quiet americans Larkinesque references to the swinging Sixties here. It is, however, a book full of
dates—but it is conspicuous that none of the dates accompanying the poems falls
later than 1945 (excepting the ‘penitential exercise’ included in the ‘postscript’^15 ),
giving it an instantly memorial quality. At the centre of it is ‘Funeral Music’, Hill’s
vision of the Wars of the Roses—not as they were but as they must appear—which
is also a vision of the dead and dying of two World Wars—in relation to the precise
agonies of any instant of which ‘all echoes are the same’.^16 Inthisrespectitcould
be said to recall Orson Welles’s virtually contemporaneous staging of the Battle of
Shrewsbury inChimes at Midnight(1966), in which even the lovable Falstaff looms
unrecognizably towards us encased in metal like some hideous autochthonous First
World War tank.
All through the book the poet stares fixedly behind him, as if forced despite
himself to emulate Walter Benjamin’s Angel of history—then catching himself,
with his mouth open, in that now grotesque pose. ‘If the ground opens, should
men’s mouths|open also?’, he asks (in ‘Four Poems Regarding the Endurance of
Poets’,^17 the first of which bears the title ‘Men Are a Mockery of Angels’). In poem
after poem, poets or poetry (I list some of Hill’s verbs) ‘regard’, ‘survey’, ‘recognize’,
‘gaze at’, ‘look down’ upon (or try ‘not to look down’ upon), are variously ‘dazzled
by’ and ‘bear witness’ to the innumerable ‘strange-postured dead’, as if these ‘had
Finison their brows’; as if dyingwerean art; and as if tragedy were not ‘Feasting
on this, reaching its own end’.^18 The book plays endlessly on the rich array of
similarities and differences between being finished as a human being, finished off,
before you feel you are finished (‘Crying to the end ‘‘I have not finished’’ ’,^19 in the
formidable closing line of ‘Funeral Music’), dying while your life feels as though
it is still in mid-sentence, or, if you’re a poet, before your pen has glean’d your
teaming brain, and the way works of art are finished—the way a poem is moved
‘grudgingly’, for instance, to its ‘extreme form’.^20 The poet is warmed by the sight
of the dead, he flatters himself that he is animated by it: ‘It seemed I stared at
them, they at me’;^21 whereas he is not so much animated as, as he said, unfinished.
So when, in his inauthentic way, the poet ‘gaze[s] at the authentic dead’,^22 he is
treating them like works of art, as if they had had some say in how all this came to
pass, like John Tiptoft whom he imagines creating ‘the tableau of his own death’.^23
‘So these dispose themselves,’ he writes in ‘Funeral Music’.^24 But as this baroquely
self-conscious poetry constantly reminds us, the dead have as much right as the
living to be recognized for what they mostly are: inauthentic, bastardized, given up,
(^15) Hill, ‘In Memory of Jane Fraser’, inKing Log(London: Andr ́e Deutsch, 1968), 69–70.
(^16) Hill, ‘Funeral Music 8’, inCollected Poems, 77.
(^17) Hill, ‘Four Poems Regarding the Endurance of Poets’, ibid. 78–81.
(^18) Hill, ‘Tristia: 1891–1938’, ibid. 81. (^19) Hill, ‘Funeral Music 8’, 77.
(^20) Hill, ‘Three Baroque Meditations 2’, ibid. 90. (^21) Hill, ‘Funeral Music 7’, ibid. 76.
(^22) Hill, ‘A Letter from Armenia’, in ‘The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz’, ibid. 99.
(^23) Hill, ‘Funeral Music: An Essay’, ibid. 200. (^24) Hill, ‘Funeral Music 1’, ibid. 70.