Geoffrey Hill and “Platonic old England”

England surprises Geoffrey Hill, most often because it disappoints, but sometimes for reasons that are more sublimely moving:

XXXII

Black, broken-wattled, hedges appear

thinned through, fields an irregular patchwork,

the snow businesslike. I can record

these elements, this bleak satiety:

accustomed ratios of shine to shadow

reversed; inflected when not reversed.

Closer to nightfall the surface light is low-toned.

This is England; ah, love, you must see that;

her nature sensing its continuum

with the Beatific Vision. Atemwende,

breath-fetch, the eye no more deceived,

beggars translation. Her decencies

Stand bare, not barely stand. In the skeletal

Orchards of Syon are flowers

long vanished; I will consult their names.

Climate, gravity, featherlight aesthetics,

pull us down. The extremities of life

draw together. This last embodiment

indefinitely loaned, not quite

the creator’s dying gift regardless.

Clear sky, the snow bare-bright. Loud, peat-sodden,

the swaling Hodder. Of itself

age has no pull. Be easy. With immense

labour he can call it a day.

England announces its presence, out of and within the landscape, like an emanation in Blake. It happens. Hill is on a walk, feeling the age of his body. The landscape is resistant (“broken-wattled” mends with a hyphen what is not a natural fit), it arrives to his vision (“hedges appear”) as if out of a void (of the blank of the page at the line-ending), but then resolves into something less rich than he might have assumed (“thinned through” where the preposition is porous in the phrase, leaving open what has done the thinning or what the thinning shows), something almost comical (an “irregular patchwork” is particolored like a clown’s garb), and then distantly humdrum (“businesslike”). As if steadying himself, assuring himself, he states, a first-person affirmation: “I can record.” With the line-break, it is a general statement: he can record anything at all, the blank filled by whatever he happens to perceive, and “these elements” only somewhat specifying, “elements” being both weather but also the elements that compose the natural world, elements capable of making up anything at all. Yet the description of this haggard landscape is rich: a “bleak satiety.” There is something fulfilled even in the landscape, at least as he has seen it and said what he sees. We don’t know what the “accustomed ratios of shine to shadow” are, but that they are accustomed shows the journey to be habitual, or the place at least familiar; that they are “reversed” seems to make no difference, a line-turn without a turn despite the word. When not reversed, “inflected,” a word that, like “ratio,” suggests a coolly measuring eye, with a precision that carries into the next line: “closer to nightfall the surface light is low-toned.” This line is itself low-toned, utterly without drama as it takes stock of where it is and when; it would be matter-of-fact except the significance is more than factual: “This is England.” From the “surface light,” Hill moves to the depths of “this.” “This” takes in all of the light and land that has come before, and then implores the sense that is illuminated by illumination: “ah, love, you must see that.” The italics strain within the line, a muscular effort exhorting the sight of another to do more than it might be capable of doing, but also an effort to stop the other from trying to take England in by some other way than sight: its real self is apprehended with sensuous immediacy. But the italics also ask that we engage visually with the poem itself, seeing it as well as hearing it; they also demand the voice stretch beyond the limits we might impose. By refusing to let us say the line naturally, the italics register a break in nature akin to the presence of something spiritual breaking through the landscape.

The italics are especially unusual here because they are repeated two lines later with Atewende, where they are justified by the non-English linguistic element, the word from Paul Celan that is translated “breath-fetch” in this poem. There is interference between these two uses of italics, so that they are made to mark not only the emphasis on “see,” but the foreignness of the word—or the foreignness of the act of seeing itself, something that, like “Atemwende,” stops language. This is a poem that presents sight in a way that is unlike how most of us know it, and the focalized “see,” italicized and alien, arrives as an urging and imploring for what is immediate before the poet. “This” gestures at a presence that cannot be specified with any particular aspect or element of the landscape, but that is all of it and greater than the sum of what can be seen and said. 

“Atemwende,” translated as “breath-fetch,” “beggars translation,” not because the German can find no home in English but because it is a word that gets at a faltering of any language, a catching of breath; language peeled away, the eye can see, “no more deceived.” But the poem does not proclaim a naïve visionary empiricism: it is by means of language that we can apprehend a limit beyond which something presses, as it presses on Hill bodily in the catch of the breath. Perception reaches its limit in language that marks, but cannot articulate, what pushes against it. The description "Clear sky, the snow bare-bright. Loud, peat-sodden, / the swaling Hodder" doesn't exhaust what's seen, but begins to enter into the richness of its appearance.

The nation here is an aesthetic experience, impinging on the present because the place—the named place, not the physical land—has a name, Syon, that carries within it two histories, the Biblical Zion and the English of Syon House in Brentford, which intertwine to look ahead to a future where England is redeemed (like Blake’s Jerusalem). The poem brings this knowledge, this meaning, to the landscape.

In The Orchards of Syon, Hill finds in a familiar landscape something different from it, alien to it, unnatural because more-than-natural: invested by an energy that changes its significance. This animating, altering energy is not “something given” (as in Wordsworth’s “Resolution and Independence”) but something “indefinitely loaned,” as the body could be said to be on loan to the spirit for the duration of a life (as its final extremities near), or as the earthly Syon (England) borrows its promise from the heavenly Zion. 

There is no English poet in the twentieth century who can reach out and bring into poetry, stilling them our apprehension, the energies of nature that are both aesthetic and numinous, transcendent and immanent. In this, he is the heir to Hopkins, not least when the poetry registers their force so as to attest to the irremovable core of selfhood. And much more than Hopkins, Hill extends his poetry to the self-consciousness of history, national, European, and more broadly cosmopolitan. 

Hill’s most unabatedly aesthetic work is The Orchards of Syon. But his extraordinary aesthetic power has intersected with his political imagination throughout his career. Some twenty years prior to The Orchards of Syon, “An Apology for Revival of Christian Architecture in England,” appeared in 1978’s collection Tenebrae. The ninth poem in the sequence is “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.

“Platonic England” is not Hill’s phrase. He borrows it from Coleridge, whose Anima Poetae provides an epigraph to the sequence: “the spiritual, Platonic old England.” What makes this poem work in its invocation of so Romantic a conception of the nation is that it is ambivalently situated in the luscious descriptions. “Rests in its laurels” comes close to “rests on its laurels,” but the difference in prepositions is enormous: “in” suggests it hides, or it wears the laurels, and is at rest; “in” attaches also to “its injured stone,” and the line approaches a Zeugma, since resting “in its laurels” and resting “in its injured stone” are not quite parallel, resting in “injured stone” evoking a retired aristocrat confined to a manor, but also a platonic nation inhabiting the stone itself, injured by what has been built from it. 

The question that the poem leaves unanswered is whether “Platonic England” remains—as in the vision of the landscape in The Orchards of Syon—integral to the landscape, whether it “rests” temporarily or is at rest in “injured stone” as if in a tomb. “Injured” has two meanings: “in jure” and “harmed.” “In jure” suggests that the stone is England, or England’s is the stone’s, by right; “harmed” suggests that the stone where Platonic England rests has been harmed, and the memory it embodies whether it is a mausoleum or a residence—likewise harmed. Is the injured stone of the house necessarily? Might it not be the injured stone of the house? And is the house itself the house of solitudes, or is the house depicted in the final two tercets one of the “solitudes” that the larger house of England contains? This proliferation of readings is not a failure of the verse to orient semantic fields; instead, it is testimony to the difficulty of locating Platonic England, and the possibility of finding it in generation and decay, in waste and abundance, in sclerotic, inherited solitude and the enduring landscape. It is at odds with itself, unsure of its own world.

The jostling meanings deny the “rest” an ease. “Replete with fortunes that are gone” similarly empties its own significance: well-supplied with the memories alone, so that even the Platonic nation has been thinned out. The rest is uneasy, and it stands not truly but “as if at ease with its own world,” where “own” is grasping, possessive, and also diminished, smaller than it might be. It is certainly insular, an island insulated by the memories of the Empire, addressed explicitly in other poems in the sequence. In the sonnet’s final tercet its “own world” narrows further to a private space that is frigid, mannered, and brittle in its eroticism; the “brittle floods” have been refigured. Everything is closed in, contained in a cabinet or muffled by baize, and though the room is tremulous, this anxiety and quivering life is made a part of its inanimate stasis, rather than any generative potential; only the glasses kiss behind the amethyst glass. “Frost” is the final word: it refers to frosted glass, but also to the frigid air of the room, and to winter, where the poem closes after its magnificently autumnal opening. 

The poem is achingly lyrical throughout, but the ache of the opening quatrain is the ache of life stirring in its decay. Byy the poem’s end, the lyricism aches with nervous solitude and the shudder of loneliness. The difference is evident in the line-endings: in the first quatrain, the lines are enjambed, the syntax pouring over, the lines and clauses “entangled,” the chaos of fertility sits among it but does not participate in it. The other stanzas are without the energies of those enjambments, or the energies of the land. The “brittle floods” do not so much anticipate the brittle crystal of the final stanza as they contrast with it: the brittle surface of the floodwaters (is Dickens’ Bleak House with the flooded Lincolnshire estate of the Leicester family in Hill’s sights?) utterly unlike the brittleness of the boudoir. In the first stanza, the poetry participates in the sensuous growth of the fall of the year, allowing itself its own disorder and excess; in the next three stanzas, it walks with measured step, mannered and mindful not to break what cannot sustain such fecund energies as the landscape inspires.

In this sequence, Hill perfects and expands the reach of the high-wrought, semantically dense (rich in ambiguities) language that was developed by the New Critical poets—Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and early Robert Lowell—in the wake of Eliot especially. The body of techniques developed by these poets provides Hill with a way to balance competing judgments about Platonic England, both redeeming and critiquing the notion. That he does so with a conscious revival of the verbal textures and descriptive ranges of Tennyson, Hardy, and Hopkins allows for him to cast the Platonic England as both an inheritance from and delusion of the poetry of the Victorian era: Platonic England is something most keenly, if imperfectly, alive in the energy generated by their verse. Tennyson lives with special force in the eleventh poem of the sequence. The title invokes his epic about King Arthur, Idylls of the King, a poem marred not only by its narrative inertia and drift but also by its lack of self-scrutiny about the vague idealization it carries forward; Tennyson’s is a poem that fails to adequately apprehend its subject, but that nonetheless possesses many of the beauties of Tennyson’s verse. Hill makes something good of this vitiating divide between Tennyson’s realized poem and the possibility for more that flickers across its lines, making his poem a conscious diagnosis of the divide, aware of what it reveals:

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.

Pigeons don’t not purr, but cats definitely do, with satisfaction over dead mice or birds, and so right away, something is wrong: even though a cooing pigeon can be heard as a purr, the pigeon purring is cat-like in its smug contentedness. Then the wood has gone, a variation of the motifs of loss and gain that thread through the sequence, except that rather than a squandered inheritance, the loss is a transfiguration, a play of light on sight: “dark leaves that flick to silver in the gust.” It’s a trick, it’s a flickering of light, it’s rapid and nonchalant and overwhelming in its power. The wood seems no longer to be the wood as the trees turn over, becoming something else, lost to sight before it calibrates. Throughout the sequence, Hill glimpses the power beyond earthly powers, and he finds it here in a natural phenomenon that affects a supernatural end. The description broadens but “and the marsh-orchids and the heron’s nest” simply appears; they govern no verb, and their action is simply existence or appearance before Hill, illuminated by the “goldgrimy shafts and pillars of the sun.” With this fourth line of the sonnet, something shifts: grime enters and pillars entail architecture. Although it is meant here to be an architecture surpassing human artifice (the tree trunks illuminated, the beams of sun descending down), the pillars anticipate the construction zone that will emerge clearly in the final stanza.

It's worth jumping there now to see where the poem will go, to better appreciate how it sustains two arcs over its course, each pressing on the other but never collapsing together: 

above this long-sought and forsaken ground,   

the half-built ruins of the new estate,

warheads of mushrooms round the filter-pond.

If we have this in mind as the poem’s end and re-read, the question that rises is whether the vision of the wood in the first line is nothing but pure fantasy, whether the true anchor of that opening stanza is “the wood has gone,” already replaced by “the half-built ruins of the new estate,” which we can take to be a public housing estate of the 1970s, an aborted product of urban planning, with the decay enlarging to the nightmare of global proportions with the “warheads of mushrooms.” “Round” means “around” but also comes to seems a verb, the active rounding of a circle: the “filter-pond” contains waste, but might, like the poem, filter it, to something as balanced and perfect as a circle, a pure geometric form in the desecrated landscape. This is ironic, but it is, like any good irony, true to some extent in both directions: the landscape is desecrated, but there is something about it that allows for an imaginative repair of what has been lost, and this is what we can see in the first stanza, if we believe that Hill is conjuring woods that are entirely desecrated. And we can also make better sense of the pigeon purring: it is in fact a cat that purrs, transfigured imaginatively into a pigeon. 

Hill’s greatness as a poet is of a piece with the greatness of any poet: a discovery of new energies in the medium of language to register the energies of the world, and the ability to set words in a form whose possibilities of balance, proportion, and wholeness serve as a scale against which those energies can be contrasted and gauged. In this poem, the past is balanced against and within the present; it is given a life through Hill’s imagination, but it is countered consistently by the raw edge of recognition of how far the present has come from the past, even as the imagination shows its power in asserting what might have once been. But the present denies Hill the ease of recovery, prevents him from being lost in a swoon to a past that perhaps is no more real than Tennyson’s “Idylls of the King.” “Weightless magnificence upholds the past” is a boast and a self-indictment, the “weightless magnificence” might be the pillars of sunlight, breaking through the scene to uphold something now absent, the imagination fulfilling its potential to bring what-is-not into union with what-is. The pillars also might be myth and language, whose weightlessness reveals that any past they uphold must itself be weightless, a mirage. The thrust of “upholds,” idealizing and hopeful, even if as empty as the air, is countered by the weight and confinement of “cement recesses,” containing the remnants of rodents and scavengers. And yet, even within this, Hill forages: “berries wrinkle in the badger-run” is not entirely lifeless, because “wrinkle” is active, and the last line asserts nature’s generative presence however small and limited it might be: “wiry heath-fern scatters its fresh rust.” This is beautiful in the doubleness that it holds in equilibrium: “wiry” is not wire and rust is not “fresh” like growth, and “scatters” suggests sowing or seeding. At the same time the “heath-fern” seems “wiry” and seems to “scatter its fresh rust” because the dominant manufactured decay pulls the language within its semantic field: the life is made to participate in it, rather than to overcome it. 

“‘O clap your hands’” is from Psalm 47 set to music by Orlando Gibbons in 1620 and Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1920, as well as John Rutter in 1973, shortly before this[JS1]  was published; it has a presence in British life. It’s a Psalm of joyful praise (in all three of the versions this is heard; they differ mostly in how much serenity they incorporate), and this hopeful note rises over the final sestet, before it ends in the image of apocalyptic mushrooms rounding the filter-drain. The point of the arc moving from the Psalm to the filter-drain is not to bring the poem back to the earth, but to allow the Psalm to rise above the “long-sought and forsaken ground.” Even if that ground is the poem’s resting place, the penultimate sestet looks to a height that, if it remains only a promise, provides hope. The pigeon, which the poem’s evolving imagery has allowed us to recognize as the urban-dwelling bird dismissed as a pest, is recognized here instead as what it also is: a member of the dove family. “‘O clap your hands’” is not only the Psalm but a boisterous cry, the hands clapped to echo through the half-finished building, to rouse the pigeon to flight. It ascends through foliage, which I take to be real, even if it is not the full foliage of the wood. We can assume the imagination is at work through the peculiar “green twilight” of the final stanza. Even if the twilight has been rendered green by the leaves, the word itself feels like an allusion to the late-Victorian notes of Wallace Stevens, the world made real by imaginative freedom. Stevens’ “Sunday Morning” is relevant, its opening section mentioning “the green freedom of a cockatoo” and its final stanza’s famous image of “casual flocks of pigeons” that “make | Ambiguous undulations as they sink| Downward to darkness on extended wings.” Hill’s poem undulates ambiguously, not least in the word “plunges” which reorients the pigeon’s flight so that even as it flies up, it seems to move down. It is not a perverse image because “plunges its wings” can mean that it thrusts its wings downward into the twilight as it flies up, but the word nonetheless lines up with the various markers of gravity-falling words, against the pillars and flight: in this way, the pigeon is held in suspense in the language, rising and falling at once, weightless and weighted. It’s the same suspense that exists between “long-sought” and “forsaken” or “half-built” and “ruins,” between past and present, between imagination and reality, between hope and despair, between delusion and redemption, and between promise and deception, which the poem resolves only in its formal poise, as if both remain possibilities not yet determined by the course of the nation’s history.

Nearly twenty years later, Hill published the first collection in what some view as the start of the late phase of his career. This collection, Canaan, from 1996, can also be set against Orchards of Syon, The Triumph of Love, and Speech!. Speech!as a middle period before the later flurry of works in the twenty-first century, some of which were unpublished until the collected poems (ed. Kenneth Haynes) appeared. In these collections, Hill writes from more open extremes: of despair, of indignation, of yearning and awe, with despair and indignation most often being provoked by the hollow rhetoric, historical amnesia, and hypocrisy of England and Europe: 

Respublica

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.

In its taut lineation, this is utterly unlike the poems we have seen. The effect of the shortened lines is double. On the one hand, the incessant enjambments register resistance, both from the language and to the language, both to the poet and from the poet, as if Hill is exhausted, as if the language is exhausted, as if the language is too heavy, as if the circumstances press too hard on the poem, leaving it barely able to clear out space for itself. On the other hand, the poem is perfectly even, each stanza consisting of a four syllable line, followed by two five syllable lines, and then a final four syllable line; Hill is in total control, the enjambments serve the form he has determined, which is intended to break the syntax into units of meaning that alienate them from their habitual dullness. 

This is a poem about memory: “Respublica” is a dead term, but an idea we expect to see alive in our institutions, though for Hill it is dead there too; it is an inheritance that we have squandered, a term that needs to be rendered in a foreign language because the ideal has become estranged from our reality. At its center though is an ambivalence about the lifeblood of a republic: the demos, the mass of men and women who are betrayed and set to “wild insolence” by those in power. They are remembered and reckoned with politically as “aggregates | without distinction” where “distinction” cuts deep, the distinction of honors (in Bourdieu’s sense of the word) but also the “distinction” of difference that honors one person from another. Their courage is what is impossible to truly know through historical memory, and their courage is consistently invoked, but not honored; it is exploited. “Spent in the ruck” is time spent in the ruck, as if by volition, and also “spent” as exhausted and wasted. “Ruck” is a rugby scrum but also just the masses, and as coming as near to “courage” as it does, it suggests also the ruck of the battlefield, and the muck of the trenches in the Great War, or any number of battles fought and forgotten before that. Most devastating as an indictment and most important for this poem is what follows: their “remnant witness | after centuries | is granted them|| like a pardon.” “Granted” as if it were not theirs to begin with but granted also as a redeeming act or[JS2]  forgiveness. All of us no doubt could do with some redeeming and forgiveness, but Hill’s objection is different: it is that witness that is rightfully theirs, because true, is “granted,” [JS3] and it is granted with a moral force that is unwarranted. Bearing witness has no moral quality in itself: bearing witness might follow from an act of courage or it might not. The muddle he diagnoses is deep. “Other” in “other fealties” and “other fortitudes” dramatizes rhetoric too lazy to specify, but also registers exasperation, as if Hill cannot bear to fully reckon with, wrestle against, language that is “broken as named,” so broken that it cannot be responsibly named by Hill in the poem. Then the break of the dash, the leap to the word that is the poem’s center of semantic gravity: “Respublica” or is it “res publica”? In classical Rome, the latter; during the Renaissance, the former (though Milton, it’s worth mentioning, usually wrote it as two words). But the question of whether this is one word or two is not irrelevant when it is “brokenly recalled.” “Brokenly” suggests both that the act of recollection is broken and that what is recalled is broken; even the difference of spellings suggests something fractured in what the word has been and meant. This is not a failure of the word, but its condition, and “brokenly recalled” can be read as the first stirring of hope against the despair that dominated the earlier stanzas: “respublica” cannot but be recalled “brokenly,” but what matters is that it is recalled. This is not the sole reading, but it is one against darker, more pessimistic possibilities. It’s the fate of republics to destroy the hope they inspire. The final lines of the poem resolve despair into resolution that permits something less than hope: “that so many times” is weary but also cause to believe it can be done again. “Brought with triumph | back from the dead” cuts in several directions: a miraculous revival can take place, but it would still feel like a miracle, something breaking the order of things; the triumph would be real, but whose triumph would it be, whose power would be celebrated and celebrating; and a “triumph” was, for the Romans, the entry march for a victorious general, suggesting grimly that if “respublica” were to be brought back from the dead, it would be as a conquered prisoner rather than a freely living ideal.

Geoffrey Hill died on June 30, 2016, one week after the Brexit resolution. Broken Hierarchies, collecting his poems from 1952-2012, had been published in 2013. It was taken, at the time, to be the final collection of his career. There was some surprise, therefore, when 2019 saw the posthumous release of a final collection, a sequence of poems in a form of Hill’s invention: The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin. It is one of the finest works of his career. The poems in it were written and collected in the manner of the “Daybooks,” the volumes of poetry that first appeared in Broken Hierarchies,and the classification of which suggests they were written and collected in order of composition. By this logic, the final poem of The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin was the final poem Hill wrote, and it is a poem that takes in the shock of Brexit, placing its composition between June 24 and June 30, likely nearer to the former, perhaps on the 24th itself, given the immediacy of the event it suggests:

271      

The numbness after the shock of exit, big-bummed Brittania in her tracksuit; her phantom 

lap of honour; no other runner.

July the dark month; the lime leaves turned matt. The newly-bloomed mallow will see us 

re-autumned before it falls fallow.

Even so, the power of stout roses has risen by watt by watt against the afterglow of each 

brief thunder-shower.

Not Brexit as national tragedy but Brexit as national farce: “big-bummed Brittania” running a lap of honour on her own behalf, having won a race in which there are no other runners. Hill’s nation was never “little Britain,” the provincial nationalism of which he long deplored; it was instead a nation that stood among a history of Europe and other nations beyond, his poetry finding solidarity and honoring those who sought to redeem the promise of their national spirits (their Platonic shadows), who were exiled abroad or estranged within its borders, and who saw the injustices of its past and present against the ideal self it persistently held forth. As so often, here in the final poem of his career, that ideal self is figured forth in the landscape that contains more than it can show and that is interpreted by the poem’s description. With “re-autumned,” autumn resumes her place in Hill’s poetry, the rhythm of seasonal change bearing out against the whirligigs of history. But “Even so” suggests something is akilter: despite the inevitable coming-on of autumn, some power rises, and the “power of stout roses” rises in menace, power being taken quite literally as an electrical field, charged by “watts” in the thunder showers. Behind “roses” there might be the Lancastrian rose, but the vibrancy of the image does not depend on the historical connection as much as it depends on vibrancy itself: the rose is an icon of icons, a symbol of symbols, and it shows itself with an intensity of power that remains for poets to apprehend. Even so, something remains to be claimed by the sensuous expression of poetry, as simple and passionate in its faith as it is in its distress—perplexed by how both are possible at once.