Geoffrey Hill

I King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: moneychanger: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne. ‘I liked that,’ said Offa, ‘sing it again.’ IV I was invested in mother-earth, the crypt of roots and endings. Child’s-play. I abode there, bided my time: where the mole shouldered the clogged wheel, his gold solidus; where dry-dust badgers thronged the Roman flues, the long-unlooked-for mansions of our tribe. V So much for the elves’ wergild, the true governance of England, the gaunt warrior-gospel armoured in engraved stone. I wormed my way heavenward for ages amid barbaric ivy, scrollwork of fern. Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground: my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-faced, sick on outings—I who was taken to be a king of some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one. VI The princes of Mercia were badger and raven. Thrall to their freedom, I dug and hoarded. Orchards fruited above clefts. I drank from honeycombs of chill sandstone. ‘A boy at odds in the house, lonely among brothers.’ But I, who had none, fostered a strangeness; gave myself to unattainable toys. Candles of gnarled resin, apple-branches, the tacky mistletoe. ‘Look’ they said and again ‘look.’ But I ran slowly; the landscape flowed away, back to its source. In the schoolyard, in the cloakrooms, the children boasted their scars of dried snot; wrists and knees garnished with impetigo. X He adored the desk, its brown-oak inlaid with ebony, assorted prize pens, the seals of gold and base metal into which he had sunk his name. It was there that he drew upon grievances from the people; attended to signatures and retributions; forgave the death-howls of his rival. And there he exchanged gifts with the Muse of History. What should a man make of remorse, that it might profit his soul? Tell me. Tell everything to Mother, darling, and God bless. He swayed in sunlight, in mild dreams. He tested the little pears. He smeared catmint on his palm for his cat Smut to lick. He wept, attempting to master ancilla and servus. XI Coins handsome as Nero’s; of good substance and weight.Offa Rex resonant in silver, and the names of his moneyers. They struck with accountable tact. They could alter the king’s face. Exactness of design was to deter imitation; mutilation if that failed. Exemplary metal, ripe for commerce. Value from a sparse people, scrapers of salt-pans and byres. Swathed bodies in the long ditch; one eye upstaring. It is safe to presume, here, the king’s anger. He reigned forty years. Seasons touched and retouched the soil. Heathland, new-made watermeadow. Charlock, marsh-marigold. Crepitant oak forest where the boar furrowed black mould, his snout intimate with worms and leaves. XV Tutting, he wrenched at a snarled root of dead crabapple. It rose against him. In brief cavort he was Cernunnos, the branched god, lightly concussed. He divided his realm. It lay there like a dream. An ancient land, full of strategy. Ramparts of compost pioneered by red-helmeted worms. Hemlock in ambush, night-soil, tetanus. A wasps’ nest ensconced in the hedge-bank, a reliquary or wrapped head, the corpse of Cernunnos pitching dayward its feral horns. XVI Clash of salutation. As keels thrust into shingle. Ambassadors, pilgrims. What is carried over? The Frankish gift, two-edged, regaled with slaughter. The sword is in the king’s hands; the crux a craftsman’s triumph. Metal effusing its own fragrance, a variety of balm. And other miracles, other exchanges. Shafts from the winter sun homing upon earth’s rim. Christ’s mass: in the thick of a snowy forest the flickering evergreen fissured with light. Attributes assumed, retribution entertained. What is borne amongst them? Too much or too little. Indulgences of bartered acclaim; an expenditure, a hissing. Wine, urine and ashes. XXVII ‘Now when King Offa was alive and dead’, they were all there, the funereal gleemen: papal legate and rural dean; Merovingian car-dealers, Welsh mercenaries; a shuffle of house-carls. He was defunct. They were perfunctory. The ceremony stood acclaimed. The mob received memorial vouchers and signs. After that shadowy, thrashing midsummer hail-storm, Earth lay for a while, the ghost-bride of livid Thor, butcher of strawberries, and the shire-tree dripped red in the arena of its uprooting. XXX And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk towards us             he vanished he left behind coins, for his lodging, and traces of red mud.

1 Created purely from glass the saint stands, Exposing his gifted quite empty hands Like a conjurer about to begin, A righteous man begging of righteous men. 2 In the sun lily-and-gold-coloured, Filtering the cruder light, he has endured, A feature for our regard; and will keep; Of worldly purity the stained archetype. 3 The scummed pond twitches. The great holly-tree, Emptied and shut, blows clear of wasting snow, The common, puddled substance: beneath, Like a revealed mineral, a new earth.

When snow like sheep lay in the fold And winds went begging at each door, And the far hills were blue with cold, And a cold shroud lay on the moor, She kept the siege. And every day We watched her brooding over death Like a strong bird above its prey. The room filled with the kettle’s breath. Damp curtains glued against the pane Sealed time away. Her body froze As if to freeze us all, and chain Creation to a stunned repose. She died before the world could stir. In March the ice unloosed the brook And water ruffled the sun’s hair. Dead cones upon the alder shook.

William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450 John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470 Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483 1 Processionals in the exemplary cave, Benediction of shadows. Pomfret. London. The voice fragrant with mannered humility, With an equable contempt for this world, ‘In honorem Trinitatis’. Crash. The head Struck down into a meaty conduit of blood. So these dispose themselves to receive each Pentecostal blow from axe or seraph, Spattering block-straw with mortal residue. Psalteries whine through the empyrean. Fire Flares in the pit, ghosting upon stone Creatures of such rampant state, vacuous Ceremony of possession, restless Habitation, no man’s dwelling-place. 2 For whom do we scrape our tribute of pain— For none but the ritual king? We meditate A rueful mystery; we are dying To satisfy fat Caritas, those Wiped jaws of stone. (Suppose all reconciled By silent music; imagine the future Flashed back at us, like steel against sun, Ultimate recompense.) Recall the cold Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn, Wakefield, Tewkesbury: fastidious trumpets Shrilling into the ruck; some trampled Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet, Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind’s Flurrying, darkness over the human mire. 3 They bespoke doomsday and they meant it by God, their curved metal rimming the low ridge. But few appearances are like this. Once Every five hundred years a comet’s Over-riding stillness might reveal men In such array, livid and featureless, With England crouched beastwise beneath it all. ‘Oh, that old northern business …’ A field After battle utters its own sound Which is like nothing on earth, but is earth. Blindly the questing snail, vulnerable Mole emerge, blindly we lie down, blindly Among carnage the most delicate souls Tup in their marriage-blood, gasping ‘Jesus’. 4 Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not Endure. Soul grasps its price, begs its own peace, Settles with tears and sweat, is possibly Indestructible. That I can believe. Though I would scorn the mere instinct of faith, Expediency of assent, if I dared, What I dare not is a waste history Or void rule. Averroes, old heathen, If only you had been right, if Intellect Itself were absolute law, sufficient grace, Our lives could be a myth of captivity Which we might enter: an unpeopled region Of ever new-fallen snow, a palace blazing With perpetual silence as with torches. 5 As with torches we go, at wild Christmas, When we revel in our atonement Through thirty feasts of unction and slaughter, What is that but the soul’s winter sleep? So many things rest under consummate Justice as though trumpets purified law, Spikenard were the real essence of remorse. The sky gathers up darkness. When we chant ‘Ora, ora pro nobis’ it is not Seraphs who descend to pity but ourselves. Those righteously-accused those vengeful Racked on articulate looms indulge us With lingering shows of pain, a flagrant Tenderness of the damned for their own flesh: 6 My little son, when you could command marvels Without mercy, outstare the wearisome Dragon of sleep, I rejoiced above all— A stranger well-received in your kingdom. On those pristine fields I saw humankind As it was named by the Father; fabulous Beasts rearing in stillness to be blessed. The world’s real cries reached there, turbulence From remote storms, rumour of solitudes, A composed mystery. And so it ends. Some parch for what they were; others are made Blind to all but one vision, their necessity To be reconciled. I believe in my Abandonment, since it is what I have. 7 ‘Prowess, vanity, mutual regard, It seemed I stared at them, they at me. That was the gorgon’s true and mortal gaze: Averted conscience turned against itself.’ A hawk and a hawk-shadow. ‘At noon, As the armies met, each mirrored the other; Neither was outshone. So they flashed and vanished And all that survived them was the stark ground Of this pain. I made no sound, but once I stiffened as though a remote cry Had heralded my name. It was nothing …’ Reddish ice tinged the reeds; dislodged, a few Feathers drifted across; carrion birds Strutted upon the armour of the dead. 8 Not as we are but as we must appear, Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we Desire life but as they would have us live, Set apart in timeless colloquy. So it is required; so we bear witness, Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us, Each distant sphere of harmony forever Poised, unanswerable. If it is without Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or If it is not, all echoes are the same In such eternity. Then tell me, love, How that should comfort us—or anyone Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place, Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

xxiv What is far hence led to the den of making: Moves unlike wildfire | not so simple-happy Ploughman hammers ploughshare his durum dentem

the spiritual, Platonic old England … S. T. COLERIDGE, Anima Poetae ‘Your situation’, said Coningsby, looking up the green and silent valley, ‘is absolutely poetic.’ ‘I try sometimes to fancy’, said Mr Millbank, with a rather fierce smile, ‘that I am in the New World.’ BENJAMIN DISRAELI, Coningsby 1 QUAINT MAZES And, after all, it is to them we return. Their triumph is to rise and be our hosts: lords of unquiet or of quiet sojourn, those muddy-hued and midge-tormented ghosts. On blustery lilac-bush and terrace-urn bedaubed with bloom Linnaean pentecosts put their pronged light; the chilly fountains burn. Religion of the heart, with trysts and quests and pangs of consolation, its hawk’s hood twitched off for sweet carnality, again rejoices in old hymns of servitude, haunting the sacred well, the hidden shrine. It is the ravage of the heron wood; it is the rood blazing upon the green. 2 DAMON’S LAMENT FOR HIS CLORINDA, YORKSHIRE 1654 November rips gold foil from the oak ridges. Dour folk huddle in High Hoyland, Penistone. The tributaries of the Sheaf and Don bulge their dull spate, cramming the poor bridges. The North Sea batters our shepherds’ cottages from sixty miles. No sooner has the sun swung clear above earth’s rim than it is gone. We live like gleaners of its vestiges knowing we flourish, though each year a child with the set face of a tomb-weeper is put down for ever and ever. Why does the air grow cold in the region of mirrors? And who is this clown doffing his mask at the masked threshold to selfless raptures that are all his own? 3 WHO ARE THESE COMING TO THE SACRIFICE? High voices in domestic chapels; praise; praise-worthy feuds; new-burgeoned spires that sprung crisp-leaved as though from dropping-wells. The young ferns root among our vitrified tears. What an elopement that was: the hired chaise tore through the fir-grove, scattered kinsmen flung buckshot and bridles, and the tocsin swung from the tarred bellcote dappled with dove-smears. Wires tarnish in gilt corridors, in each room stiff with the bric-a-brac of loss and gain. Love fled, truly outwitted, through a swirl of long-laid dust. Today you sip and smile though still not quite yourself. Guarding its pane the spider looms against another storm. 4 A SHORT HISTORY OF BRITISH INDIA (I) Make miniatures of the once-monstrous theme: the red-coat devotees, melees of wheels, Jagannath’s lovers. With indifferent aim unleash the rutting cannon at the walls of forts and palaces; pollute the wells. Impound the memoirs for their bankrupt shame, fantasies of true destiny that kills ‘under the sanction of the English name’. Be moved by faith, obedience without fault, the flawless hubris of heroic guilt, the grace of visitation; and be stirred by all her god-quests, her idolatries, in conclave of abiding injuries, sated upon the stillness of the bride. 5 A SHORT HISTORY OF BRITISH INDIA (II) Suppose they sweltered here three thousand years patient for our destruction. There is a greeting beyond the act. Destiny is the great thing, true lord of annexation and arrears. Our law-books overrule the emperors. The mango is the bride-bed of light. Spring jostles the flame-tree. But new mandates bring new images of faith, good subahdars! The flittering candles of the wayside shrines melt into dawn. The sun surmounts the dust. Krishna from Radha lovingly untwines. Lugging the earth, the oxen bow their heads. The alien conscience of our days is lost among the ruins and on endless roads. 6 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. Gone the ascetic pastimes, the Persian scholarship, the wild boar run to ground, the watercolours of the sun and wind. Names rise like outcrops on the rich terrain, like carapaces of the Mughal tombs lop-sided in the rice-fields, boarded-up near railway-crossings and small aerodromes. ‘India’s a peacock-shrine next to a shop selling mangola, sitars, lucky charms, heavenly Buddhas smiling in their sleep.’ 7 LOSS AND GAIN Pitched high above the shallows of the sea lone bells in gritty belfries do not ring but coil a far and inward echoing out of the air that thrums. Enduringly, fuchsia-hedges fend between cliff and sky; brown stumps of headstones tamp into the ling the ruined and the ruinously strong. Platonic England grasps its tenantry where wild-eyed poppies raddle tawny farms and wild swans root in lily-clouded lakes. Vulnerable to each other the twin forms of sleep and waking touch the man who wakes to sudden light, who thinks that this becalms even the phantoms of untold mistakes. 8 VOCATIONS While friends defected, you stayed and were sure, fervent in reason, watchful of each name: a signet-seal’s unostentatious gem gleams against walnut on the escritoire, focus of reckoning and judicious prayer. This is the durable covenant, a room quietly furnished with stuff of martyrdom, lit by the flowers and moths from your own shire, by silvery vistas frothed with convolvulus; radiance of dreams hardly to be denied. The twittering pipistrelle, so strange and close, plucks its curt flight through the moist eventide; the children thread among old avenues of snowberries, clear-calling as they fade. 9 THE LAUREL AXE Autumn resumes the land, ruffles the woods with smoky wings, entangles them. Trees shine out from their leaves, rocks mildew to moss-green; the avenues are spread with brittle floods. Platonic England, house of solitudes, rests in its laurels and its injured stone, replete with complex fortunes that are gone, beset by dynasties of moods and clouds. It stands, as though at ease with its own world, the mannerly extortions, languid praise, all that devotion long since bought and sold, the rooms of cedar and soft-thudding baize, tremulous boudoirs where the crystals kissed in cabinets of amethyst and frost. 10 FIDELITIES Remember how, at seven years, the decrees were brought home: child-soul must register for Christ’s dole, be allotted its first Easter, blanch-white and empty, chilled by the lilies, betrothed among the well-wishers and spies. Reverend Mother, breakfastless, could feast her constraint on terracotta and alabaster and brimstone and the sweets of paradise. Theology makes good bedside reading. Some who are lost covet scholastic proof, subsistence of probation, modest balm. The wooden wings of justice borne aloof, we close our eyes to Anselm and lie calm. All night the cisterns whisper in the roof. 11 IDYLLS OF THE KING The pigeon purrs in the wood; the wood has gone; dark leaves that flick to silver in the gust, and the marsh-orchids and the heron’s nest, goldgrimy shafts and pillars of the sun. Weightless magnificence upholds the past. Cement recesses smell of fur and bone and berries wrinkle in the badger-run and wiry heath-fern scatters its fresh rust. ‘O clap your hands’ so that the dove takes flight, bursts through the leaves with an untidy sound, plunges its wings into the green twilight above this long-sought and forsaken ground, the half-built ruins of the new estate, warheads of mushrooms round the filter-pond. 12 THE EVE OF ST MARK Stroke the small silk with your whispering hands, godmother; nod and nod from the half-gloom; broochlight intermittent between the fronds, the owl immortal in its crystal dome. Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill, the clock discounts us with a telling chime. Familiar ministrants, clerks-of-appeal, burnish upon the threshold of the dream: churchwardens in wing-collars bearing scrolls of copyhold well-tinctured and well-tied. Your photo-albums loved by the boy-king preserve in sepia waterglass the souls of distant cousins, virgin till they died, and the lost delicate suitors who could sing. 13 THE HEREFORDSHIRE CAROL So to celebrate that kingdom: it grows greener in winter, essence of the year; the apple-branches musty with green fur. In the viridian darkness of its yews it is an enclave of perpetual vows broken in time. Its truth shows disrepair, disfigured shrines, their stones of gossamer, Old Moore’s astrology, all hallows, the squire’s effigy bewigged with frost, and hobnails cracking puddles before dawn. In grange and cottage girls rise from their beds by candlelight and mend their ruined braids. Touched by the cry of the iconoclast, how the rose-window blossoms with the sun!