuptial Torch’ in Paradise
Lost book XI,22 but Hill’s application of the pop term to the earlier period
signals the abundance of comparable love-lorn songs at the time. In one
of these, ‘False Love Reprov’d’, Henry Lawes asks ruefully ‘But who can
tell thy Fate? / And say that when this Beauties done, / This lovers torch
shall still burn on’.23
Later, Hill homes in on an actual musical performance:
Sei solo, a polished soundfocus, blunt splay fingers

unhasty, the bow attentive, now to be glimpsed
pistoning tempo di bourrée, and heard
clawing out four-string polyphony, a form
of high baritone tessitura,
groan, almost, and sighing – such depth – the instrument’s
power from úpthrust, the return
equally measured: an athlete’s kind of measure
with and against earth’s torque and tricky camber.
(2.52)
This may refer to the tempo di bourrée in either of Bach’s Cello suites BWV
109 and 110. The bourrée dance ‘begins with an upbeat’ and its rhythm
‘occurs in dance and poetry throughout the baroque period’, though ‘the
syncopation rhythm does not occur in the dance steps, so the music and
22 John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Alastair Fowler, second edition (Harlow: Pearson
Longman, 2007), p. 631.
23 Henry Lawes, ‘False Love Reprov’d’, in John Wilson, Charles Colman, Henry Lawes
et al., Select Ayres and Dialogues for One, Two, and Three Voyces […] (London: John
Playford 1659), p. 45.
dance are always in counter-rhythm when syncopation occurs in music’.24

The poem of fers a recreation of a performance of a dance-inspired piece
on a four-stringed instrument, simultaneously registering the physical play
of ‘blunt splay fingers’, the ‘polyphony’ of the composition, the ‘polished
soundfocus’ of its acoustic, the implied presence of ‘voice’ in the instrumen-
tal counterpoint, and a Hopkins-like sense of a musical ‘measure’ which
works both ‘with and against earth’s torque and tricky camber’. ‘Torque’ is
a twisted aural pun on ‘talk’, and parallels Hill’s understanding of the way
poetry resists the ‘inertial drag’ of speech. ‘Camber’ remembers the athlete’s
track (as well perhaps as ‘Chamber’ or ‘Kammer’ music), and picks up the
‘er’ sound that weaves assonantally through ‘measure’, ‘power’, ‘tessitura’, and
‘fingers’. Mimetically and discursively the poem registers musical perform-
ance as a paradigm of its own ‘tricky’ poetic ‘kind of measure’ and power.
In part three, Hill extends this ref lection on music as a paradigm of
his medium, and considers the sequence as a mirror of his love-af fair with
music. He re-describes his text in musical terms (with ‘metronome keep-
ings’, ‘figured bass’, and ‘stark-sounding’ arias), before yielding his most
telling confession about his personal investment in music: ‘Sometimes I
wish music / meant less to me’ (3.6). Having opened the sequence with a
ref lection on ‘personality as a mask’, he later notes professorially that he has
‘lost Milton on Music / and The English Masque’ (1.15). However, in using
the masque as a mask, Hill appropriates Milton as his Bloomian sponsor,
as he had done with Of fa in Mercian Hymns and as Blake had done in
Milton. Unusually, Hill’s investment is in Milton and Music rather than
the vexed poetic theology of Paradise Lost. Towards the end, Hill speaks
of ‘Partiality, / error, relative absolutes // pitching things into shape’ (3.18),
and ‘pitching’ here combines the full gamut of possibilities, comparable
to what he said of Hopkins: ‘his poems do “speak” the “unspeakable” at
a pitch that simultaneously represents intense formality and idiomatic
immediacy’ (CCW, p. 391).
24 See Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne, Dance and the Music of J. S. Bach (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 42.
208 hugh haughton
If Scenes from Comus at times seems more like a commentary on music – Hill
on Music – than a ref lex of it, ‘Broken Hierarchies’ from Without Title of fers
the real thing. The first fifteen lines compose one unravelling, suspended
sentence, carried across five f lexible triplets. After a hiatus, the poet takes
up the acoustic dimension with a reference to a Pentecostal ‘babble of silent
tongues’ and ‘choiring’ church, as the sentence resumes, swerving into a
celebration of one of America’s richest sources of vernacular music:
like Appalachian music, those

aureate stark sounds
plucked or bowed, a wild patience
replete with loss,

the twankled dulcimer,
scrawny rich fiddle gnawing;
a man’s low voice that looms out of the drone:

the humming bird that is not
of these climes; and the great
wanderers like the albatross;

the ocean, ranging-in, laying itself
down on our alien shore.
(WT, p. 78)
Hill’s linguistic instrument is acutely tuned to the characteristic instru-

mental sounds of Appalachia – the ‘dulcimer’ and fiddle combination of
‘plucked and bowed’, the voice over the drone – but also creates a distinc-
tive water-music, full of ‘l’ and ‘s’ sounds. Combining the ‘aureate’ and
the vernacular, the poem dwells on sound-ef fects like the plucked ‘k’ in
the nonce-word ‘twankled’, which is picked up in ‘plucked’; the internal
assonance of ‘gnawing’ and ‘scrawny’; and the ‘m’ and ‘n’ sounds that hum
through ‘man’, ‘loom’, ‘drone’ and ‘humming’. The notion of a ‘wild patience
/ replete with loss’ is plangent and precise, building around the ululating ‘l’
sounds projected from the earlier ‘Appalachian’ through ‘twankled’, ‘fiddle’,

‘low’, ‘looms’, ‘albatross’, and finally ‘laying’ down on the ‘alien’ shore. As
always in Hill, the cultural identity of the music counts intensely, with
Appalachia carrying associations not only of Copland’s Appalachian Spring
but a vernacular religious tradition of song and instrumental music. Once
again Hill’s poetry aspires to the condition of religious music, of fering a
figure of possible transcendence which is also a figure of historical mourn-
ing, ‘replete with loss’.
In A Treatise of Civil Power there are also a number of treatises on
music, including ‘Harmonia Sacra’, ‘G. F. Handel, Opus 6’, and ‘Johannes
Brahms, Opus 2’. ‘Harmonia Sacra’ dwells on ‘the seventeenth-century
vision of harmony / that all gave voice to and that most betrayed’ (TCP,
p. 10), while ‘G. F. Handel, Opus 6’ (p. 32) takes up the argument around
harmony at a later historical moment, ref lecting on the composer’s twelve
Concerti Grossi of Autumn 1738, of fering an un-misgiving harmony ‘with
the world also, broadly understood’ (not something Hill usually wants to
underwrite). Like several other poems in A Treatise, the title is taken from
an existing work, in this instance a musical rather than a literary one. The
same is true of ‘Johannes Brahms, Opus 2’, a response to Brahms’ early
F sharp minor Piano Sonata. Though it speaks of ‘Each phrase sounding
its own future / resolution in opposition, discord in harmony’, and the
‘Oratory of those hammers’, such forged harmony feels subjugated to Hill’s
own oratory (p. 39).
In ‘A Précis or Memorandum of Civil Power’, with its distinctly un-
musical title, Hill returns to music with more attack, where he cites Mes-
siaen’s Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps as ‘this challenge’ to the age. In the
fourth section, Hill says ‘I accept, now, we make history’, and in the final
section he pursues the relation between making history and making music
in terms of the extraordinary war-time moment of the music’s composi-
tion, asking:
Why Quatuor pour la Fin du Temps, this has
nothing to do
surely with civil power? But it strikes chords
direct and angular: the terrible
210 hugh haughton
unreadiness of France to hold her own:

nineteen forty
and what Marc Bloch entitled Strange Defeat;
prisoners, of whom Messiaen was one,
the unconventional quartet for which
the Quatuor
was fashioned as a thing beyond the time,
beyond the sick decorum of betrayal
(TCP, p. 31)
Once again, this is an instance of Hill’s inscription of music into history
and warfare. The poem cites Messiaen’s sui generis musical masterpiece,
but in a grating, prosaic idiom, beyond the ‘direct and angular’ style of
the unconventional quartet (for clarinet, piano, violin, and cello) which
the French composer devised and performed in the Silesian prison camp
at Görlitz where he was interned by the Nazis in 1941. Messiaen’s notion
of ‘The end of time’ in his eight-movement piece, which Paul Grif fiths
understands as ‘the end of orderly progressive time’,25 becomes for Hill an
instance of something ‘fashioned as a thing beyond the time’ in many senses.
It is projected not only ‘beyond the sick decorum of betrayal’ in Vichy
France but, with its apocalyptic religious and aesthetic compass, beyond
the language of the modern period. Nonetheless, for Hill, the music itself
is a witness from the period, to be set beside Strange Defeat, the posthu-
mously published memoir by the Annales historian Marc Bloch, which
castigated the French government for its responsibility for the failure of
the French army to withstand the German Blitzkrieg. Bloch, who left his
post as Professor in the Sorbonne to become a Captain in the French army,
was later tortured and shot by the Gestapo, leaving Strange Defeat and The
Historian’s Task as a legacy. Hill emblematically sets composer and historian
beside each other in historical time, ending his poem with the direction:
‘Strike up, augment, / irregular beauties contra the New Order. / Make do
with cogent if austere finale.’ ‘Strike up’ and ‘augment’ are simultaneously
musical and discursive, and Hill’s sense of ‘irregular beauties’ encompasses
not only the musician’s quartet and historian’s chronicle but his own poem,
caught between music and ‘civic power’.
25 Paul Grif fiths, ‘Messiaen, Olivier’, Grove Music Online.

We could say that in such a poem Hill is again closer to writing a poetic
commentary on music than a ‘musical’ poem which shows his ear for his
own medium. In ‘Word Value in F. H. Bradley and T. S. Eliot’, Hill of fers
a detailed critique of Eliot’s Four Quartets in relation to ‘the public wire-
less language of the war years’, quoting Eliot’s own words in ‘The Music
of Poetry’ against him. Where Eliot argues that the poet ‘must, like the
sculptor, be faithful to the material in which he works’, Hill argues that in
Four Quartets Eliot’s material was ‘no longer primarily language’ but ‘Chris-
tian Thought’ or ‘the People as he understands them’ (CCW, p. 547). In a
poem like ‘A Précis’, Hill risks reducing his own medium in a comparable
way. The way a poet or musician works in and on their time, within the
peculiar time-signatures of the work, to fashion ‘a thing beyond the time’,
involves incalculably complex aesthetic and ethical adjustments. If Hill’s
self-ref lexive musical idiom cannot always do this, still it goes beyond most
poetry, not only in the concrete ways it plays out its aspiration towards the
condition of music despite itself, but also in its ref lections on the historical
conditions of music itself. Alex Ross gives his history of modern music,
The Rest is Noise, the sub-title ‘listening to the twentieth century’; the same
phrase could be applied to Hill’s work, with its uncanny combination of
acoustic, musicological, and historical intelligence.
Kenneth Haynes
‘Perplexed Persistence’:
The Criticism of Geof frey Hill
In his Collected Critical Writings (2008), Geof frey Hill often praises writers
for the resistance they of fer through their words. The praise has committed
him to exploring related questions: what is it that should be resisted, where
and how does resistance take place, and why is it praiseworthy? He is alert
to the possibility that an Irish bull lurks within the admonition to resist
(‘Resist authority’ – ‘who says?’); sometimes it is the impulse to resist that
should be resisted. Because Hill is aware of many kinds of resistance, his
critical analyses are diverse. For example, on some occasions he is hostile
to clichés and celebrates shocks of recognition as a means to resist their
inertia; on others, cliché or commonplace is to be restored and renewed
rather than dislocated or shocked. Dif ferent instances of resistance lead
Hill to theorise about it in dif ferent ways, but his concern with the phe-
nomenon is constant throughout the criticism.
In the Collected Critical Writings the word ‘resist’ and its cognates
appear almost five dozen times. Its first appearance, on the first page of the
book, is already dense with suggestion and implication. Hill refers to ‘the
real challenge’ that lies behind ‘the façade of challenge’: the real challenge
is ‘that of resisting the attraction of terminology itself, a power at once
supportive and coercive’ (CCW, p. 3). Three things should be noted. First,
resistance is a response to attraction, an attractive force, which Hill in some
later works will associate with the gravity of sin and of language. Second,
terminology attracts and infects us, so that the language we thought we
could use as a diagnostic tool and perhaps as a means of resistance may turn
out instead to be recalcitrant to our program. We are used by the things
we use, a reciprocal state of af fairs that is sometimes one of terrible attri-
tion, as we become used to the things that use us up, a theme identified
214 Kenneth Haynes
in this essay (CCW, pp. 18–19) but developed more fully in Inventions

of Value and Alienated Majesty. Third, Hill calls the attractive force ‘at
once supportive and coercive’; the right response to attraction therefore
involves both resistance (to coercion) and cooperation (with support).
Resistance, then, has some relation to the attractive force which language
exerts towards ill; this attraction af fects terminology and other tools by
which resistance is described, with the result that resistance as a word and
as a concept may not, in a specific linguistic context, resist; and a resistant
reaction may need to resist and cooperate at once with a force that both
supports and coerces.
Consider three further, dense discussions of resistance in The Lords of
Limit, where the term occurs with particular frequency. The essay on Swift
(1968) locates his creative intelligence in ‘the capacity to be at once resistant
and reciprocating’ (CCW, p. 71). In his literary work Swift’s reciprocat-
ing resistance is not reactionary in a mechanical or deterministic sense, in
contrast, for example, to the simpler attitudes expressed in his proposal
that an academy correct and settle the English language (which Hill calls
‘a kind of Tory stoicism’, CCW, p. 85). Swift’s invective is not, that is, a Pav-
lovian reaction but rather is marked by cherished particularity; even where
he is most personally concerned, Swift can be at once aloof and accurate.
The outrageous can be festive in his best scatological work; he abhors the
anarchic while taking creative delight in it. Resistance is not a matter of
an attractive force on one side coming into contact with a resistant object
on the other. Swift is neither helplessly in the grip of a pathological obses-
sion, nor on the other hand free of it; he is at once helplessly and helpfully
in its grip.
Near the beginning of ‘Redeeming the Time’ (1973), Hill turns to
Wordsworth’s ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of
Early Childhood’, focusing on the shift from the end of stanza eight, which
speaks of custom ‘Heavy as frost, and deep almost as life!’, to the begin-
ning of stanza nine, ‘O joy! that in our embers / Is something that doth
live’. The rhythmical break, according to Hill, ‘far from being an injury
sustained, is a resistance proclaimed’. It registers ‘mimetically’, a ‘deep shock
of recognition’ (CCW, p. 91). Hill goes on to describe the ‘abrupt surge
with which the “joy” of [stanza] nine’s opening resists, pulls away from
the gravitational field of the closing lines of stanza eight’. This is ‘a magical
change’ (Hill quotes Hopkins for this description), the means by which
‘Wordsworth transfigures a fractured world’ and by which the ‘life-crisis
of the nineteenth century’ is ‘redeemed’ (CCW, p. 92). This is the strong-
est statement in the Collected Critical Writings of redemptive resistance
ef fected through language and meter. Such claims do not disappear in the
essays subsequent to ‘Redeeming the Time’ (cf. CCW, pp. 180, 473, 475),
but Hill’s scepticism is greater.
After the discussion of Wordsworth, ‘Redeeming the Time’ moves on
to develop a somewhat dif ferent account of resistance. Hill continues to
see resistance as action or reaction within a gravitational field exerted by
the pressure of custom, and especially customary language, with its unchal-
lenged prejudices and unacknowledged tacit assumptions. But he alters the
description of resistance as a ‘deep shock of recognition’. Resistance can
also take the form of ‘cross-rhythms and counterpointings’ that oppose
‘rhythmical gerrymandering’; ‘the drama of reason’ (as Coleridge called
it) acknowledges ‘the antiphonal voice of the heckler’ (CCW, p. 94); its
style is ‘parenthetical, antiphonal, it turns upon itself ’ (CCW, p. 98). The
most consistent practitioners of this antiphonal style in the nineteenth cen-
tury, Hill writes, are Coleridge (in his prose works) and Hopkins, though
T. H. Green and Newman also have isolated moments of success. The essay
concludes with strong praise of Hopkins: the nineteenth century is an age
of decadence, of ‘falling’ (Hill alludes to the etymology to get the sense
of gravitational attraction), but against this ‘Hopkins’ poetry establishes
a dogged resistance. Both ethically and rhythmically, his vocation was to
redeem the time’ (CCW, p. 108).
These three descriptions of resistance – as reciprocating, mutually
infecting interaction; as redemption and transfiguration; as constant,
vigilant, self-heckling counterpointing – dif fer in how they evaluate the
price paid for resistance and the degree of success that is won, but they are
consistent with one of the constant emphases of his writing on language,
resistance, and value: the relation of passive and active. Hill explicitly medi-
tates on this relationship – which he variously calls one of conversion, co-
presence, complicity, doubling, and straddling – in his criticism of Bacon
and Shakespeare (CCW, p. 67), Donne (CCW, pp. 161, 315), Pound (CCW,
p. 165), Burton (CCW, p. 314), Gurney (CCW, p. 438), Whitman (CCW,
p. 517), and others.
216 Kenneth Haynes
It is central to the poetic thinking of both Coleridge and Wordsworth.

In ‘To William Wordsworth’, Coleridge can momentarily ‘stabilize the
self-dissipating brilliance’ of his own mind by concentrating on its very
dissipation. The dissipation is reciprocally involved with the concentration,
as a passive ‘stagnation’ is reciprocally involved with ‘active contempla-
tion’ (CCW, p. 14). As Coleridge writes, ‘our chains rattle, even while we
are complaining of them’ (quoted in CCW, p. 151). For Wordsworth, the
exploration of endurance, ‘one of the great words which lie directly on the
active–passive divide’, is a chief means by which to realise value in language,
to compose strength out of weakness and torpor (CCW, pp. 390–1). The
conversion of passive into active also occurs in Wordsworth’s ‘Resolution
and Independence’, described as the ‘helpless reiteration of a question’ by
A. C. Bradley, who feared that its ‘perplexed persistence’ verges on the
ludicrous. Hill, however, disagrees: Wordsworth’s ‘creative gift’ was to
transform the passive – the ‘helpless reiterations’ of raw encounter – into
something active, the perplexed persistence, the ‘obstinate questionings’, of
a meditated art that maintains the sense of rawness (CCW, pp. 114–15).
The movement between active and passive can be ef fected by basic
elements of punctuation or rhetorical figures. In ‘Our Word is Our Bond’,
Hill discusses Pound’s use of quotation marks in Homage to Sextus Propertius
and Hugh Selwyn Mauberley. In the latter, the phrase ‘the age demanded’
appears twice, on the second occasion marked out by quotation marks.
To be told the ‘age demanded’ may be shorthand for being told that one’s
choice has been ruled out from the start; but the act of recording the lan-
guage by which one is made helpless may still constitute some, perhaps
minimal, form of resistance. It can be a way of ‘recording the rapping noise
made by those things which the world throws at us in the form of preju-
dice and opinion’, the ‘obtuse assurance’ of those to whom one does not
count (CCW, p. 150). Even if not a means of redemption or of the trans-
formation of circumstance, quotation marks may still be a way to insist on
the non-concurrence of speaker and hearer, a basic distance which makes
ref lection possible, and therefore resistance, even if only in the form of
withholding assent.
Like quotation marks, the rhetorical figure of anadiplosis, the repeated
word or phrase, can be used to force a return upon language which adds
to the passive expression of a sentiment an active scrutiny of it. In Shake-

speare’s sixty-sixth sonnet, ten lines begin with ‘And’, cataloguing betrayal,
misjudgement, and injustice; the ‘And’ records exhausted attrition even as
it resolves defiance (CCW, p. 476). Keats in the ‘Ode to a Nightingale’
repeats the adjective ‘forlorn’ and by doing so revokes a false claim of poetry
itself (CCW, p. 7). In the more expansive analysis of this passage which he
delivered in a sermon in 1983, Hill writes that Keats stumbles upon a harsh
discovery: the presence, in the midst of ‘an exquisite and harmless fancy’,
of real and all but unbearable longing, loss, and abandonment; and that
Keats moreover is not the ‘passive recipient’ of the discovery but rather in
the last stanza ‘takes up the burden of that knowledge, and moves on’.1
One way to compare these dif ferent instances of resistance is to place
them along a sliding scale according to the proportion of activity and pas-
sivity. At the end of the scale dominated by active, we have deep shocks
of recognition, a gravity-defying, almost magical act; at the other end,
at the all but passive level, an action as small as adding quotation marks
or repeating a word may still be a way to convert the inertly tacit into an
explicit registering. Between them many other forms of resistance through
language can be found, including antiphonal hectoring, processes of self-
discovery and self-rebuke, exhausted attrition that is also defiant resolve,
and simultaneous dissipation and concentration.
Hill not only praises exemplary instances of resistance, but also explores
them from a number of theological and philosophical vantage-points.
Here I find him illuminating, though not always consistent. For example,
at dif ferent moments his ‘theology of language’ (CCW, pp. 404, 405)
elaborates the themes of redemption/atonement (e.g., chapters 1 and 6),
witness/memorialising (chapter 23), and vigilance/diligence (chapters 16
and 22), each emphasis corresponding better to some instances of resist-
ance than to others. The same is true of his more philosophical explora-
tions of writing in relation to jurisdictive speech-acts (chapter 9), forms
1 Geof frey Hill, ‘“Thus my noblest capacity becomes my deepest perplexity”’, sermon

delivered at Great St Mary’s, the University Church, Cambridge, 8 May 1983 (pri-
vately printed), p. 2.
218 Kenneth Haynes
of self-consciousness (chapter 33), and intrinsic value revealed elegiacally,

in the condition of loss (chapters 27 and 28). These theological and philo-
sophical strands in Hill’s criticism overlap and interact with each other, but
I do not believe that they are coherent enough to claim that Hill of fers
either a philosophy or a theology of value in literature – or that this is
something simply to be regretted or applauded. Much of the dif ficulty in
responding to Hill’s collected criticism comes in seeking the appropriate
degree of abstraction at which to read it. He ref lects upon the nature of
language, value, and salvation more than is typical in practical criticism;
he directly engages with the work of major philosophers (Hobbes, Locke,
Hume, Green, Bradley) and theologians (Tyndale, Butler, Barth, Weil);
but he himself proceeds more inductively and less systematically than we
would ask of a theorist.
One strand in Hill’s discussions of resistance emphasises conscious-
ness or selfhood; it takes resistance to be a change in consciousness that
comes about as language converts a passive into an active. For example, he
describes Keats’ repeated ‘forlorn’ as a linguistic process of self-discovery and
self-rebuke, an instance of the return upon the self which Arnold praises in
Burke and which Hill explores in other contexts (CCW, pp. 7, 164). ‘One is
ploughing down into one’s own selfhood and into deep strata of language
at one and the same time’, he writes in his Great St Mary’s sermon of 1983.
He quotes R. L. Nettleship: ‘the consciousness which we express when we
have found the “right word” is not the same as our consciousness before we
found it; so that it is not strictly correct to call the word the expression of
what we meant before we found it’ (CCW, p. 123). Great writing, he insists,
is able to change the ‘passive involvement or impaction’ of one’s self with
one’s past, and of one’s self with the selves of others who have dif ferent pasts,
into ‘an active quality of perception’ (‘Address of Thanks to the Sponsors
and Jury of the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory
of Newton Arvin (2009)’). Most succinctly, he claims that ‘Poetry is one
of the multifarious forms of self-consciousness’ (CCW, p. 548).
As a philosophical statement, the aphoristic equation of poetry and
self-consciousness is misleading, and for several reasons. First, how is
self-consciousness to be distinguished from consciousness or selfhood?
Sometimes Hill appears to use the terms synonymously, at others self-
consciousness has the implications of awkward self-awareness (CCW, pp. 15,

133, 257–8, 436, 496, 507). Most of the poetic examples which he consid-
ers are not self-conscious in the latter sense and would scarcely motivate
the equation. Second, the change in consciousness (or self-consciousness,
or selfhood) made by poetry is often called ‘sudden’, ‘abrupt’, or ‘immedi-
ate’, as ‘instantaneously perform[ing] what it desiderates’ (CCW, pp. 17,
92, 102, 167, 349, 358, 387, 391, 404, 494, 533, 566, 570, 576, 580); such
changes are typically made by a mot juste, innovative phrasing, and dra-
matic metrical breaks rather than larger structures or plain language (which
Hill often considers but does not associate with resistance and changes in
consciousness). Third, the idea of a return upon the self does not in itself
of fer criteria for distinguishing a genuine return from, say, a complacent
simulacrum of disillusion (as Hill has characterised some of the poetry of
‘The Movement’), or a mere pose of defiance that does not actually resist
(on Housman, CCW, p. 418), or the ‘many ways in which an aggressively
iron will to resist may be quietly reconciled with options and conditions’.2
Fourth, the language of self-consciousness participates in an intellectual
tradition, stemming from Schiller, of contrasting modern and premodern,
sentimental and naive, but much of Hill’s criticism does not accept the terms
of the contrast: an unself-conscious style may answer a self-conscious one,
and the lack of irony an ironising one, as well as the reverse. Finally, even
if poetry is a form of self-consciousness, we are still left with the question
of why it may sometimes lead us to experience the consciousness of others,
but at other times only absorb us further into ourselves.
In making these objections to poetry as a kind of self-consciousness, and
to poetic value as resistance in the form of a change in self-consciousness, my
point is not just the pedantic one that only some poetry is well described in
this way (‘Moore, do you then have some apples in that basket?’), but rather
that Hill himself, throughout his criticism, finds value in very dif ferent
sorts of writing, and that his theoretical discussions in one essay often do
not account for his own critical practice in others.
2 Geof frey Hill, ‘Preface to the Penguin Edition’, in Henrik Ibsen, Brand, trans.
Geof frey Hill, third edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), pp. vi–xi (viii).
220 Kenneth Haynes
Sometimes resistance is mere self-will and should itself be resisted; the

passive may lie not in moral or linguistic inertia but in the instinct for defi-
ance or self-assertion. Tense, watchful, vigilant, self-correcting accuracy is
not the only attitude fit for human life; at other times that stance amounts
to paranoia or the withholding of basic comradeship. There are occasions
when it is the mistrust that should be mistrusted, and the cliché or the
commonplace validated. Both responses to cliché are documented in the
earliest essay collected in Hill’s critical writings, ‘“The World’s Proportion”:
Jonson’s Dramatic Poetry in Sejanus and Catiline’ (1960). When words
and phrases, ‘by constant repetition in popular literary modes’, have ‘been
reduced to easy, unquestioned connotations’ (CCW, p. 49), the connota-
tions can then be ‘disturbingly scrutinized’ by a word choice which ‘blasts
the cliché into a new perspective’; in this way, conventional and clichéd
masks can be torn apart (CCW, p. 49). However, another response is pos-
sible: ‘the utterance of deliberate cliché, but cliché rinsed and restored to
function as responsible speech’ (CCW, p. 48).
From the start, then, Hill has been responsive to two types of resist-
ance in literature – the kind that blasts cliché into a new perspective, and
the kind that restores it. The former, with its concomitant returns upon the
self, sudden shocks of recognition, and antiphonal hectoring, is only half
the story. The latter is accomplished by very dif ferent means: the deploy-
ment of a commonplace as ‘an authentic, even though limited, statement
of civic faith’ in Jonson (CCW, p. 55); the ‘troth-plight between denota-
tion and connotation’ of Spenser’s Amoretti 68 (CCW, p. 152); the ‘Angli-
can comeliness’ of Walton that appeals to men of ‘best understandings’
while also being suited to ‘the Common apprehension’ (CCW, p. 212); the
‘plain, even severe, statements of faith and practice’ in Burton that stand
out from the vast ‘tragic-comic welter’ (CCW, p. 315); and the ability of
great statesmen like Lincoln and Churchill to recirculate cliché ‘so that
they seemed both preordained and new minted for the common struggle
of each particular day’ (CCW, p. 537).
The Collected Critical Writings contains several extended case-studies
of legitimate, vexed, and failed rhetorics of commonplace. The first of
these (chapter 2) discusses Southwell’s language of sweet reasonableness
in extremis. Southwell develops a palpably equitable style to bear palpable
witness to equity, not ecumenically but to aim at conversion, to demon-

strate that Catholicism is the true religion of joy and hope. The style is
sincere and deliberated, a synthesis of commonplace feelings and virtues
with common doctrine. Clarendon (chapter 19), Whitman (chapter 30),
and others attempt to solve analogous problems of style, though in each
case the particular feelings, virtues, and doctrines dif fer, as does the labour
needed to represent them as common.
‘Common’ is the crux. In one of Hill’s earliest public lectures (an
unpublished talk on the South African poet David Wright, delivered
c. 1958), he writes that we are confronted with ‘the common, the great
problem’. Hill is interested in how Wright, especially in Monologue of a
Deaf Man (1958), manages the fact of his own deafness in such a way that
it is not only a ‘brooding on his own isolation; but a means of perceiving
the isolation of others’. In the course of his criticism, Hill will draw on sev-
eral sources to ref lect upon this question – Luther’s sense of sin as the self
bent inwards upon itself (CCW, p. 400), Bradley’s exploration of solipsism
(CCW, p. 422), Gillian Rose’s study of the ‘aporia between everyone and
every “one”’ (CCW, p. 569) – but it is always most pressing to him as an
urgent matter of practical criticism.
Three cases of ‘the common, the great problem’ come in for extended
scrutiny in Hill’s criticism: Anglican writing of the late sixteenth century
and seventeenth century; the long arc of democratic humanitarian feeling
traceable from Wordsworth to Wilfred Owen and other war poets, at its
height with George Eliot (in England) and Walt Whitman (in the United
States); and the later work of T. S. Eliot. In the first case, the problem
is how to represent established belief both as common tradition and as
the ‘principle of integrity and comeliness’ (CCW, p. 339, on Clarendon)
despite the strains of this representation; or how to assert the ordinate as
common good even while confessing personal inordinacy (CCW, p. 263,
on Donne); or how to pretend, through an equivocating use of the adjec-
tive ‘common’, that ‘hierarchical distinctions and brute natural obduracies
are alike resolved into equity’ (CCW, p. 375, on Hooker). In the second,
it is a matter of making articulate our common experience, especially of
suf fering, labour, and endurance, through a common inarticulate language,
while also distinguishing the ‘Grand, common stock’ from the ‘mean f lat
222 Kenneth Haynes
average’ (CCW, p. 524, Whitman). In the writing of both periods, Hill is
attentive not only to accomplished utterances but also to instances of fail-
ure, such as ‘a minute particular of inaccurate music’ in Donne’s ‘Hymne to
Christ’ (CCW, p. 312), and the incapacitating blindness which prevented
Hooker, Bramhall, and Clarendon from seeing in commoners the common
origin of the Church (CCW, pp. 334–5), and which also rendered Owen
blank before the articulacy of soldiers whom he believed inarticulate and
on whose behalf he felt obliged to speak (CCW, pp. 399, 453).
Three chapters of the Collected Critical Writings are devoted to
T. S. Eliot (21, 32, and 33), the main burden of which is to show that Eliot
‘declined’ as a poet as he aged, either because he suf fered an ‘unwilled der-
eliction of the creative faculty’ or because he ‘abdicated’ his poetic respon-
sibility (CCW, pp. 377, 564, 579). Hill’s engagement with Eliot is marked
by animus and pays only glancing attention to the language of the Four
Quartets. Still, the outline of the argument is clear: Eliot, unlike Church-
ill (CCW, p. 537) and Whitman (CCW, p. 378), and even J. B. Priestley
(CCW, p. 542), was unable to command the common style. There was
every reason, in wartime England, to respond to the demand for a ‘Work
of National Importance’ (CCW, p. 547), and perhaps to write a work that
would assuage and console (cf. CCW, p. 377), but Eliot, in Hill’s view, even
at his best in this vein, can manage no more than ‘the ruminative, well-
modulated voice of a man of letters’ (CCW, p. 579) which will speak for a
particular educated class but not on behalf of a ‘still divided and unequal
nation’ (CCW, p. 547; cf. p. 560). At his worst, Eliot commits the ‘cringing
platitudes’ of ‘Defence of the Islands’ (CCW, p. 578). As Hill sees it, the
great poet of ‘eros and alienation’ (CCW, p. 556) mistook his own powers
as he entered his later career.
The poles of resistance as self-consciousness and as common expres-
sion are constant in all of Hill’s criticism; nonetheless, as one would expect,
the critical collections dif fer in their emphases. The Enemy’s Country is the
collection most committed to describing poetic achievement as resistance
to the circumambient pressure of circumstances. The book is framed by
Dryden and Pound, between whom Hill draws a parallel, as pre-eminent
writers of resistance. He invokes Pound’s standard of judgement (‘you
cannot call a man an artist until…he shows himself in some degree master
of the forces which beat upon him’) in order to praise Dryden as someone
whose ‘work manifests, albeit with varying degrees of finality, his command
of the essential facts: that a poet’s words and rhythms are not his utterance
so much as his resistance’ (CCW, p. 179). The domain in which the resist-
ance is made manifest, in Dryden as in Pound, is ‘the field of brokerage,
negotiation, and compromise’ (CCW, p. 184), the domain of labour and
business. Those who believe that the ‘creative will can be imagined as opera-
tive above or below the middle ground of circumstance’ (CCW, p. 184) are
wrong: that middle ground is not only an arena of prejudicates and opin-
ions but also of resistance to prejudicates and opinions, and poets’ labour
is to be directed toward the constraints and extortions of circumstances,
where they may ef fect ‘a brief gasp between one cliché and another’ (quot-
ing Pound, CCW, p. 252).
Poetic achievement understood as the interaction between the pres-
sure of circumstances and the resistant self is expressed most vividly in a
passage from Inventions of Value: ‘style marks the success an author may
have in forging a personal utterance between the hammer of self-being and
the anvil of those impersonal forces that a given time possesses’. This would
seem to continue the quasi-heroic portraiture of the poet in The Enemy’s
Country, but Hill adds that ‘Hammer and anvil together distort as well
as shape’ (CCW, p. 407), and this foregrounding of distortion marks an
essential dif ference from the earlier work. In The Enemy’s Country, there
is a tendency to see sin in circumstances and in that part of the self which
colludes with circumstance, but nonetheless to imagine that another part
of the self, the resistant part, is free from it. In Style and Faith (2003), and
the collections which follow it, resistance becomes more distorted and
distorting, as Hill understands more fully the intimate co-existence of
capacity and perplexity which he had noted in The Lords of Limit.
Hill comes to a deeper understanding of original sin in relation to
language and selfhood in Style and Faith. Basic texts for Hill include Paul
Ricoeur’s ‘involuntariness at the very heart of the voluntary’ (CCW, p. 283)
and J. I. Mombert’s ‘imperfection which marks all human ef fort, especially
where it aims to avoid it’ (CCW, p. 362); these underscore the dif ficult
recognition that there is no part of the self free from sin, no area within
one’s accomplishment that is exempt from it. Hill deplores the co-existence
224 Kenneth Haynes
of negligence with diligence in modern scholarship (the second edition

of the OED, an edition of Tyndale, a study of religious and ethical lan-
guage in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England), but he does not
simply inveigh against contemporary ignorance. ‘Fine scholars and spir-
itual wrestlers’ of early modern England were also disabled by ‘a kind of
mental membrana’ (CCW, p. 345) that made them negligent when they
most wished to be diligent.
Inventions of Value identifies other incapacities at the heart of actions
intended to resist, such as silence (CCW, pp. 397–8), or witnessing for those
imagined to be silent (CCW, p. 399), or defiance (CCW, p. 418), or elegiac
memorialisation (CCW, p. 487). Alienated Majesty continues to ask how
it is that the intelligence which should be the ground of resistance so often
fails to resist, why it is that we do not, in general, have the benefit of our
intelligence. New England in the nineteenth and early-twentieth century
provides ready examples. Why should Josiah Royce have been so incisive in
the seminar setting but so fatuous in his public addresses (CCW, p. 501)?
How can William James be so astute a clinical diagnostician but so plati-
tudinous in his diagnoses of contemporary society (CCW, p. 498)? Why is
Emerson so much more intelligent in his journals than in the sermons and
(with the exception of ‘Experience’) the essays (chapter 29)? The radically
inhibiting ef fects of public exposure can be observed in the guarded work-
ing of private intelligences, and Hill traces the fault-line between them,
both in the case of New England and in that of wartime Britain.
Alienated Majesty is darker than previous collections, more conscious
of the grotesque, aware to a greater degree than ever of the inhibiting and
distorting power of circumstance. The fact of alienation is not a concern
new to Hill, but it now has a dif ferent timbre and set of associations. In the
first two books, he sees it mainly as an opportunity for resistance. In Style
and Faith he describes the alienation of the writer in theological terms: ‘I
am willing to claim as an empirical fact that when you write at any serious
pitch of obligation you enter into the nature of grammar and etymology,
which is a nature contrary to your own’ (CCW, p. 352). In Alienated Maj-
esty there is a greater sense of the sheer wreckage of alienation. The final
essay bleakly narrows the enterprise of ‘entering into a nature contrary to
one’s own’ when it describes the writer’s task as ‘self-projection into the
ludicrous’ (CCW, p. 565). The contrast between his two essays on Hopkins
(chapter 6 and chapter 31) is emblematic of Hill’s shift in purpose. The first
concludes by finding that Hopkins’ vocation was ‘to redeem the time’ –
and renew the Pauline commonplace, we might add. In the second, Hill
concentrates on ‘Tom’s Garland’, ‘one of the most grotesquely unnatural of
nineteenth-century poems’ (CCW, p. 530), which moreover knows itself
to be grotesque, and is compelled to appear ‘two or three centuries behind
the times’ (CCW, p. 527).
This emphasis on being forced to appear grotesque and even ludicrous
at the very moment when one is most in earnest is evident in the book’s
concluding essays, on Eliot and Yeats. After their ‘exemplary’ work of the
1920s and 1930s (CCW, p. 579), Hill sees failure in both cases: Eliot would
recoil when contemplating the cost of being alienated from his audience
(CCW, p. 556), and Yeats, despite his willingness to explore gauche and
repellent modes, dissipated his attention by rabble-rousing and aloof hau-
teur (CCW, p. 578). And yet, as so often in Hill, a study in failure has its
productive side, that of implying new poetic possibilities – Hill’s own.
geoffrey hill
from Odi Barbare
XXI
Land of Logic self of illogic later

Nor become sated with a bane of stricture
Origen unmanned and the robot surgeon
Twisting his lasers
All in all V Mary did not enjoy great

Gabriel although the tall wings inspired her
Welch ein gruss ist das as a quantum made in
Time her condition
Begging still her pardon I here accept all

Necessary mysteries barring one sleight
Which I will not stomach | in that it beggars
Matrix of substance
How to brand postures so to speak unfearful

Nothing burneth there but self will says Boehme
Dante yet names Brutus Iscariot hell’s
Fecal impaction:
What would be judgement that could home on mercy

Such the free topoi absolution’s finis
Interplanetary Averroism
Stalls for the uplift
Reconcile these failures to find assumption

Sacrifice won selfhood to that which makes us
Total strangers think they are in our prayers
Can you believe it
228 geoffrey hill
XXII
Time’s remittance Linacre Lupset Starkey

Commonweal censors not Utopians though
Men of More’s circle woe my ploy of speaking
What have you wrought me
So to claim these shards of a formal vantage:

Snapping back wind-warping the daf fodils f lame
Whiteish new-drawn shreds of a grafted tenure
Held to be forfeit
Then let go Dorset the striated clif fs of

Multicoloured sandstone and sand raw-weathered
Pembrokeshire swaying on its rooted tide-wrack
Still life-befathomed
Anglian sea-beaches in winter strewn | bare

Midland acres haunted by blighted elm-wraiths
Woods yet thriving lapped in an intricate still
Tumult of ivy
These to yield grudging as withholding plenty

Name forbearance heir to some stricken dictum
Here extend comb-rhombing the Lenten prayer wheel’s
Turn of reprisal —
See above — retaxing the sullen cognate

Celibate nation far as faith will take it
Infinite time (seemed) to rehearse at leisure
Grasping our portion
from Odi Barbare 229
XXIII
Stranger these years say you consented sleeping

Even dead ears perk when the gist is this bad
Peace to fierce claims maybe there is a balm in
Gilead sister
Something like | some trace that’s more manna maybe

No more no less common complaisance huddled
Sign that one bleeds faith in symbolic numbers
Practise provision
If this soul much good may it do my phantom

You who look not anyplace much for torment
Nor I so like demi-divine Adonis
Born of a myrrh tree
Cradle-blessed lone children to twinned redemption

Let me not fear saecular rites dismembered
All to come sweet mother of our redeemer
Virgine bella
You maybe still waiting against the summons

Something wrought more telling than melopoeia
Thousand sighs turn graphite from such a patience
Ambered the thorn-ends
Winter-clogged bushes as the sun arises

Cresting those f lash webs as they slant abristle:
Stipulate on-line resurrection | this clicks —
Damn — is for ever
Afterword
Odi Barbare is one of ‘The Daybooks’, the five new books of poetry which
will be included in Hill’s forthcoming Collected Poems. In an interview
given in 2010, he remarked that the sequence ‘derives from a rediscovery
of the power and beauty of one of Sir Philip Sidney’s lyrics in Arcadia, a
demanding technical exercise in English “Sapphics”’.1 Hill has in mind the
lyric which begins:
If mine eyes can speak to do hearty errand,

Or mine eyes’ language she do hap to judge of,
So that eyes’ message be of her received,
Hope, we do live yet.2
The challenge of writing English poetry in classical metres is one which

attracted a great many poets in Sidney’s time, but one which has not fre-
quently been taken up since.3 Hill announces his intention to ‘Measure
loss re-cadencing Sidney’s Sapphics’4 at the sequence’s beginning, and in
these three later sections we find the ‘demanding technical exercise’ shap-
ing poetry of strange and complex beauty.
Hill mentioned in his conversation with Rowan Williams that ‘in the
last couple of years I have gone back to writing very formal poetry’, and he
went on to discuss the exploratory power of technique, which, for him,
1 Chris Woodhead, ‘Geof frey Hill: “I was wired weird”’, in Standpoint, July/August

2010, 86–7 (86).
2 Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (London:
Penguin, 1977), p. 190.
3 For a discussion of the quantitative experiments of Sidney and his contemporaries,
see Derek Attridge, Well-Weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974).
4 Geof frey Hill, from Odi Barbare, I, in Standpoint, July/August 2010, 88–91 (90). Other
sections from the poem have been published here (sections I, II, XXIX, XLVII, XLVIII)
and in Keble College: The Record (Oxford, 2009), 52–4 (sections 6, 12, 18, 34).
232 Afterword
is something ‘far more important than just a schoolroom exercise’, being

‘in some ways a kind of psychic-metaphysical instrument, which makes
its own discoveries’. If Hill’s creative imagination has long been drawn to
containment, as Steven Matthews discusses, then Odi Barbare like so many
of his compositions takes its title from an existing work, in this case the
three volumes of that name published between 1877 and 1889 by the Ital-
ian poet Giosuè Carducci (1835–1907), whose ‘Barbarian Odes’ similarly
display strong classical inf luence. Charles Lock’s essay considers Hill’s close
attention to punctuation, and each of these sections uses only minimal
pointing, the dash and the raised vertical, the latter having first appeared
in The Triumph of Love (1998) before coming to prominence in Speech!
Speech! (2001). Divisions of line and stanza work in the manner described
by T. S. Eliot when he wrote that ‘Verse…is itself a system of punctuation’,5
and in this regard these sections continue the experiments of ‘The Pente-
cost Castle’ (from 1978’s Tenebrae) and later lyrics such as ‘Ritornelli’ and
‘Cycle’, from Canaan (1996), experiments which in many ways culminate
in the typographical interest of Clavics (2011) – although this book, like
Odi Barbare, returns to an earlier period to find its form.
These poems are also ‘re-cadencings’ in terms of content as well as form.
Section XXI, for instance, is dense with theological matter, as refracted
through earlier poetic iteration. The reference in the first stanza to ‘Origen
unmanned’ finds Hill glancing once again at Eliot, who alluded to ‘ener-
vate Origen’ in ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’.6 As Eusebius reports,
the early Christian theologian Origen (c. 185–254) is ‘unmanned’ because
he castrated himself for his faith, on the basis of Matthew 19:12: ‘there
be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of
heaven’s sake’.7 The italicised words in the second stanza – which translate
as ‘What sort of a greeting is that?’ – make reference to the Luther Bible’s
5 In the Times Literary Supplement, 27 September 1928; cited in Christopher Ricks,

The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 89.
6 T. S. Eliot, ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’, in Collected Poems 1909–1962
(London: Faber and Faber, 1968), p. 34.
7 Eusebius, The History of the Church from Christ to Constantine, ed. Andrew Louth,
trans. Geof frey Arthur Williamson, revised edition (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1989), p. 186.
Afterword 233
rendering of Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel, at Luke 1:29, which in

the King James Version reads: ‘And when she saw him, she was troubled at
his saying, and cast in her mind what manner of salutation this should be’.
Hill had cited the words in Speech! Speech! – ‘But Welch ein Gruss, what
kind of pitch is that?’ – and the idea of the Annunciation had earlier been
fundamentally important for the two ‘Annunciations’ collected into King
Log (1968). That volume also includes the sequence ‘Funeral Music’, the
fourth of its eight sonnets marking Hill’s first encounter with Averroes, the
Islamic theologian Ibd Rashd (1126–98), whose heresy is revisited here in
the penultimate stanza’s ‘Interplanetary Averroism’.8 The other two sec-
tions again find Hill returning to earlier concerns. Section XXII begins in
the sixteenth century, listing a catalogue of humanist scholars, all named
Thomas, while the allusion to ‘There is a balm in Gilead’ at the beginning
of section XXIII continues Hill’s engagement with the spirituals, as dis-
cussed in Hugh Haughton’s essay.
The ‘demanding technical exercise’ also gives coherence to lines whose
syntax is mobile and often elliptical, and these sections exemplify the ten-
dency towards experiment which has always been present throughout
Hill’s poetry. The alienating power of language was discussed in Hill’s
2008 conversation with Rowan Williams. Having cited Brecht’s distinc-
tion between Verfremdung and Entfremdung, Hill talked about the ‘double
alienation involved in all creative activity’, which is to say, ‘the alienation
one inevitably feels from the commonplaces and truisms of the day’, on the
one hand, and, on the other, ‘the inevitable alienation of a dif ferent and
more mysterious kind, which happens whenever you work to some degree
of success in the body of language’. It is this deep understanding of the active
compact between shaping writer and shaping medium which informs one
of the statements which he made earlier in the proceedings:
A great poem, a major poem…is an annunciation. It is an annunciation or an epiphany.

It is not the filtering of one’s emotions or opinions through a kind of mellif luous
medium.
8 See also John Haf fenden, ‘Geof frey Hill’, in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with
John Haf fenden (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), pp. 76–99 (98), and Carl Phillips,
‘The Art of Poetry LXXX: an interview with Geof frey Hill’, Paris Review, 154 (Spring
2000), pp. 272–99 (275–6).
Bibliography
Works by Geof frey Hill
‘An Ark on the Flood’, The Isis, 1222 (10 March 1954), 18–19; repr. Oxford Poetry 1954, ed.
Jonathan Price and Anthony Thwaite (Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1954), pp. 14–17
Ash Wednesday Sermon, delivered at Trinity College, Cambridge, 6 February 2008,
available online at <http://www.trin.cam.ac.uk/show.php?dowid=520>, accessed
5 July 2011
‘Between Politics and Eternity’, in Peter S. Hawkins and Rachel Jacof f (eds), The Poets’
Dante: Twentieth-Century Responses (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux,
2001), pp. 319–32
Review of Blake’s Jerusalem, The Isis, 1197 (4 March 1953), 22
Canaan (London: Penguin, 1996)
‘Civil Polity and the Confessing State’, The Warwick Review, 2 (2008), 7–20
Clavics (London: Enitharmon Press, 2011)
Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2008)
Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985)
‘“The Conscious Mind’s Intelligible Structure”: A Debate’, Agenda, 9:4/10:1 (Autumn/
Winter 1971–2), 14–23
‘Contemporary Novelists: 4 – François Mauriac’, The Isis, 1230 (16 June 1954), 22
‘Il Cortegiano: F. T. Prince’s Poems (1938)’, PN Review, 147, 29:1 (September–October
2002), 28–31
‘Epithalamion’, New Poems, ed. Donald Hall, 1:3 (Spring 1953), 5
The Fantasy Poets, Number 11 (Oxford: The Fantasy Press, 1952)
‘Flower and No Flower’, New Poems, A Fantasy Press Publication, ed. Donald Hall,
1:2 (Winter 1952), 5
‘For Isaac Rosenberg’, The Isis, 1170 (20 February 1952), 20
For the Unfallen: Poems 1952–1958 (London: André Deutsch, 1959)
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Willinsky, John, Empire of Words: The Reign of the OED (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
Wilmer, Clive, ‘An Art of Recovery: Some Literary Sources for Geof frey Hill’s Ten-
ebrae’, Agenda, 30:1–2 (Spring–Summer 1992), 139–58
Woodhead, Chris, ‘Geof frey Hill: “I was wired weird”’, Standpoint, July/August
2010, 86–7
Wordsworth, William, Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson, rev. Ernest de Selin-
court (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)
Notes on contributors
Sheridan Burnside recently completed a PhD on the remembrance

of the Holocaust in European Literature at Royal Holloway, University
of London.
Hugh Haughton is Professor of English at the University of York. He

is the author of The Poetry of Derek Mahon (2007), along with numerous
essays on twentieth-century poetry, and has edited many books, including
The Chatto Book of Nonsense Poetry (1988), Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures
in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (1998), Freud’s The Uncanny
(2003), Second World War Poems (2004), and (as co-editor, with Valerie
Eliot) The Letters of T. S. Eliot, volumes one and two (2009).
Kenneth Haynes is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and

Classics at Brown University. His recent publications include a transla-
tion of Johann Georg Hamann’s Writings on Philosophy and Language
(2007), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, volume four:
1790–1900 (co-edited with Peter France, 2006), the monograph English
Literature and Ancient Languages (2003), and a translation of Heidegger’s
Of f the Beaten Track (Holzwege) (with Julian Young, 2002). His current
work includes volume five (1880 to 2000) of The Oxford History of the
Classical Reception within English Literature, of which he is editor. In 2008
he edited the Collected Critical Writings of Geof frey Hill.
Geof frey Hill is the author of fifteen volumes of poetry, from For the
Unfallen (1959) to Clavics (2011), and of many critical essays; his Collected
Critical Writings, edited by Kenneth Haynes (2008), was awarded the
Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. He studied English at Keble
College, Oxford (of which he is an Honorary Fellow), and taught at insti-
tutions including the University of Leeds, Emmanuel College, Cambridge
248 Notes on contributors
(of which he is an Honorary Fellow), and Boston University, where he

was Professor of Literature and Religion and co-director of the Edito-
rial Institute. He retired in 2006 and lives in Cambridge. He is a Fellow
of the Royal Society of Literature and of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences, and holds honorary degrees from the universities of Bristol,
Cambridge, Leeds, Oxford, and Warwick. In 2010 he was elected as the
forty-fourth Oxford Professor of Poetry.
Charles Lock holds the Professorship of English Literature at the Uni-

versity of Copenhagen. Recent publications include essays on the poetry of
Thomas Hardy, Roy Fisher, and Anne Blonstein; others concern the theo-
retical challenges of book history, migration literature, and John Cowper
Powys. An extended consideration of Andrei Rublev and Russian iconog-
raphy was published in Sobornost (2008); an essay on Fielding’s Tom Jones
and the history of the Foundling Hospital appeared in Angles: On the
English-speaking world (2008). He is the editor of The Powys Journal.
Steven Matthews is Professor of English at Oxford Brookes University.

His recent publications include Modernism: A Sourcebook (2008), Modern-
ism: Contexts in Literature (2004), Yeats as Precursor (2000), Irish Poetry:
Politics, History, Negotiation (1997), and Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism
and After (with Keith Williams, 1997). He is currently completing a study
on the Renaissance and T. S. Eliot for Oxford University Press.
Michael Molan read English at Magdalen College, Oxford, and com-

pleted an MPhil in Renaissance Literature at Pembroke College, Cam-
bridge. He is currently a DPhil candidate at Magdalen College, Oxford,
studying Milton’s inf luence on twentieth-century poetry.
Kathryn Murphy is Fellow and Tutor in English at Oriel College,

Oxford. She has published various articles on early modern literature, and
edited ‘A man very well studyed’: New Contexts for Thomas Browne (with
Richard Todd, 2008). She is currently writing a book on seventeenth-
century prose, entitled Aristotle and the English Imagination.
Notes on contributors 249
Matthew Paskins is a PhD student in the Department of Science and

Technology Studies at University College London. He previously studied
at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and maintains a research interest in
contemporary poetry and philosophy.
Piers Pennington is completing a doctoral thesis on modern poetry

at Corpus Christi College, Oxford.

Literature at Keble College, Oxford. He was a graduate student at Corpus
Christi College, Oxford, and the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, and
wrote a doctoral thesis on Geof frey Hill and the study of language.
Marcus Waithe is Fellow in English and University Lecturer at

Magdalene College, Cambridge. He is the author of William Morris’s
Utopia of Strangers: Victorian Medievalism and the Ideal of Hospitality
(2006). In addition to his publications on Victorian literature and thought,
he has published articles on the poetry of Geof frey Hill.
Index
Adams, Franklin P. 43, 46, 50 Jerusalem 16–17

alienation 222, 224–5, 233 Marriage of Heaven and Hell 14
Ambrose of Milan, St 166 and Milton 105, 207
anarchical plutocracy see plutocratic Songs of Innocence and Experience 16,
anarchy 17
aporia 172–3, 221 ‘The Tyger’ 16
arbitrariness 63, 64, 67, 95, 101, 130 Bloch, Marc 210
Arendt, Hannah 103 Bloom, Harold 207
Arnold, Matthew 65, 197, 218 Blonstein, Anne 50 n
Aronson, Judith 59 Boeckhe, August 114
Ascham, Roger 109–10 Bonhoef fer, Dietrich 56–8, 190–2, 196,
Athill, Diana 52 n 199
Augustine of Hippo, St 69, 194 Bradley, A. C. 216
Austin, J. L. 71 n, 112, 125–6 Bradley, F. H. 100, 101, 103, 104, 218, 221
Averroes 233 Brahms, Johannes 187, 209
Bramhall, John 222
Bach, J. S. 188, 199, 206 Brecht, Bertolt 233
Bacon, Francis 67–8, 86, 215 Britten, Benjamin 193
Barker, George 6 Brotherton Collection, Leeds 1, 16 n,
Barth, Karl 79, 126, 218 25 n, 32 n, 33 n, 108 n, 110 n, 112 n
Bartók, Béla 188 Brownjohn, Alan 6–7
BBC (British Broadcasting Bruckner, Anton 192
Corporation) 42 Brueghel, Pieter 179
Beckett, Samuel 203 Burckhardt, Sigurd 79
Beckett, Sister Wendy 182 Burke, Edmund 65, 218
Beethoven, Ludwig van 188, 196 Burton, Robert 215, 220
Begbie, Jeremy S. 191 Butler, Joseph 218
Benn, Gottfried 101
Benjamin, Walter 103 Caccini, Giulio 195
Berryman, John 2–3 Carducci, Giosuè 232
Blackmur, R. P. 2–3 Carlyle, Thomas 136, 146
Blake, William Caygill, Howard 172
America 14–15 Celan, Paul
inf luence on Hill 6, 10, 33 Atemwende 75, 151–2
252 Index
‘Benedicta’ 152 Dictionary of National Biography 121

and Hill 151–5, 159, 165–6, 168–9, 170 Disraeli, Benjamin 136
‘Der Meridian’ 151 Donne, John 6, 65, 96–7, 215, 221, 222
Die Niemandsrose 151, 152, 157 Dowland, John 187
‘Psalm’ 157 Dryden, John 51, 64, 68–9, 81, 90, 222–3
Sprachgitter 152, 155 Dufay, Guillaume 195
‘Tenebrae’ 4, 155–63 Dunbar, William 13
‘Todesfuge’ 152
Chaucer, Geof frey 12, 13–14 Eberhart, Richard 2, 6, 11, 23
Chopin, Frédéric 196 Elgar, Sir Edward 188
Clarendon, Earl of 221 Eliot, George 146, 206, 221
cliché 118, 133, 213, 220, 223 Eliot, T. S.
Clock Tower, The 5, 12, 13, 18 Ash-Wednesday 75–6
Cobbett, William 136 and the ‘common’ 221
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor and conversion 65
Aids to Ref lection 114, 143 Dante 98–9, 103
Anima Poetae 86–7 decline of 97, 222, 225
on the copula 115–16 ‘Defence of the Islands’ 222
‘drama of reason’ 215 ‘dissociation of sensibility’ 81–3
‘Kubla Khan’ 36 Four Quartets 1–2, 97, 189, 222
‘living powers’ 113–19, 130 and Hill 6, 7, 81–105
and Milton 86, 87–8 ‘The Metaphysical Poets’ 81–2, 87
and R. C. Trench 3, 109, 111, 112–13, and Milton 3, 81–105
119–20 ‘Mr Eliot’s Sunday Morning
‘To William Wordsworth’ 216 Service’ 232
commemoration 59–60 n, 137–8, 152–5, and music 189–90, 192, 211
157–8, 160, 162–3, 168, 193, 224 on punctuation 232
containment 19, 23, 29, 30, 123, 232 ‘Tradition and the Individual
context/contexture 4, 49, 58, 214 Talent’ 29n
conversion see metanoia The Waste Land 11, 20–1
Copland, Aaron 209 ‘Whispers of Immortality’ 9
Corinthians, First Epistle to 36 Elyot, Sir Thomas 90
Couderc, Gilles 188 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 95, 111, 112,
Crashaw, Richard 96 119–20, 121–3, 224
Cummings, Brian 74 Empson, Sir William 6, 112, 125–6
Cunningham, Valentine 139–40 enjambment 52–5, 57, 59, 75, 78, 88, 160,
197
Daniel, Book of 15 epanalepsis 73–4, 75–6 n
Dante Alighieri 76, 98–100 Est, William 62–3, 70, 71
Della Casa, Giovanni 88–9 etymology
depression 74–5, 139–40 of ‘agon’ 171
Index 253
of ‘bless’ 118 Hill, Geof frey

of ‘cadence’/’decadence’ 204, 215 Alienated Majesty 94–7, 98–9, 103,
of ‘deliberate’ 71–2 213–14, 224–5
and geological metaphor 121–3 ‘Annunciations’ 233
in Hill’s writings 70, 71, 107, 126–31, ‘An Apology for the Revival of
144–5, 224 Christian Architecture in
of ‘metanoia’ 62–3 England’ 84–5
of ‘reduce’ 127–9 ‘An Ark on the Flood’ 20–2
in Ruskin’s writings 144–5 Ash Wednesday Sermon 61–3
Eusebius 232 ‘Between Politics and Eternity’ 95n,
Ewbank, Inga-Stina 53 n 98–100, 103
‘The Bidden Guest’ 65
Fantasy Press 6, 8, 13, 25, 32 ‘Broken Hierarchies’ 208–9
Felstiner, John 155, 161 Canaan 1, 17, 83, 97, 105, 135–6,
Frith, John 69–70 190–3
‘Canticle for Good Friday’ 65, 72,
Gadamer, Hans-Georg 161–2 152–3
Gaskell, Philip 44, 50 ‘“Christmas Trees”’ 56–8
Gascoyne, David 7 ‘Churchill’s Funeral’ 17, 105, 141, 148
Genesis, Book of 20, 41 ‘Citations II’ 51–2
geology 121–4 ‘Civil Polity and the Confessing
gospel music 200–1 State’ 1, 103–4
grace 23, 69, 70, 79, 123–4, 194 Clavics 1, 108n, 232
Gramsci, Antonio 99 ‘Coda’ 73
Greg, W. W. 45 Collected Critical Writings 1, 3, 4,
Green, T. H. 66, 215, 218 107–8, 213–25
Grif fiths, Eric 130 Collected Poems 1, 25, 31–2, 42
Grif fiths, Paul 210 ‘Of Commerce and Society’ 32–3n
Guarini, Giovanni 195 ‘Common Weal, Common Woe’ 90,
Gurney, Ivor 50, 189, 215 107–11, 113–14, 120, 127–8
‘The Conscious Mind’s Intelligible
Haf fenden, John 139, 188 Structure: A Debate’ 100–2
Hall, Donald 6 ‘Cycle’ 232
Hamburger, Michael 155–7 ‘Dark-Land’ 129, 135
Handel, G. F. 187, 196, 209 ‘The Daybooks’ 1, 231
Hart, Henry 18 n, 22, 28–9 ‘De Jure Belli ac Pacis’ 190–2
Haydn, Joseph 194 ‘Of Diligence and Jeopardy’ 45
Heaney, Seamus 77 ‘Dividing Legacies’ 84, 96–7
Hegel, G. W. F. 172 The Enemy’s Country 50, 222–3
Hendrix, Jimi 188 ‘Envoi (1919)’ 50
Herbert, George 65 n, 80 ‘Epithalamion’ 14–16
Highgate 117 on Eliot 84
254 Index
The Fantasy Poets Number Eleven 6, The Orchards of Syon 75, 77, 93, 108,
8, 13, 25 116–19, 129, 151, 154, 199–204
‘Flower and No Flower’ 10, 16, 28, 34 ‘Our Word Is Our Bond’ 56, 216
‘For Isaac Rosenberg’ 8, 16 ‘Pensées’ 16n, 33–4
‘For Janice’ 18–19 ‘Pentecost’ 9
For the Unfallen 3, 5–6, 17, 25, 38–9 ‘The Pentecost Castle’ 232
‘Funeral Music’ 167, 187, 193, 233 ‘Perplexed Persistence’ 120
‘Funeral Music: An Essay’ 138 ‘A Pharisee to Pharisees’ 79
‘Genesis’ 3, 16, 25–42, 71, 72 ‘Pindarics’ 55, 77–8, 80, 138, 149
‘G. F. Handel, Opus 6’ 187, 209 ‘Poetry and Value’ 114–16, 133, 141,
‘Gideon at the Well’ 18–19 145, 152
‘Good Friday’ 8 ‘Poetry as “Menace” and “Atone-
‘Harmonia Sacra’ 209 ment”’ 56, 65, 79, 103, 189–90,
‘The Herefordshire Carol’ 187 213–14
on Housman 19 ‘A Postscript on Modernist Poet-
‘Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres’ 1 ics’ 98, 100–3
‘In Memoriam: Gillian Rose’ 171–85 ‘A Précis or Memorandum of Civil
‘In Memory of Jane Fraser’ 16, 66, 73 Power’ 209–11
Inventions of Value 214, 223–4 ‘Prospero and Ariel’ 23
‘In Ipsley Church Lane I’ 134–5 ‘Psalms of Assize’ 195
‘I See the Crocus Armies ‘Redeeming the Time’ 115, 147, 206,
Spread ...’ 17–18 214–15, 225
‘Johannes Brahms, Opus 2’ 187, 209 ‘Requiem for the Plantagenet
‘Jordan’ 8 Kings’ 187
‘Keeping to the Middle Way’ 97 ‘Respublica’ 136, 190
‘Lachrimae’ 187 ‘Rhetorics of Value and Intrinsic
‘Language, Suf fering, and Value’ 141–2
Silence’ 69–70 ‘Ritornelli’ 76, 192–3, 232
‘Late Autumn’ 7 ‘Robert Lowell: Contrasts and
‘Letter from Oxford’ 22–3, 33 Repetitions’ 22
The Lords of Limit 214–15, 223 ‘Saint Cuthbert on Farne
on Mauriac 23 Island’ 9–10
Mercian Hymns 3, 52, 88, 138–41, 207 Scenes from Comus 73, 80, 84, 90–4,
‘Merciles Beaute’ 12–13 98, 102, 128–9, 187, 189, 204–7
‘Merlin’ 17 ‘September Song’ 159
The Mystery of the Charity of Charles ‘A Short History of British India
Péguy 52–5, 60, 75, 134, 138 (III)’ 85–8
Odi Barbare 1, 227–33 ‘Sobieski’s Shield’ 144
‘On Looking Through 50 Jahre im ‘The Songbook of Sebastian
Bild: Bundesrepublik Deutsch- Arruruz’ 187
land ’ 43, 58–9 ‘Sorrel’ 144–5
Oraclau | Oracles 1, 72
Index 255
Speech! Speech! 50, 75, 92–3, 128–9, and Milton 94, 98, 104
196–9, 232, 233 and music 189
Style and Faith 189, 223–4 ‘Spring and Fall’ 118, 204
‘Summer Night’ 8, 16 ‘Tom’s Garland’ 225
‘The Tartar’s Bow and the Bow of and Whitman 95, 98
Ulysses’ 67–9, 94 Williams (Oscar) on 11
Tenebrae 3, 56, 84–5, 88, 151, 163, 167, on Wordsworth 214–15
189 Holst, Gustav 196
‘Tenebrae’ 4, 152, 163–70, 188 Housman, A. E. 6, 19, 219
‘That Man as a Rational Howard, Henry 76
Animal ...’ 97 Hulme, T. E. 7
‘Three Baroque Meditations’ 72n Hume, David 149, 218
‘“Thus my noblest capacity ...”’ Hungaroton 203
(sermon) 108, 120–2, 217, 218 Hyde, Edward see Clarendon, Earl of
‘To the High Court of
Parliament’ 83 Ibsen, Henrik 53
‘To the Lord Protector Isis, The 5, 8, 19, 20
Cromwell’ 179 Ives, Charles 197–8
‘To William Dunbar’ 13, 139
‘Translating Value’ 135, 147, 148 James, William 224
A Treatise of Civil Power (Clutag John, Elton 188, 196
Press) 49–50 John, St, Gospel of 80
A Treatise of Civil Power (Penguin) 1, Jonson, Ben 64, 77–8, 220
3, 49–50, 84, 89, 95, 171 Joshua, Book of 199
The Triumph of Love 15, 73–5, 75, 76, Judges, Book of 18
89–90, 91, 102, 103, 116, 123–4, Jutland, Battle of 196
138, 143, 154, 155, 193–6, 232
‘Two Chorale-Preludes’ 151, 187 Kafka, Franz 203
‘Word Value in F. H. Bradley and Keats, John 73, 217, 218
T. S. Eliot’ 211 Keble College, Oxford 3, 5, 25–6, 49
‘The World’s Proportion’ 220 Kenwood House 117
on Wright 221 Kierkegaard, Søren 2, 172
Hobbes, Thomas 148, 149, 218 Knottenbelt, E. M. 151
Hölderlin, Friedrich 158, 203 Krenek, Ernst 188, 203
Holocaust 138, 152, 154–5, 157, 159–63, Kurtág, György 188, 203
164, 166–70, 201
Hooker, Richard 97, 221, 222 Lawes, Henry 94, 188, 189, 206
Hopkins, Gerard Manley Levinas, Emmanuel 167
and the commonplace 9 Locke, John 86, 142–3, 146, 218
and conversion 64 Love, Harold 48
Hill on 64, 207 Lowell, Robert 6, 20, 22
inf luence on Hill 6 Luke, St, Gospel of 161, 166, 233
256 Index
Luther, Martin 69, 70, 221, 232–3 Mombert, J. I. 109, 223
mood stabilisers 74–5
MacDiarmid, Hugh 100 More, Thomas 3, 61, 65
McKenzie, D. F. 44 n Morris, William 136–7
McNees, Eleanor 166, 168 Murray, Sir James A. H. 112, 127–8
Machiavelli, Niccolò 90 music 21, 55, 76 n, 88, 94, 151, 187–211, 233
Mallarmé, Stéphane 48
martyrdom 69–70, 133, 169 Nettleship, R. L. 218
Marvell, Andrew 93–4 Newman, John Henry 63, 65, 109, 215
Matthew, St, Gospel 152, 161 Norbrook, David 87 n
Mark, St, Gospel of 161 nostalgia 87–8, 130–1
Martin, Frank 188, 198, 202–3
Mauriac, François 23 Oastler, Richard 147 n
Maurras, Charles 103 organicism 113–14, 126, 130
Melville, Herman 20 O’Riada, Seán 196
memory/memorials see commemoration Origen 232
Messiaen, Olivier 188, 209–10 original sin 20, 63, 69, 70, 71, 109, 124–6,
metanoia 61–80 200, 223–4
Meyerbeer, Giacomo 201 Owen, Wilfred 118, 221, 222
MHRA Style Book 56 Oxford English Dictionary
Milton, John on ‘accident’ 45
Areopagitica 83 on ‘adamant’ 195
‘At a Solemn Music’ 188–9, 205 on ‘bless’ 108
‘blind mouths’ 171, 179 on ‘bow’ 69
Comus (‘A Masque ...’) 90–3, 195, on ‘couvade’ 94
204–7 on ‘diligence’ 111
‘Of Education’ 85 on ‘genius’ 107
and Eliot 81–105 importance to Hill 107–11
Hebraism of 194 on ‘hymnody’ 190
inf luence on Hill 83–4, 81–105 on ‘metanoia’ 61–2, 72
Leavis on 82 on ‘ordain’ 119
‘Lycidas’ 15, 20–2 on ‘organum’ 201
‘the Milton controversy’ 81 and original sin 63, 223–4
Paradise Lost 15, 94, 206, 207 on ‘recoil’ 66
Paradise Regained 94 on ‘reduce’ 127–8
Samson Agonistes 94 on ‘sensuous’ 92
‘simple, sensuous and passionate’ 3, on ‘splitter’ 203
85–8, 90–1, 94, 102 on ‘torch-song’ 206
‘Sonnet XII. On the Detraction…’ 93 Oxford Guardian 7–8
‘Sonnet XIII. ‘To Mr H. Lawes, on Oxford Poetry 5–6, 9, 20, 23
his Airs’ 75, 94, 189
modernism 7, 10–11, 23, 84, 100–2, 188 Parkes, Malcolm 49
Index 257
Paris Review 18, 25, 27, 29, 38, 86 Review of English Studies 47
Pater, Walter 197 Rich, Adrienne 10
Pavese, Cesare 55, 77, 138, 149 Ricks, Sir Christopher 3, 49, 83, 84, 98,
Peacham, Henry 72 118, 124, 167
Péguy, Charles 52, 65, 138 Ricoeur, Paul 223
Petrarch 76 Rilke, Rainer Maria 185 n
Phocion, wife of 181–3, 184 Roberts, Andrew Michael 29 n, 151
Pindar 78 romanticism 6–7, 10
pitch 96–7, 187, 194, 205, 207 Rose, Gillian
Plutarch 182–3 on ‘aporia’ 172–3, 221
plutocratic anarchy 136–7, 138 The Broken Middle 172, 173
politics 17, 81–4, 85, 90, 94, 98, 100–5, 123, and conversion 65
130, 136–7, 173, 181–4, 188, 192–3 and Hill 4, 171–85
Poussin, Nicolas 181–3 Love’s Work 173, 174, 177–8, 183–5
Powell, Neil 171 Mourning Becomes the Law 172, 173,
Poetry (Chicago) 48 176–7, 180–2
Pound, Ezra Paradiso 173
‘Canto LXXXI’ 12 Rosenberg, Isaac 8–9, 197
‘Canto CXVI’ 51, 70 Rosenfeld, Alvin 158
‘Envoi (1919)’ 43, 50, 59, 189 Ross, Alex 202 n, 211
Hill on 66, 100, 215, 222–3 Rouault, Georges 154
Homage to Sextus Propertius 216 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 44, 50, 53
Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 216 Royce, Josiah 224
‘In a Station of the Metro’ 48, 51 Ruddock, Margot 101–2
inf luence on Hill 7 Rumi 185 n
and music 189 Ruskin, John
Price, Jonathan 6 Fors Clavigera 138–9, 143n
Priestley, J. B. 222 inf luence on Hill 3, 133–49
Prince, F. T. 88–9, 94, 194 A Joy for Ever 142
psalms 153–5, 157–70, 194, 197–8 Modern Painters 134
Pugin, Augustus 136 Munera Pulveris 145, 147
punctuation 38, 43–60, 85, 216–17, 232 Proserpina 144
Purcell, Henry 188 The Seven Lamps of
Puttenham, George 73, 74 Architecture 137–8
The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth
Rabelais, François 44, 47 Century 135
Ransom, John Crowe 66 Unto This Last 141, 145–6
Rathbone, Joyce 68 n
remembrance see commemoration Saint-Saëns, Camille 201
Repton, Humphry 117 sapphics 227
resistance 46, 51–2, 55–6, 58, 180, 182, Schiller, Friedrich 219
213–25 Schlegel, August Wilhelm von 198
258 Index
Schleicher, Rüdiger 191, 192 On the Study of Words 120

Schnittke, Alfred 188, 193, 201–2 and the OED 119, 121
Schubert, Franz 196 A Select Glossary ... 120
sensuousness 11–12, 64, 74, 80, 82–8, on sin 124–6
90–1, 94, 102, 104, 127, 188, 190, Trio 16–17, 33 n
195 Turner, J. M. W. 148
Shakespeare, William turning see enjambment, metanoia
King Lear 200 Tyndale, William 3, 61–3, 65, 69–71,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream 47 109–11, 218, 224
Pericles 199
and resistance 215 value
Sonnet Sixty-Six 217 currency 145, 148–9
The Tempest 198, 199 ef fectual 146–7
Sherman, David 167 n ethical 191
Sherry, Vincent 107, 164, 166–7, 168 exchange 141
Sidney, Sir Philip 86, 194–5, 227, 231 intrinsic 2, 99, 133, 138, 141–9, 217–18
Smart, Christopher 6, 30, 32–3 labour theory of 142–3, 146
sonnet 46, 58–9, 88–90, 104, 168, 169 poetic 219
Spenser, Edmund 220 and wealth 147
Southwell, St Robert 65, 220–1 Vaughan, Henry 6, 79
Stadler, Arnold 154, 158 Vergil 77
Surrey, Earl of see Howard, Henry Vořišek, Jan Václav 196
Swift, Jonathan 86, 214
Wainwright, Jef frey 169
Tate, Allen 5, 6, 11, 25 Walsh, Stephen 204
Tharpe, Sister Rosetta 200 Walton, Izaak 220
Thomas, Dylan 6 Wat, Aleksander 65
Tory radicalism 136–7 Weil, Simone 64, 65, 100–1, 218
Travers, Michael 153–4 Whitman, Walt 95, 98, 215, 221–2
Trench, Richard Chenevix Widor, Charles-Marie 201
and Coleridge 111, 119–20, 130 Williams, Charles 91–2, 180
and Emerson 111, 119–20, 121–3 Williams, Oscar 11
English Past and Present 120 Williams, Rowan 1, 231, 233
Hill on 119–22 Wood, Hugh 187, 188, 192–3, 204–7
inf luence on Hill 3, 126–31 Wordsworth, William 10, 86, 90, 134,
and nineteenth-century philol- 179, 214–15, 216, 221
ogy 112–13, 121 Wright, David 221
On Some Deficiencies in Our English
Dictionaries 111 Yeats, W. B. 11, 100, 101–2, 225
M o d e r n P o e t r y
Series editors:
David Ayers, David Herd & Jan Montefiore, University of Kent
The Modern Poetry series brings together scholarly work on modern and contemporary
poetry. As well as examining the sometimes neglected art of recent poetry, this series
also sets modern poetry in the context of poetic history and in the context of other
literary and artistic disciplines. Poetry has traditionally been considered the highest
of the arts, but in our own time the scholarly tendency to treat literature as discourse
or document sometimes threatens to obscure its specific vitalities. The Modern Poetry
series aims to provide a platform for the full range of scholarly work on modern
poetry, including work with an intercultural or interdisciplinary methodology. We invite
submissions on all aspects of modern and contemporary poetry in English, and will
also consider work on poetry in other language traditions. The series is non-dogmatic
in its approach, and includes both mainstream and marginal topics. We are especially
interested in work which brings new intellectual impetus to recognised areas (such
as feminist poetry and linguistically innovative poetry) and also in work that makes a
stimulating case for areas which are neglected.
For further details please contact Professor David Ayers (D.S.Ayers@kent.ac.uk), or Dr
David Herd (D.Herd@kent.ac.uk).
Volume 1 Nerys Williams:

Reading Error. The Lyric and Contemporary Poetry.
265 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-025-4
Volume 2 Mohammad A. Quayum (ed.):
Peninsular Muse. Interviews with Modern Malaysian and
Singaporean Poets, Novelists and Dramatists.
305 pages. 2007. ISBN 978-3-03911-061-2
Volume 3 Brendan Cooper:
Dark Airs. John Berryman and the Spiritual Politics of Cold War
American Poetry.
262 pages. 2009. ISBN 978-3-03911-861-8
Volume 4 Mark Ford:
Mr and Mrs Stevens and Other Essays.
259 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0247-0
Volume 5 Anthony Caleshu:
Reconfiguring the Modern American Lyric. The Poetry of James Tate.
267 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0174-9
Volume 6 Piers Pennington and Matthew Sperling (eds):
Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts.
268 pages. 2011. ISBN 978-3-0343-0185-5

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Modern Poetry

Geoffrey Hill is one of the most significant poets currently at work in

Pennington and Sperling (eds) • Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts

Pennington and Sperling (eds) • Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts

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Cover image: Christopher Wood, The Jumping Boy, Arundel (1929).

© Peter Lang AG, International Academic Publishers, Bern 2011

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We are grateful to a number of institutions and individuals for making the

Excerpts from Geof frey Hill’s published and unpublished writings and

References to the following books by Geof frey Hill are incorporated par-

C Canaan (London: Penguin, 1996)

References to the Oxford English Dictionary are also incorporated

proclaim dif ficulties in a manner which, in a rather low-grade way, is extremely f luent

Hill went on to quote a statement of R. P. Blackmur’s – as versified by John

‘The art of poetry

so twisted & posed in a form

Hill’s Uncollected Oxford Poems

…each late afternoon

The poem seems a deliberately uncongenial echo of various modernist

For when rain breaks

It followed, with ironic sense

5 Geof frey Hill, ‘Jordan’, Oxford Guardian Fortnightly Review, incorporating the

The sudden putting-on of grace

As Hill was to put it in a later essay on Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘There

10 Geof frey Hill, ‘St Cuthbert on Farne Island’, ibid. p. 19.

13 John Haf fenden, ‘Geof frey Hill’, in Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John

The all-too-small expectancy of grace

To such a mercy few of us attain:

Chaucer’s epic ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ is killed by Achilles and is relieved

See, beyond driven boundaries they move

‘Epithalamion’ shows Hill already able to compact an array of poetic

25 The MS sheet mischievously headed ‘Pensées’ in the Brotherton Collection at Leeds

Although he wonders at the illuminated plates of Jerusalem, Hill ultimately

The crocus, narrow-helmeted,

The earth labours with the dead

Nudging and thrusting to the light

The Ocean’s belly, soon, shall ease our drouth;

For we have built the ark, whose untried keel,

This hollow bow,

Unlike the poet in Milton’s ‘Lycidas’, with his frequent apostrophes to

The Manuscripts and Composition of ‘Genesis’

(something reinforced by the epithet, ‘pig-headed’, which remains constant

This ‘long and arduous process of fashioning’ is most clearly in evidence in

Upon the second day I saw

Three further gestures, each occurring separately, are to be found in this

24 Phillips, ‘Art of Poetry LXXX’, 289.

Beside the Point: A Diligence of Accidentals

It is not a matter of justice. Justice is in another world.

beside the point comma or almost full stop It is standard practice to

Apostrophe Tis a fearful thing in capital Winter

So we shuddered there in silence comma dash

ballad into a strikingly modern poem, its rhythms not uncharacteristic of

Cited by Philip Gaskell in his New Introduction to Bibliography (1972), this

who reads, restoring voice and breath.4 Punctuation might be understood

Trusty, seldom to their friends unjust,

Trusty seldom, to their friends unjust.

The apparition of these faces in the crowd :

So it first appeared in Poetry, though here it can be only approximately

11 Reprinted as ‘Geof frey Hill 1: “The Tongue’s Atrocities”’, in Christopher Ricks, The

We have reason to suppose the attentions of Geof frey Hill to be punc-

Here is careful play with a sequence of words without punctuation where

To dispense, with justice; or, to dispense