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"Eloge and elegy" :

An examination of the poetry of Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill, who has been writing now for over thirty years, is gradually coming to be recognised as one of this country's best living poets, due to his slowly inreasing oeuvre of highly compact, energy-charged lyrical verse. Howeve, he is at the same time often thought of as a very 'difficult' poet; but as Hill said in a recent interview (in 'Literary Review', February 1986), what this really means is "not ingratiating" - he makes little attempt to make his poetry immediately accessible to the reader, in that it will not divulge many of its secrets except under close study, and after much thought. Hill often writes about the obscure, the archaic and the arcane, in what is frequently an obscure, archaic and arcane manner. For instance, he often deals with relatively unknown poets (such as Osip Mandelshtam) and refers to specialised matters (such as the use of latin and reference to Ovid). Yet although a meaning has to be teased out of the seemingly inscrutable phrases, this should, by the attentive reader, be regarded as a pleasure, because of the immediate lyricism of the poems. When a volume opens with a poem of resounding phrases such as:

"The second day I stood and saw The osprey plunge with triggered claw, Feathering blood along the shore,"

the reader can easily let himself or herself be carried along by the imagery and the force of diction, letting the full (in this case) religious significance follow naturally when the reader is ready, when he or she has a stronger sense of the aesthetic workings and 'truth' of the poem. An initial impression is enough to carry one into the self- contained world of a poem. In this essay my object is to explore Hill's poetry a little further than the initial blaze of the language, by considering his thematic concerns and exact means of expression, his language. To do this is to examine the further pointers to a better understanding of his poetry.

From Hill's first volume of collected poems, 'For the Unfallen' (published 1959), to his most recent work of poetry, 'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy' (1983), his subject-matter and concerns have remained wide, although his 'voice', the tone in which he expresses himself, has altered substantially; 'Genesis', the first poem in 'For the Unfallen', begins with an innocent protagonist telling

"Against the burly air I strode, Where the tight ocean heaves its load, Crying the miracles of God"

while 'Peguy' ends with the measured, decisive (note "mourn" in the imperative, virtually a command) :

..."But still mourn, being so moved: eloge and elegy so moving on the scene as if to cry 'in memory of those things these words were born.' ".

However, although the first poem, with its tight, quick iambs, questions death, and the second, a slow-marching procession of quatrains, accepts it, both share a common concern with death, and with religious belief. In fact, most of Hill's poetry consists of meditation on some philosophical problem (though very rarely directly). To express different ideas, he uses a wide variety of different forms, from his innovative use of the prose-poem in 'Mercian Hymns', to a type of formal sonnet in the sequence 'An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England', in 'Tenebrae'. In recent years, in 'Mercian Hymns', 'Tenebrae' and 'Peguy', he has tended towards longer poems, in more formal styles; the former allowing a more detailed and sustained examination of subjects, and the latter allowing the freedom of impersonality.

The formality and impersonality of his work are perhaps the most essential and striking elements of his style. The impersonality and 'distancing' effects which he employs in his poetry allow him to address subtly such subjects as power, sex and religion without the reader immediately associating them with the poet. He takes this a step further by introducing several personae through which to explore subjects. The most obvious is Offa, the protagonist of the Mercian Hymns, though Hill views him as "The presiding genius of the West Midlands, his dominion enduring from the middle of the eighth century until the middle of the twentieth (and possibly beyond)", thus allowing him to present Offa's character separately as eighth-century king, poet, and child in the second world war - when Hill himself was a child. There are, naturally, traces of Hill in all three of these facets of Offa, and of Offa in general, the "martyrologist" (Hymn I), "this master-mason as I envisage him" (Hymn XXIV).

Hill uses a fictitious spanish poet, Sebastian Arrurruz, to similar ends. 'The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz' appears in 'King Log', Hill ostensibly having translated the slow, heavy love-songs. The dates given at the beginning of 'The Songbook',

"Sebastian Arrurruz : 1868 - 1922",

serve, among other things, to distance Hill even further from his work (they say immediately, 'this is a dead poet'). It is not Hill, but a long-dead Spanish poet, speaking in (for instance) 'From the Latin' (doubly removed!) :

"There would have been things to say, quietness That could feed on our lust, refreshed Trivia, the occurrences of the day, And at night my tongue in your furrow."

Thus, Hill has a device for writing about topics which he does not want readers to associate directly with him, giving him the freedom to explore delicate topics without triggering unwanted prejudices in the reader's mind. But it also allows him to write poems in a different style of poetry, and this latter is the more important reason; by allowing him to 'pretend' to be different people, to assume different frames of mind, he can explore new and different styles of poetry. The quatrain quoted above is an example; it is slowed by the breaks in the lines and the lack of metre and rhyme, quietened by the way the sense flows over the lines and the lack of sharp punctuation such as hyphens and colons, and made intimate by the use of "our" and the yearning "would". As with most of the poems of this sequence, the 'feel' of the poems is more important than the strict meaning; here one is kept from concentrating on the exact meaning by the confusing interposition of the clause about quietness in the sentence otherwise about (quiet) talk, and the importance of "would" which is not clear until the rest of the sentence has been read. The emotional auras of the words "quietness" and "lust" are what the poem is essentially trying to convey; and its framework, and that of others in the sequence, are what allow the poems to put their 'feel' across. 'The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz' is purely an excercise in writing a certain type of Spanish poetry.

Hill often does use fictitious characters to enable him to explore different forms, though not as well- developed as Offa or Sebastian Arrurruz; a good example is the apocryphal subject of the elegy 'In Memory of Jane Fraser'. However, Hill has departed from this method in 'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy', Peguy being a real person, a French writer, scholar and socialist, who died on the first day of the first battle of the Marne in September 1914. Writing 'Peguy' has allowed Hill to write what is not only a meditation on Peguy's character, but also a first world war poem, nearly 70 years after the event.

Certainly, most of Hill's protagonists are poets, scholars or kings, or a combination of these. He seems to have a great respect for other poets, often dedicating his works; and though few of his poems contain actual kings, Offa being the exception, kingdoms and power are frequent themes. 'Mercian Hymns' was Hill's third work (1971), and in the first Hymn, "The Naming of Offa", Offa's titles are given :

King of the perennial holly- groves, the riven sand- stone: overlord of the M5 : architect of the his- toric rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross : guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge : contractor to the desirable new estates : saltmaster : money- changer : commisioner for oaths : martyrologist : the friend of Charlemagne.

'I liked that', said Offa, 'sing it again.' "

That Offa's kingdom spans many centuries is immadiately made clear, for instance in the bathos of turning from "the perennial holly-groves" to "the M5"; but in every individual phrase, power can be felt; even "overlord of the M5" sounds important, because of the word "overlord", and because M, especially placed at the end of the clause, has a majestical sound. The passage is broken up, and each part begins with three syllables, as in "architect", "guardian" (slowing to four syllables near the end), to make each part more emphatic. The verse is finally rounded off by the rolling "...Charlemagne". Then the last line breaks the formal tone of the previous passage, and shows Offa's power as he commands it all to be repeated. He is shown more powerful, in both ancient and modern ways, in the sequence: "He threatened malefactors with ash from his noon cigar" (Hymn XIV, "Offa's Laws"), and in the passage in Hymn XI, "Offa's Coins", describing "Swathed bodies in the long ditch; one eye upstaring". Hill's attributing to Offa in two hymns a "Defence of the English People" is ironic, since the two pamphlets of that name which Milton wrote were defending them against an English king. On the other hand, unashamed patriotism is shown by the child-persona of Offa in the second world war: "The wireless boomed its commands. I loved the battle-anthems and the gregarious news." (Hymn XXII). The personal side of power is also shown, for example in Hymn VIII; although Offa asserts his power personally ("I am the King of Mercia, and I know"), this places him personally in danger, and he is "Threatened by phone-calls at midnight". This is one of the many issues of power in the 'Mercian Hymns' which have a relevance today.

Power and politics are also invoked in the title of Hill's second work, 'King Log', a collection of his poems from 1958-68. The title refers to one of Aesop's fables concerning a nation of frogs, who were ruled first by a King Log - who was not unnaturally apathetic - and then when they deserted him by a King Stork, who was a tyrant and ate them, and because they should have been content with what they had first (the moral), Jupiter allowed them to go on being killed ad infinitum. The postscript to 'King Log' is called 'King Stork', though it contains only a short, note-like essay on the sequence 'Funeral Music', which gives a few background historical details. The King Log / King Stork allegory is perhaps to remind us of the difference between the poet's "florid grim music" of the Wars of the Roses, (the subject of 'Funeral Music',) and the actual details, which Hill reminds us are not important: "There is a distant fury of battle. Without attempting factual detail, I had in mind the battle of Towton..." While the actual battle is not important, this does not decrease the value of what Hill is saying in them, that human life must not be undervalued, as in the ironic "'Oh, that old northern business.'" ('Funeral Music', 3). This is of course an important matter when considering the power of kings.

The epigraph to 'King Log' is from the 'Advancement of Learning':

"From moral virtue let us now pass on to matter of power and commandment..."

- and this indeed is the subject of many of the poems in this volume. In fact, many of Hill's poems are concerned not just with the power of kings, but with politics as we know them now. Part 6 of 'An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England' (in 'Tenebrae'), which is called "A Short History of British India (II)", ends thus:

"'India's a peacock-shrine next to a shop selling mangola, sitars, lucky charms, heavenly Buddhas smiling in their sleep.'"

Much of this sequence is veiled criticism of various victorian values, this particular extract being criticism of Britain's unfeeling treatment of India, through the insults of calling it a gaudy "peacock- shrine", and a "shop", by way of attempting to summarise what India is.

'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy' does not, on the other hand, deal with a man who has any significant political power (though his political beliefs are an important element of the poem). Hill seems to admire the literary power and integrity of Peguy. Several times in the poem sequence, in fact, Hill cannot resist transposing the two, physical power and literary power, as in:

..."the cramped shop, its unsold Cahiers built like barricades".

Peguy once kept a bookshop, the "Boutique des Cahiers", and edited a journal, "Les Cahiers de la Quinzaine". "Cahiers" in the latter context means 'jottings', but in the other usage means excercise-books:

"At Villeroy the copybook lines of men rise up and are erased. Peguy's cropped skull dribbles its ichor, its poor thimbleful, a simple lesion of the complex brain."

Death, in fact, another universal human concern, is a frequent theme in Hill's poetry. His first collection, 'For the Unfallen', contains many poems on the subject, with titles such as "Wreaths", "Elegiac Stanzas", and "Two Formal Elegies" ("For the Jews in Europe"). The title itself, a bleak parody of Laurence Binyon's first world war poem 'For the Fallen', occurs in the last poem, 'To the (Supposed) Patron', a "Prodigal of loves and barbecues". He tells how, for this "rich man", everything is made easy:

"For the unfallen - the firstborn, or wise Councillor - prepared vistas extend As far as harvest; and idyllic death Where fish at dawn ignite the powdery lake."

Because he emphasises how good life is for the "rich man", however, he is indirectly calling to the reader to think of the others, the preparers of the vistas for example. The rich man has an "idyllic death", but everyone else has an extra burden - that of surviving.

Geoffrey Hill often chooses to write about holocausts, and atrocities of various sorts. However, even in his poems not directly about death, there is often an underlying feeling of death under the formal precision of his poetry. This lends his poetry a kind of "formal violence", as it has been called. This manifests itself in a wilful, almost reckless-seeming choice of distasteful subject-matter (though all the while couched in the formal, metred language). An example is in 'Tenebrae' ("Shadows"), part I:

"I Requite this angel whose flushed and thirsting face stoops to the sacrifice out of which it arose. This is the Lord Eros of grief who pities no one; it is Lazarus with his sores."

While passages like this seem elegant, academic and dispassionate, Hill's ruthless choice of "the Lord Eros / of grief" (with its unhappy implications) as his subject-matter puts him on a par with many of his contemporaries, in respect of violence. While Hill is much like T.S. Eliot, for instance, in his impersonal and precise use of language and reference to other writers, the way he writes 'violently' is more like Ted Hughes' poetry (though it is not as important in Hill's language as in Hughes'). However, while Hill's poetry is like Eliot's in some respects, the similarity is not very deep. The poetry of both shows a respect for earlier poets and a love of the study of ideas put forward by those from whom our heritage of poetry comes. But Hill is usually more forthright and serious, whereas Eliot, especially in his earlier poetry, often hints at a darker underside to what he is saying, often playing with disjointed forms that hint at mental abnormality. On the other hand, the references in Hill's work are often more obscure; where the references to 'The Tempest' which are so central to 'The Waste Land' are easily recognisable, Hill prefers to draw from much less widely-known poets of the last century. Thus, one would have to have studied English literature to a much deeper level to understand all the references to other works; but it is not vital to the enjoyment of either poet's work to understand all references, because of the lyrical content to be appreciated in each. Hill has taken Eliot's devices a step further, but this merely ends in different effects to those Eliot achieved. ThatHill owes something of his style to Eliot is unquestionable; compare for instance Eliot's

"(Why should the aged eagle stretch its wings?)"

(from 'Ash Wednesday'), to Hill's

"Anything to have done! (The eagle flagged the sun)"

(from 'Solomon's Mines'). Not only is the religious theme (and, in these examples, even the imagery) the same, but Hill is following Eliot's characteristic use of parenthesis. Eliot is, in his later poetry, more simply and directly religious than Hill, but that is because Hill is also concerned with many other semi-related themes, violence being one of the most important; Hill's poetry often concerns combatants, not only physical ones in confrontation, but also single protagonists struggling against themselves, with or without an interlocutor. The victory often brings destruction to victor and victim alike, or in the case of a single meditator, is a pyrrhic victory only. 'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy' is Hill's "homage to the triumph of his 'defeat'".

In his poetry, Hill makes outward journeys that are symbolic of inner ones, and by this device can explore many aspects of the human condition, of which by far the most dominant in his work is religion. But Hill speaks usually not in the language of revelation, but that of non- revelation - he makes poetry out of the sense of not being able to grasp true and perfect religious experience. His work abounds with references to the Pentecost, which he also associates with the ability to write poetry, as in 'History as Poetry', which begins:

"Poetry as salutation; taste Of Pentecost's ashen feast." and ends: "Thus laudable the trodden bone thus Unanswerable the knack of tongues."

"The knack of tongues" could be interpreted as the ability to write poetry, particularly linked with the Pentecost, when the apostles were given the ability to speak in many languages, when language flowed.

The sequence 'Lachrimae', which is subtitled "Seven tears figured in seven passionate pavans" is Hill's most passionate religious poem to date. Part 2, "The Masque of Blackness", ends on an unmistakably (and typically) pessimistic note:

"Self-love, the slavish master of this trade, conquistador of fashion and remark, models new heavens in his masquerade,

its images intense with starry work, until he tires and all that he has made vanishes in the chaos of the dark."

This poem is very much open to interpretation, and probably deliberately so, but my interpretation is that this too links religion and poetry-writing, or at least, more generally, religion and art-creation. The poem expertly balances the theme of the carefree masque, in language such as the rolling "conquistador", and "fashion" and "masquerade", with the darker, more passionate 'meaning' of the poem, the "Blackness" into which the art "vanishes" without the approval of its creator. Such a note of pessimism is typical in Hill's work, but it is not the only side of his attitude to religion. He clearly has a need to believe, and 'Genesis' leads to a fiercely optimistic resolution:

"By the blood we live, the hot, the cold, To ravage and redeem the world: There is no bloodless myth will hold.

And by Christ's blood are men made free"...

This solution, with its undertones of fierceness and assertion, as if Hill wanted to convince himself, is optimistic in itself. But it continues, and becomes a typical example of irresolution leading to inflexible resolution, typical of much of his work:

..."Though in close shrouds their bodies lie Under the rough pelt of the sea :

Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight The bones that cannot bear the light."

The vacillationwhich the protagonist of 'Genesis' goes through is also typical of many poems. As with 'Genesis', he usually arrives at a rejectionof ascetic withdrawal and contemplation, but never without first being tempted, by many rhetorical questions of his own devising. In the end, however, Hill's stance on religion seems to be a belief, and a need for belief, in God, but without religious revelation. As he says in another poem about a pentecost, 'The Bidden Guest' (the title apparently referring to God):

"And so my heart has ceased to breathe (Though there God's worm blunted its head And stayed.)"

However,

"The heart's tough shell is still to crack When, spent of all its wine and bread, Unwinkingly the altar lies Wreathed in its sour breath, cold and dead."

Hill speaks of religion in a theological, scholarly manner, lent by his overall style. He is, in the final analysis, above all a historical poet. Almost all of his poems are deeply rooted in the past, and most of his subjects are historical - King Offa, ('Mercian Hymns',) the Wars of the Roses, ('Funeral Music',) Charles Peguy ('The Mystery...'). In part I of the latter (which is characterised by an ambivalent bathos, as in "Jean Jaures/ dies in a wine-puddle"), he remarks:

"History commands the stage wielding a toy gun, rehearsing another scene. It has raged so before, countless times; and will do, countless times more, in the guise of supreme clown, dire tragedian."

Being only the second stanza of the work, this can be seen as a comment on the sequence as a whole, but it is also relevant to the rest of Hill's poetry. It is also notable that 'Peguy' is largely executed as a series of tableaux vivants, rather than active description, almost like a contemporary photograph or newsreel; suggesting to the reader not that that was how it in fact was, but that that was how a contemporary observer might have seen it. In a similar way 'Mercian Hymns' tends to list the pointers to Offa's civilisation for us to interpret, rather than attempting to describe how it really was; as in

"Tracks of ancient occupation. Frail ironworks rust- ing in the thorn-thicket. Hearthstones; charred lullabies. A solitary axe-blow that is the echo of a lost sound."

(Hymn XXVIII, "The Death of Offa"). The principle here is perhaps that history can only be perceived by what it has left behind, and that any portrayal of it is neccessarily subjective. It is also pertinent to remember T.S.Eliot's lines in 'Gerontion':

"History has many cunning passages, contrived corridors And issues, deceives with whispering ambitions, Guides us by vanities."

This, the adulteration of history, is perhaps what Hill is referring to in 'History as Poetry', by "The tongue's atrocities".

History, for Hill, certainly seems to be about real atrocities, about death: "Poetry Unearths from among the speechless dead

Lazarus mystified, common man Of death."

History and the past, tied up with other universally important matters such as religion and violence, are always present in Hill's poetry, and it is in 'Mercian Hymns' that he addresses the subject most directly. In these thirty 'Hymns', Hill examines the pan-historical character of his 'Offa', particularly examining Offa's arrogant qualities, which he has as an eighth-century king and as a child:

"'Not strangeness, but strange likeness. Obstinate, outclassed forefathers, I too concede, I am your staggeringly-gifted child.'

So, murmurous, he withdrew from them. Gran lit the gas, his dice whirred in the ludo-cup, he entered into the last dream of Offa the king."

(Hymn XXIX, "The Death of Offa").

The use of the prose verse-form, the anachronisms, the references to childhood and the generally informal language disarm the highly intellectual and passionate nature of Hill's poetry more effectively than the use of ambivalence and bathos in 'Peguy', making 'Mercian Hymns' the most generally-accessible of his works. The use of prose-versets is innovative in the English language (though this form has been used in French, notably by the poet St.-John Perse), and this adds extra interest to the work. The reason why he wanted to create this informality by using such a form, is less obvious; perhaps he felt that informality was needed if he was to present the immediacy of the past, its presence even today, in both the continuous paradoxes of the human condition, and in our heritage. The example most relevant to Hill is the English language, neatly shown in the way he counterpoints latinate and anglo-saxon vocabulary in many of the hymns, as in Hymn XXIV: "Itinerant through numerous domains, of his lord's retinue, to Compostela. Then home for a lifetime amid West Mercia...". The physical presence of the past is shown in Hymn XXX, the fourth and final "The Death of Offa":

"And it seemed, while we waited, he began to walk to- wards us he vanished

he left behind coins, for his lodging, and traces of red mud."

When, in 'King Log', Hill examines 'History as Poetry', he shows how poetry colours history and cannot be contradicted: "Unanswerable [is] the knack of tongues." But, while doing so, he shows the cheapness of poetry when applied to reporting history. The word "resurgence" is a journalistic cliche, and so to use it here is cheapening. Likewise, in "Poetry / Unearths...Lazarus mystified", the word "mystified" hints at a conjuring trick - cheapness again. Immediately after the title, "History as Poetry", the poem starts:

"Poetry as salutation; taste Of Pentecost's ashen feast"...

"History as Poetry" to "Poetry as salutation" is a rather slippery turnaround, and is mirrored by the fact that the key word "as" of the title is immediately found in four different forms, none of them quite the same as "as", in the words "SAlutation", "tASte", "AShen" and "feASt". Hill is not only telling us that history does have "contrived corridors", he is showing us the way it can be done.

Often in his poetry, and especially in 'Tenebrae', Hill takes care to use the verse forms most relevant to the period. There is an element of pastiche in his elaborate and elegant imitations of Counter-Reformation songs and sonnets, and other styles. In fact, Hill's poetry is not as humourless as it might, at first sight, appear to be, with its seriousness and obscurity. It abounds with subtle, wry humour; none more grim than in "A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook":

"Primroses; salutations; the miry skull of a half-eaten ram; viscous wounds in earth opening. What seraphs are afoot."

The elegantly circular first stanza opens and closes with suggestions of the picturesque paintings of the pre- Raphaelite school, but between them is a vision which is surely "seeing the skull beneath the skin" (from a phrase in the stanza on John Webster, in Eliot's 'Whispers of Immortality').

'The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz' is even more like a spoof; his name means 'arrowroot', an antidote, and also reminds one of St. Sebastian, who was martyred by being shot with arrows. Furthermore, when the 'Songbook' was first published, it was not disclosed that the poet was merely an invention of Hill's; he was supposed to have been a minor poet who had been guilty of committing a grammatical solecism, and had thus been removed from all the anthologies. There is a comment from Hill in this myth, especially as he praises Peguy for being "a meticulous reader of proof" (in the essay on Peguy at the end of the volume). He plays hidden but witty academic games, with his language, as in:

"To dispense, with justice; or, to dispense with justice. Thus the catholic god of France, with honours all even, honours all, even the damned in the brazen Invalides of Heaven."

('Peguy', part 6. Les Invalides in Paris was where Dreyfus was publicly disgraced.)

- and also with his sources, especially in epigraphs and titles, for instance 'The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy'. This is adapted from Peguy's work 'Le mystere de la Charite de Jeanne D'Arc', and thus effectively canonises Peguy.

But, in the light of this fact, the title is not what it might have seemed. In modern English, a "mystery" is "a matter that remains unexplained or secret". But, in its older, religious meaning - which Peguy was using - it means "a religious truth that it is beyond human powers to understand". This is just one example of Hill's frequent use of obscure multiple meanings. Certainly, his poetry is profoundly ambiguous; every word has a wealth of suggestions, meanings and associations. Primarily, this leads to highly compact and charged language:

"A beast is slain, a beast thrives. Fat blood squeaks on the sand. A blinded god believes That he is not blind."

(The epigraph to 'For the Unfallen', from his poem 'Doctor Faustus').

But it also makes it impossible to attribute one meaning to one phrase. Is the Ýone of "Bad memories, seigneurs?" ('Peguy',9) sympathetic or gleeful? When in 'Genesis',

"Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight The bones that cannot bear the light",

is it because the bones detest the light, or because they are not strong enough to carry it, to live with it? In both cases, it is both, of course. All poetry consists not only of meanings and 'messages', but of the individual's responses to the language used; Hill's use of ambiguity contributes to both of these at once, and the use of reference to other works, one of Eliot's most important devices, allows many emotions and attitudes to be evoked in a very few words. In fact, the reader's response to devices such as the subtle use of journalistic or colloquial words, and the concealed humour of pretentious latinates, guides him towards what Hill actually has to say. This understanding, at least on the more academically abstract levels, certainly cannot be achieved without close study, detailed knowledge of the obscure, academic references and an understanding of why he chooses such formal, learned, styles. But, as with the poetry of T.S. Eliot, it is not neccessary to understand fully the niceties of the obscure intellectual content of the poems. The most important element of the poetry is its 'meaning of the senses', the plethora of associations and recalled impressions that is the reader's response to the language; Hill paints, with a very fine brush, word-pictures with a wealth of colour and detail, as in:

"Gasholders, russet among fields. Milldams, marlpools that lay unstirring. Eel-swarms. Coagulations of frogs: ..."

(Hymn VII). Yet he still adheres to formal styles, never letting punctuation go adrift, and often using very strict verse-forms such as sonnets (even the formal prose-versets of the Mercian Hymns are strictly adhered-to). To do this he has to exert tight control over his language, giving an impression of pent-up energy in the diction. It is exerting such concentrated power that allows him to produce such compression of the devices he uses, the intricate blends of meaning and effects, like the "master-mason" of 'Hymn XXIV' "confusing warrior with lion, dragon-coils, tendrils of the stony vine." He is the master of his language, and the master of nuance, and it is this impressive combination that gives Geoffrey Hill's poetry an immediate enjoyment for any reader, provided that he or she is prepared to give it the concentration it deserves and is not biased against its intellectually demanding nature. To reward closer study, there is the underlying humour, and Hill's real and passionate feeling on such important human matters on power, death and religion, which he expresses especially within a historical context. What is there at the heart of it all? Perhaps some real objective truth, perhaps only a mirror on the reader's imagination. Certainly, the last stanza of the poem (and volume) 'Tenebrae' suggests that the heart of the matter will defy attempts to be pinned down :

"Music survives, composing her own sphere, Angel of Tones, Medusa, Queen of the Air, and when we would accost her with real cries silver on silver thrills itself to ice."

At all events, Hill's poetry, especially after study and meditation, provides enough entertainment, from exquisitely-phrased language and intellectual consideration of matters relevant to the human condition, to satisfy any perceptive, sensitive and artistically impartial reader of poetry; and it is the quality of all of these elements which makes Geoffrey Hill one of the most brilliant poets writing in the English language today.