gareth reeves
ashes.’^17 Theselines (from the first of ‘Two Formal Elegies: For the Jews in Europe’)
intensely involve despair and exhilaration: syntactically, what is ‘bedded’ is both
acceptance of violence and also the song made possible by that acceptance. This is
Swiftian satire at its most biting and truth telling: our highest achievements are the
bright side of darkest human nature. Hill’s poetry would give voice to the silent dead,
but is all the time conscious that in so doing it relives and resurrects the atrocity
buried with them. ‘Artistic men prod dead men from their stone’ (‘Of Commerce
and Society 4’);^18 and the Auschwitz death camp continues to have a fantasy half-life
in the way it is remembered and memorialized: ‘a fable|Unbelievable in fatted
marble’, where ‘unbelievable’ mixes scornful irascibility and colloquial disbelief in a
way that comprehends the gamut of incredulity, in a dense utterance characteristic
of Hill’s poetry (marble monument, marbled flesh). Both the story and its memorial
are beyond comprehension.
Davie accused Hill’s poetry of ‘set[ting] up an equation in which one side cancels
out the other, leaving us with an ironic zero’;^19 but the antithesis of an ironic zero
is an ironic plenitude, and that is just as trueof Hill’s poetry. The plain, even stark,
style of Hill’s ‘September Song’ (1968) contains a knotted and knotty message.
Acutely reticent at the same time as acutely confessional, it is inscrutable in its
locked-in emotions. It accuses itself of getting poetic mileage out of its subject even
as it does so; it is self-indulgent even as it reprimands itself for self-indulgence; it
scrutinizes its own conscience. The victim ‘deported’—and in the context this word
conjures up ‘departed’—to the death camp was born in the same year, 1932, as Hill,
but the poet is still alive to write the poem. The speaker’s consequent guilt comes
across in the central but ostentatiously parenthetical sentence ‘(I have made|an
elegy for myself it|is true)’^20 —central in its position in the poem, and central to the
poem’s emotional complex, parenthetical because bracketed and parenthetical to
what the poem is supposed to be about: not the poet, but the victim. That sentence,
seemingly forthright, is, like every other phrase in the poem, double-edged: ‘In
making this elegy I please myself merely,’ and ‘I have made an elegy that turns out
to be anticipating my own death’—not just because the poet shares the same birth
year as the victim, but because all elegies have this about them. They all say, ‘it could
have been me’; they all imply the poet’s own mortality (as one of the greatest English
elegies, Milton’sLycidas, demonstrates). But ‘it|is true’ not only that the poet has
written all these guilt-ridden things, but also that in so writing, in so confessing, he
has written truly: it is a true poem because it implicates the elegist in the elegy he
is writing. It is also true in its chillingly unsentimental evocation of the mechanical
efficiency of the mass slaughter. But to describe death from the perspective of one
(^17) Geoffrey Hill, ‘Two Formal Elegies 1’, inCollected Poems(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 30.
(^18) Hill, ‘Of Commerce and Society 4’, ibid. 49.
(^19) Davie,Under Briggflatts: A History of Poetry in Great Britain 1960–1988(Manchester: Carcanet,
1989), 247.
(^20) Hill, ‘September Song’, inCollected Poems, 67.