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The Triumph of Love

by Peter Robinson

Geoffrey Hill. Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

 

It is little more than two years since Geoffrey Hill published Canaan. Not since Mercian Hymns (1971) followed so quickly on the heels of King Log (1968) has the poet been as prolific. His new book-length poem evokes the Trionfi of Petrarch in its cover design, its title, and in the text itself:

         Vergine bella, as you
    are well aware, I here follow
    Petrarch, who was your follower,
    a sinner devoted to your service.
Readers who expect Hill's language to be densely burnished, and will perhaps be at ease with the poem's familiar latinate mariolatry, may be surprised by the subsequent simplicity of these lines. The section's apostrophe to the BVM acknowledges that 'One cannot purchase / the goodwill of your arduously simple faith' like setting up 'a small convenience store / established by aloof, hardworking Muslims'. Hill's almost-identification with the 'aloof, hardworking' people of another religion, maintains its own laborious distance in the 'One cannot purchase ... faith / as one would
acquire a ... shop'. This self-evident observation has not prevented wealthy Christians from investing for eternity, sponsoring centuries of European culture into the bargain, as Hill's poem registers: 'Donors are permitted / to give of themselves, with saints and martyrs, / kneeling at the altarpiece's edge'. Addressing the Virgin, The Triumph of Love petitions to be received as such a gift:
    I ask that you acknowledge the work
    as being contributive to your high praise,
    even if no-one else shall be reconciled
    to a final understanding of it in that light.
These lines suspect that the culture into which it is published will not be able to take the poem as such, and not only because too many are not
Christians: 'The rule is clear enough: last / alleluias forte, followed by indifferent / coffee and fellowship.' Does the line-end-isolated adjective qualify both nouns? Hill's practising co-religionists are either routinely nice people who drink unpleasant coffee, or, hearing the zeugma, hypocrites who can't make coffee either. A model for the poem's numbered sections of varying lengths may be the sequences by Antonio Machado, who is praised in The Triumph of Love for putting 'his own voice to slow-drawn induration'. It was Machado's Abel Mart’n and Juan de Mairena, among others, who served as prompts for the imaginary writer Sebastian Arrurruz of King Log; here too, there are signs of a framed text that would institutionalize the separation between composing poet and enunciating subject. This critical distance is repeatedly underlined by the interventions in square brackets of a meddlesome fictive editor, who officiously inserts information, even daring comment on the state of the text. The 'GREAT WORKE' of which its Nehemiah 6:3 epigraph speaks and from which the writer 'CAN NOT COME DOWN' (for 'WHY SHOULD THE WORKE CEASE, WHILEST I LEAVE IT, AND COME DOWNE TO YOU?') is not then just Geoffrey Hill's The Triumph of Love, but one that doubles up as the text of a projected old poet with distant detractors who, despite the epigraph, betrays himself into descending to his critics' imagined level. Putting words in their mouths, this projection states, with smartly miscalculated justice, that 'It's self-evident he can't / keep up a fiction, even for twenty lines'.

Though his earlier, scrupulously impersonal work bespoke its maker from the recesses of a dramatized lyric speech, The Triumph of Love gives of its author with bluntly intrusive references to Hill's situation as man and
poet. The Christian faithful are quizzed for a suspected residual
anti-semitism:

    But what strange guild is this
    that practises daily
    synchronised genuflection and takes pride
    in hazing my Jewish wife?
Elsewhere, the poem ventriloquizes some literary types chatting about the author photograph on the jacket for The Lords of Limit: 'How would you define his body-language? / Stoic consensuality? Sceptic paranoia?' Much of the work is taken up with stooping to worse ad hominems than those to which even malicious reviews or critical essays usually descend: 'Rancorous, narcissistic old sod - what / makes him go on?' Thus, this buffeted and buffeting poem does not read as a hermetically-sealed monodrama, or portrait of a martyr poet a la Charles Peguy; its framing devices are self-consciously riddled with lines which purport to be in more or less
propria persona. The resulting disturbed fiction is not unlike Pound's Mauberley, where author and character overlap in what one hopes is an absurdly exaggerated self-portraiture. It thus demonstrates the self-ruination involved in seeking amid the deafening noise of spite to preserve a measure of dignity even when such efforts serve further to bemire.

The Shakespeare of Sonnet 24 knew the poet to be a lowly trader at work in his 'bosom's shop' - the heart being both 'artist's studio and retail
outlet' as one editor felicitously glosses it. Yet where in Hill's English period, the poet's words demonstrated how high-sounding language would be ensnared in base motives, and was emblematically impacted with such
trip-ups, now a spaciously discursive style (recalling Four Quartets in its mockery of 'senex / sapiens' or 'the wisdom reserved for old age') deploys a barrage of mis-takes, errata slips, envious calumnies and the like from which it would remain loftily aloof, however compulsively driven to 'COME DOWNE':

    Extraordinary how N. and N. contrive
    to run their depilators off the great turbine -
    the raw voltage would flay them. Such
    intimate buzzing and smooth toiletry,
    mingled with a few squeals, may yet
    draw blood from bloodless Stockholm. Mea culpa,
    I am too much moved by hate -
    pardon ma'am? - add greed, self-pity, sick
    scrupulosity, frequent fetal regression, and
    a twisted libido? Oh yes - much
    better out than in. Morosa
    delectatio was his expression, that Irish
    professor of rhetoric - forget his name.
    Forget my own name next in hac
    lacrimarum valle.
On one of the other occasions when the bounty of that explosives expert Nobel, nowhere mentioned by name, ruffles the poem, the writer concerned is noted: '[Internal / evidence identifies the late / Eugenio Montale as the undoubted / subject of this address. - ED] The poem's ancillary figure, who editorially parenthesizes yet more as the sequence continues, sees no need to point out who might these phoneys be, for whom the poem later seems to intercede: 'Bless, / of your charity, for your orator's sake, / worthless
N. and N. now Swedish millionaires.' Does loving thine enemies require the Christian to maintain those who are to be loved as enemies? Certainly 'worthless' is chary of being over-charitable: 'I / write for the dead; N., N., for the living / dead' - a jocose enjambment the poem naturally recognizes, by continuing: 'No joke, though...'

While, beyond the sphere of shop-talk's higher and lower gossip, it's not possible to identify these two wealthy scribblers, 'that Irish / professor of rhetoric' is unmistakeably Seamus Heaney. The 'forget his name' can be short hand for 'I forget...' or an imperative, a quibble made clear by the reapplication of the phrase to the poet figure himself. Nor does The Triumph of Love give reasons (outside the self-inflicted sins listed) for this attack, beyond Heaney's worldly success and use of a Latin tag to label its poet's involved melancholic brooding. It is hard not to feel, then, that the sequence is, for better or worse, a bruised and self-bruising scuffle in the top poets' yard - what The Triumph itself admits is: 'thirty / vicarious rounds of bare-knuckle.' For other literary-critical enemies, the poem employs pseudonyms: Croker, MacSikker, and SŽan O' Shem (read, presumably: shorn of shame), who seem like the Englishman, Scotsman, and Irishman of a schoolboy joke. A grimly slapstick, scholarly humour is frequently deployed, as in the bemoaned but aptly inept evaluation of that earlier Shem's Finnegans Wake as a 'dead end'.

The Triumph of Love is an exemplary study in ruination. It returns again to Europe's war wreckage in its stylish evocation of a Blitzed Coventry ('flame-shadow bronzing the nocturnal / cloud-base of her now legendary dust') and to Daniel for its painfully acute image of Bomber Harris's 'whirlwind': ('in Leipzig, out of the sevenfold / fiery furnace?') Most centrally exploded, though, appears to be its poet's sense of himself. The sequence opens in Offa territory, with a one-line image ('Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp') and announces that 'Guilts were incurred in that place', guilts that are questioningly glossed as 'self-molestation of the child-soul'. Having found its author's own young self wanting, the poem does not stint on the shortcomings of contemporary youth, who are berated for being culpably unaware of others' pain, death and grief:

    By what right did Keyes, or my cousin's
    Lancaster, or the trapped below-decks watch
    of Peter's clangorous old destroyer-escort,
    serve to enfranchise these strange children
    pitiless in their ignorance and contempt?
The exhortation to judge not that ye be not judged is mere prudence if taken to mean that you can hedge on the Judgment Day by keeping your counsel; rather, it warns that judging words constitute judgments of those delivering them. Of this, and its consequences, The Triumph of Love provides eloquently self-aware illustration.

Hill's poem is approached through the triumphal arch of a title-page design adapted from a 16th-century translation of Fraunces Petrarcke. The hardback has a jacket whose framing devices form a contrast with the parodic self-denigration of its own staged position-jockeying. There is a pre-publication canonization by Harold Bloom: 'a great and difficult moral, cognitive, and aesthetic achievement- "a sad and angry consolation" almost beyond measure'; a blurb that calls it 'a masterpiece in the forgotten mode of laus et vituperatio'; and five further plea-bargaining quotes (methinks it doth protest too much) singling out Hill's poetry as 'the finest' or 'the major achievement'. To reach such heights, the Wall Street Journal notes, 'the ascent is steep, the view austerely sublime', and the Boston Globe places his oeuvre, not with English-language writers, but 'the work of Mandelstam and Montale'- two Ms whose posthumously published poetry wouldn't persuade me to bracket them together.

A sorry, elegaic light plays over Hill's poem's elegantly-sketched 'moral landscape', its:

    conglomerate, metamorphic rock-
    strata, in which particular grace,
    individual love, decency, endurance,
    are traceable across the faults.
'But leave it now, leave it', the verse urges, rising to beseech or, more frequently, dragging itself down to writhe like Sebastian as yet another exaggerated critical barb strikes - but not home. In the light of the jacket encomia, a reviewer may be left speechless, further laus, let alone balanced or limiting judgment, appearing invidious or otiose. So, in its much-wounded, lonely superiority, let The Triumph of Love stand as an example to us all.