Geoffrey Hill

I Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp. XIII Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose? Who can now tell what was taken, or where, or how, or whether it was received: how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over- laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around, rotted down with leafmould, accepted as civic concrete, reinforceable base cinderblocks: tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up with the Baltic and the Pontic sludge: committed in absentia to solemn elevation, Trauermusik, musique funèbre, funeral music, for male and female voices ringingly a cappella, made for double string choirs, congregated brass, choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting, like glassblowers, inventions of supreme order? XIV As to bad faith, Malebranche might argue it rests with inattention. Stupidity is not admissible. However, the status of apprehension remains at issue. Some qualities are best left unrecognized. Needless to say, unrecognized is not unacknowledged. Unnamed is not nameless. XVII If the gospel is heard, all else follows: the scattering, the diaspora, the shtetlach, ash pits, pits of indigo dye. Penitence can be spoken of, it is said, but is itself beyond words; even broken speech presumes. Those Christian Jews of the first Church, huddled sabbath-survivors, keepers of the word; silent, inside twenty years, doubly outcast: even so I would remember— the scattering, the diaspora. We do not know the saints. His mercy is greater even than his wisdom. If the gospel is heard, all else follows. We shall rise again, clutching our wounds. XXXV Even now, I tell myself, there is a language to which I might speak and which would rightly hear me; responding with eloquence; in its turn, negotiating sense without insult given or injury taken. Familiar to those who already know it elsewhere as justice, it is met also in the form of silence. XXIX Rancorous, narcissistic old sod—what makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather, he might be dead. Too bad. So how much more does he have of injury time? XL For wordly, read worldly; for in equity, inequity; for religious read religiose; for distinction detestation. Take accessible to mean acceptable, accommodating, openly servile. Is that right, Missis, or is that right? I don’t care what I say, do I? XLI For iconic priesthood, read worldly pique and ambition. Change insightfully caring to pruriently intrusive. Delete chastened and humbled. Insert humiliated. Interpret slain in the spirit as browbeaten to exhaustion. For hardness of heart read costly dislike of cant. XLII Excuse me—excuse me—I did not say the pain is lifting. I said the pain is in the lifting. No—please—forget it. XLIII This is quite dreadful—he’s become obsessed. There you go, there you go—narrow it down to obsession! LI 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. LII Admittedly at times this moral landscape to my exasperated ear emits archaic burrings like a small, high-fenced electricity sub-station of uncertain age in a field corner where the flies gather and old horses shake their sides. LXVI Christ has risen yet again to their ritual supplication. It seems weird that the comedy never self-destructs. Actually it is strengthened—if attenuation is strength. (Donne said as much of gold. Come back, Donne, I forgive you; and lovely Herbert.) But what strange guild is this that practises daily synchronized genuflection and takes pride in hazing my Jewish wife? If Christ be not risen, Christians are petty temple-schismatics, justly cast out of the law. Worse things have befallen Israel. But since he is risen, he is risen even for these high-handed underlings of self- worship: who, as by obedience, proclaim him risen indeed. LXVII Instruct me further in your travail, blind interpreter. Suppose I cannot unearth what it was they buried: research is not anamnesis. Nor is this a primer of innocence exactly. Did the centurion see nothing irregular before the abnormal light seared his eyeballs? Why do I take as my gift a wounded and wounding introspection? The rule is clear enough: last alleluias forte, followed by indifferent coffee and fellowship. LXIX What choice do you have? These are false questions. Fear is your absolute, yet in each feature infinitely variable, Manichean beyond dispute, for you alone, the skeletal maple, a loose wire tapping the wind. LXX 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.Intrinsic value I am somewhat less sure of. It seems implicate with active virtue but I cannot say how, precisely. Partaking of both fact and recognition, it must be, therefore, in effect, at once agent and predicate: imponderables brought home to the brute mass and detail of the world; there, by some, to be pondered. XCVI Ignorant, assured, there comes to us a voice— Unchallengeable—of the foundations, distinct authority devoted to indistinction. With what proximity to justice stands the record of mischance, heroic hit-or-miss, the air so full of flak and tracer, legend says, you pray to live unnoticed. M r Ives took Emersonian self-reliance the whole way on that. Melville, half-immolated, rebuilt the pyre. Holst, some time later, stumbled on dharma. What can I say?— At worst and best a blind ennoblement, flood-water, hunched, shouldering at the weir, the hatred that is in the nature of love. CXVIII By default, as it so happens, here we have good and bad angels caught burning themselves characteristic antiphons; and here the true and the false shepherds discovered already deep into their hollow debate. Is that all? No, add spinners of fine calumny, confectioners of sugared malice; add those who find sincerity in heartless weeping. Add the pained, painful clowns, brinksmen of perdition. 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. CXIX And yes—bugger you, MacSikker et al.,—I do mourn and resent your desolation of learning: Scientia that enabled, if it did not secure, forms of understanding, far from despicable, and furthest now, as they are most despised. By understanding I understand diligence and attention, appropriately understood as actuated self-knowledge, a daily acknowledgement of what is owed the dead. CXX As with the Gospels, which it is allowed to resemble, in Measure for Measure moral uplift is not the issue. Scrupulosity, diffidence, shrill spirituality, conviction, free expression, come off as poorly as deceit or lust. The ethical motiv is—so we may hazard— opportunism, redemptive and redeemed; case-hardened on case-law, casuistry’s own redemption; the general temper a caustic equity. CXXI So what is faith if it is not inescapable endurance? Unrevisited, the ferns are breast-high, head-high, the days lustrous, with their hinterlands of thunder. Light is this instant, far-seeing into itself, its own signature on things that recognize salvation. I am an old man, a child, the horizon is Traherne’s country. CXLVII To go so far with the elaborately- vested Angel of Naked Truth: and where are we, finally? Don’t say that—we are nowhere finally. And nowhere are you— nowhere are you—any more—more cryptic than a schoolyard truce. Cry Kings, Cross, or Crosses, cry Pax, cry Pax, but to be healed. But to be healed, and die! CXLVIII Obnoxious means, far back within itself, easily wounded. But vulnerable, proud anger is, I find, a related self of covetousness. I came late to seeing that. Actually, I had to be shown it. What I saw was rough, and still pains me. Perhaps it should pain me more. Pride is our crux: be angry, but not proud where that means vainglorious. Take Leopardi’s words or—to be accurate—BV’s English cast of them: when he found Tasso’s poor scratch of a memorial barely showing among the cold slabs of defunct pomp. It seemed a sad and angry consolation. So—Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem—I ask you: what are poems for? They are to console us with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch. Let us commit that to our dust. What ought a poem to be? Answer,a sad and angry consolation.

He was so tired that he was scarcely able to hear a note of the songs: he felt imprisoned in a cold region where his brain was numb and his spirit was isolated. 1 Requite this angel whose flushed and thirsting face stoops to the sacrifice out of which it arose. This is the lord Eros of grief who pities no one; it is Lazarus with his sores. 2 And you, who with your soft but 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: 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. 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. 3 Veni Redemptor, but not in our time. Christus Resurgens, quite out of this world. ‘Ave’ we cry; the echoes are returned. Amor Carnalis is our dwelling-place. 4 O light of light, supreme delight; grace on our lips to our disgrace. Time roosts on all such golden wrists; our leanness is our luxury. Our love is what we love to have; our faith is in our festivals. 5 Stupefying images of grief-in-dream, succubae to my natural grief of heart, cling to me, then; you who will not desert your love nor lose him in some blank of time. You come with all the licence of her name to tell me you are mine. But you are not and she is not. Can my own breath be hurt by breathless shadows groaning in their game? It can. The best societies of hell acknowledge this, aroused by what they know: consummate rage recaptured there in full as faithfulness demands it, blow for blow, and rectitude that mimics its own fall reeling with sensual abstinence and woe. 6 This is the ash-pit of the lily-fire, this is the questioning at the long tables, this is true marriage of the self-in-self, this is a raging solitude of desire, this is the chorus of obscene consent, this is a single voice of purest praise. 7 He wounds with ecstasy. All the wounds are his own. He wears the martyr’s crown. He is the Lord of Misrule. He is the Master of the Leaping Figures, the motley factions. Revelling in auguries he is the Weeper of the Valedictions. 8 Music survives, composing her own sphere, Angel of Tones, Medusa, Queen of the Air, and when we would accost her with real cries silver on silver thrills itself to ice.

born 19.6.32—deported 24.9.42 Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time. As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries. (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes. This is plenty. This is more than enough.

The strident high civic trumpeting of misrule. It is what we stand for. Wild insolence, aggregates without distinction. Courage of common men: spent in the ruck their remnant witness after centuries is granted them like a pardon. And other fealties other fortitudes broken as named— Respublica brokenly recalled, its archaic laws and hymnody; and destroyed hope that so many times is brought with triumph back from the dead.

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores, Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good, To sound the constitution of just wars, Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood. Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust, Their usage, pride, admitted within doors; At home, under caved chantries, set in trust, With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs They lie; they lie; secure in the decay Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted, Before the scouring fires of trial-day Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head, Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.

Sea-preserved, heaped with sea-spoils, Ribs, keels, coral sores, Detached faces, ephemeral oils, Discharged on the world’s outer shores, A dumb child-king Arrives at his right place; rests, Undisturbed, among slack serpents; beasts With claws flesh-buttered. In the gathering Of bestial and common hardship Artistic men appear to worship And fall down; to recognize Familiar tokens; believe their own eyes. Above the marvel, each rigid head, Angels, their unnatural wings displayed, Freeze into an attitude Recalling the dead.

Nothing to tell why I cannot write in re Nobody; nobody to narrate this latter acknowledgement: the self that counts words to a line, accountable survivor pain-wedged, pinioned in the cleft trunk, less petty than a sprite, poisonous as Ariel to Prospero's own knowledge. In my room a vase of peacock feathers. I will attempt to describe them, as if for evidence on which a life depends. Except for the eyes they are threadbare, the threads hanging as from a luminate tough weed in February. But those eyes—like a Greek letter, omega, fossiled in an Indian shawl; like a shaved cross section of living tissue, the edge metallic blue, the core of jet, the white of the eye in fact closer to beige, the whole encircled with a black-fringed green. The peacock roosts alone on a Scots pine at the garden end, in blustery twilight his lambent cloak stark as a warlock's cape, the maharajah-bird that scavenges close by the stone-troughed, stone-terraced, stone-ensurfed Suffolk shoreline; at times displays his scream.

non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare, solaque famosam culpa professa facit. Amores, III, xiv I love my work and my children. God Is distant, difficult. Things happen. Too near the ancient troughs of blood Innocence is no earthly weapon. I have learned one thing: not to look down So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere, Harmonize strangely with the divine Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.

Whether or not shadows are of the substance such is the expectation I can wait to surprise my vision as a wind enters the valley: sudden and silent in its arrival, drawing to full cry the whorled invisibilities, glassen towers freighted with sky-chaff; that, as barnstorming powers, rammack the small orchard; that well-steaded oaks ride stolidly, that rake the light-leafed ash, that glowing yew trees, cumbrous, heave aside. Amidst and abroad tumultuous lumina, regents, reagents, cloud-fêted, sun-ordained, fly tally over hedgerows, across fields.

Highlight Actions Enable or disable annotations 1 Cloven Cloven Divided.About the title. The book Crowds and Power(Masse und Macht[1960], translated from German) was written by Elias Canetti; it is a study of how crowd behavior (ranging from religious congregations to mob violence) relates to obedience to state rule. Canetti (1905-1994) was a Bulgarian born novelist, playwright, and non-fiction writer who wrote in German and won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1981. The second section of this poem, in italics, is a long quotation/translation from this book , we are incorporate incorporate United in one body. Compare part of one petition from the Book of Common Prayer: “and that we are very members incorporate in the mystical body of thy Son” (from The Order for the Administration of The Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion). , our wounds simple but mysterious. We have some wherewithal to bide our time on earth. Endurance is fantastic Fantastic Imaginative or fanciful; remote from reality. ; ambulances battling at intersections, the city intolerably en fête en fête French for being festive, perhaps being dressed in festive attire . My reflexes are words themselves rather than standard flexures flexures Acts of bending, such as bowing or kneeling of civil power. In all of this Cassiopeia's Cassiopeia’s Cassiopeia is both a star constellation in the northern sky, and in Greek mythology an Ethiopian queen and the mother of Andromeda; a beautiful woman, but whose vanity and arrogance led to her downfall. John Milton refers to Cassiopeia in Il Penseroso: “Or that starr’d Ethiop queen that strove / To set her beauty’s praise above / The sea nymphs, and their powers offended” (lines 19-21). a blessing as is steady Orion Orion Orion is both the easily recognized star constellation and in Greek mythology a hunter. beloved of poets beloved of poets A list of poems naming Orion includes: Milton’s Paradise Lost , Tennyson’s Locksley Hall , Teasdale’s “ Winter Stars ” , Pickthall’s “ Stars ” , Eliot’s “ Sweeney among the Nightingales ” , and Frost’s “ The Star-splitter .” . Quotidian Quotidian Daily, everyday natures ours for the time being I do not know how we should be absolved Absolved To declare someone free from blame, guilt, or responsibility; also, in Christian theology, to remit or forgive someone for a sin. or what is fate. 2 Fame is not fastidious about the lips Fame is not fastidious about the lips In A Treatise of Civil Power(2007), Geoffrey Hill notes: “section 2 is a paragraph from Elias Canetti’s chapter on ‘Fame’, transposed, with slight changes of wording, into strophic form.” For more on this book by Canetti, see the note about the title above. which spread it. So long as there are mouthsto reiterate the one name it does notmatter whose they are.The fact that to the seeker after famethey are indistinguishable from each otherand are all counted as equal shows that thispassion has its origin in the experienceof crowd manipulation. Names collecttheir own crowds. They are greedy, live their ownseparate lives, hardly at all connectedwith the real natures of the men who bear them. 3 But hear this: that which is difficult preserves democracy; you pay respect to the intelligence of the citizen. Basics are not condescension. Some tyrants make great patrons. Let us observe this and pass on. Certain directives parody at your own risk. Tread lightly with personal dignity and public image. Safeguard the image of the common man the common man There is another version of this poem, printed in Geoffrey Hill’s book A Treatise of Civil Power(2007), with a fourth section added. .