quiet americans ‘England’ in ‘Little Gidding’ recalls the patriotic rhetoric ofHenryV(which does
not mean that this Anglophile quiet American wasn’t leading his readers, in true
Symbolist fashion, up the garden path), but Hill takes us closer to the blood-strewn
worlds ofHenry IV andHenry VI. In this world all wars are civil. Death and
suffering are things we inflict on one another, on the human being who is next to
us, not on a bunch of foreign extras.
In this context, Hill’s shrieks, grunts, jokes, and blasphemies are also, crucially, an
approximation, amid so much pompous elaboration, to poetry as a Wordsworthian
speech-act. Here is a man who would be speaking to a man if he were not ‘gasping
‘‘Jesus’’ ’; if he were not in the middle of being slaughtered on a battlefield and
‘Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place’.^33 Even the jargon of the history
primer, of the TV commentator (‘Oh, that old northern business...’^34 )can,ifyou
come across it at the right moment, seem to speak on behalf of history, especially
against a background of poetry, which is to say a background of silence. It is within
these limits that Hill manages, as few poets writing in English have managed since,
to splice together accessible commonplace speech, language that seems to talk to us,
and the difficult radiance of self-conscious modernism, language that seems to talk
to itself: ‘A field|After battle utters its own sound|Which is like nothing on earth,
but is earth.’^35 Whereas Eliot’s punning conjunction of ‘England and nowhere’
is meant to vaporize the earth (a battlefield becomes something as nebulous as a
‘field of action’),^36 Hill’s several puns on ‘nothing’ would bring us back down to
it: they confront us with the earth, with something like insistence (‘but is earth’).
The book’s constant images of earth and fields, too close in sometimes, rubbing
our noses in it, or the language of it, seem bound to recall the trenches, still vivid
to us from the poetry of the First World War. And just as the trenches became
identified with poppies, so inKing Logthe air seems to be thick, almost heavy, with
a profusion of plants and flowers, far in excess of Eliot’s scentless rose.
Basil Bunting’s career might have been dreamed up in the pages of a Graham
Greene novel. He finished school towards the end of the First World War, but
as a Quaker, he refused to be drafted and was incarcerated, as a conscientious
objector, in Wormwoods Scrubs. Between the wars he knocked about Europe,
studied languages, wrote poetry, raised a family, learned sailing. By the time the
Second World War broke out, he was eager to enlist. Because of his knowledge of
Persian, he was eventually shipped out to Iran, where he worked with the RAF and
British Intelligence. He was at Tripoli; he helped prepare Eisenhower’s warroom in
Sicily; he was made British Vice-Consul in the city of Isfahan, and then after the
war he became, for a time, Chief of Political Intelligence in the Middle East. He
(^33) Hill, ‘Funeral Music 8’, 77. (^34) Hill, ‘Funeral Music 3’, inCollected Poems, 72.
(^35) Ibid.
(^36) Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, 192 and 195. For Eliot’s punning here, see Alan Marshall, ‘England and
Nowhere’, in A. David Moody (ed.),The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), 106.