alan marshall
indisposed .One ending, then, is at odds with another. ‘This is plenty,’ but ‘This is
more than enough.’^25 This is this: the same pronoun, the same quantity seen in a
different light.
It has been noted before that in the steady allusions to music and silence,
King Log is conducting some kind of argument with Eliot’s Four Quartets.^26
With consummate skill (which can be gauged by the consternation the poem has
provoked among both poets and critics ever since), and ‘With an equable contempt
for this World’ (‘Funeral Music’),^27 Eliot subsumed the ‘grunts and shrieks’ of
history (‘Funeral Music: An Essay’)^28 in the abstract temporality of music, or rather,
in the elaborate dead ends of language musically conceived. The matter of history
became mere temporality, and temporality was turned into music and silence. The
effect was to take the ‘dung and death’ out of dung and death.^29 It is by means of
dung and death, therefore, or rather shrieks, grunts, and blasphemous jokes, that
Hill takes the argument back to Eliot, and attempts to rattle his post-Symbolist cage.
What gives authority and bite to what may be called, then, in contradistinction to
Eliot’s post-Symbolist music of time, Hill’s ‘noise of time’ is his comparable ear for
poetry’s mesmerizing power—its power, one wants to say, to stop you dead; to
make you feel as though it stopped you dead. As Emily Dickinson is reported to
have said, in the spirit of the Earl of Worcester: ‘If I feel physically as if the top of
my head were taken off, I knowthatis poetry.’^30
The war to which ‘Little Gidding’ obviously refers is the English Civil War of the
seventeenth century, though Lyndall Gordon points out that Eliot contemplated
blending it with the Battle of Bosworth and the Wars of the Roses.^31 As far as I am
aware, what has gone unremarked is that the image of the ‘broken king’ in ‘Little
Gidding’ also recallsRichard II, Shakespeare’s extraordinary study in ‘the deposing
of a rightful king’ (thereby seeming to transform him into a prototype of Eliot’s
Caroline martyr), and Richard’s grievous sense that ‘time is broke’ (punning on
the name of the usurper Bolingbroke), and the paradoxical way in which Richard,
despite his sense of the disorder thereby visited on ‘the music of men’s lives’, makes
his own majestic music of it, as he reconciles himself to that ‘pattern|Of timeless
moments’, as Eliot calls it, ‘the death of kings’.^32 That Shakespeare’s history plays
seem to resonate after a fashion inFour Quartetsis important, because of the very
different way in which they are left to resonate inKing Log. The repetition of
(^25) Hill, ‘September Song’, inCollected Poems, 67.
(^26) See e.g. Gabriel Pearson, ‘King LogRevisited’, in Peter Robinson (ed.),Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his
Work(Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), 34.
(^27) Hill, ‘Funeral Music 1’, inCollected Poems, 70. (^28) Hill, ‘Funeral Music: An Essay’, ibid. 199.
(^29) T. S. Eliot, ‘East Coker’, inThe Complete Poems and Plays(London: Faber, 1969), 178.
(^30) Emily Dickinson, quoted in T. W. Higginson to Mrs Higginson, 16 Aug. 1870, inThe Letters of
Emily Dickinson, ed. Thomas H. Johnson (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1986), 474.
(^31) Lyndall Gordon,Eliot’s New Life(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 137.
(^32) Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, inComplete Poems and Plays, 191; William Shakespeare,Richard II,v.i.
50,v. v. 43,v. v. 44; Eliot, ‘Little Gidding’, 197; Shakespeare,Richard II,iii. ii. 156.