The Eve of St. Mark - a poem by Geoffrey Hill

 
As today is the feast of Saint Mark the Evangelist, I present you with the sonnet 'The Eve of St Mark' by Geoffrey Hill. The sonnet is the twelfth and penultimate part of the cycle 'An apology for the revival of Christian architecture in England', whose title is taken from an architectural treatise by Augustus Welby Pugin, published in 1843. A digitised copy of the book can be found here. The sonnet cycle was published in Hill's poetry collection Tenebrae from 1979, and the entire cycle is available at poetryfoundation.org.


The Eve of St Mark 

Stroke the small silk with your whispering hands,
godmother; nod and nod from the half-gloom;
broochlight intermittent between the fronds,
the owl immortal in its crystal dome.

Along the mantelpiece veined lustres trill,
the clock discounts us with a telling chime.
Familiar ministrants, clerks-of-appeal,
burnish upon the threshold of the dream:

churchwardens in wing-collars bearing scrolls
of copyhold well-tinctured and well-tied.
Your photo-albums loved by the boy-king

preserve in sepia waterglass the souls
 of distant cousins, virgin till they died,
and the lost delicate suitors who could sing.

Terribilis est locus iste - a fascination revisited

In preparation for a talk I'll be giving next week, I have spent some time revisiting some of my favourite fragments from the special collection at the library of the University of Southern Denmark. The talk will be a general presentation of some of the liturgical fragments that I have been researching, and I was reading through my notes and looking through my pictures in order to find a good angle for presenting the wealth of material contained in the fragments in question. It is always challenging - albeit in a good way - to present liturgical fragments to people who are unfamiliar with liturgy, its vocabulary, its structure, and its abbreviations. Accordingly, I was trying to find some element that would allow me to gather a lot of the main points under one heading. As I did so, I was reminded of my fascination with the office for the dedication of a church. This was a liturgical celebrationcommon to all Latin Christendom which was held on the anniversary of the consecration of the church in question. Consequently, the feast had no fixed position in the liturgical calendar. However, the feast served one common purpose, namely to connect the newly consecrated church typologically with the Temple of Solomon and further back to the first consecration of a location in the Bible, namely the site where Jacob wrestled with the angel. I have written about the typology of Jacob in an earlier blogpost, so I will not say more about this here.

The typological connection between any given medieval church and the Temple of Solomon, however, was expressed in many ways throughout the series of chants and readings that comprised the office for the dedication. One such example is the antiphon "Tu domine universorum", whose initial is pictured below. The text of this antiphon is a paraphrase of 2 Machabees 14: 35-36, in which the temple is described, and thus the antiphon invoked the typological connection between the church in which the chant was being sung and the temple built by King Solomon. Such a connection emphasised how the newly consecrated church was a part of the same historical branch reaching back through the centuries.   

Initial for the antiphon Tu domine universorum (CID: 005199)

Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA Musik M 4

As I was reading through the chants contained in one of the fragments of Syddansk Universitetsbibliotek RARA Musik M 4, I kept recalling a detail from Paul Gauguin's painting Vision after the sermon which shows the scene of Jacob and the angel. I learned of this painting through the poetry of Geoffrey Hill, both because it is used as the cover image for the edition of his collected poems from 1985. The reason for this cover image is a reference to it in one of his poems from the collection Tenebrae (1978), and to which my mind was transported after a quick immersion into the medieval typology of churches.

Terribilis Est Locus Iste

Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School

Briefly they are amazed. The marigold-fields
mell and shudder and the travellers,
in sudden exile burdened with remote
hieratic gestures, journey to no end

beyond the vivid severance of each day,
strangeness at doors, a different solitude
between the mirror and the window, marked
visible absences, colours of the mind,

marginal angels lightning-sketched in red
chalk on the month's account or marigolds
in paint runnily embossed, or the renounced
self-portrait with a seraph and a storm.



And with this poem - one I enjoy tremendously - the fascination with the story of Jacob is brought to our modern times, showing again how gripping this story is, and how it has continued to have an impact on cultural expressions through the ages.

A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook - poem by Geoffrey Hill

This is one of the most haunting and evocative poems by Geoffrey Hill, and I read it during my awakening to the importance of art as well as the convergence of art and poetry that opened up to me the richness of pre-modern art history. The poem is from the collection Tenebrae, printed in 1978.


A Pre-Raphaelite Notebook



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

Gold seraph to gold worm in the pierced slime:
greetings. Advent of power-in-grace. The power
of flies distracts the working of our souls.

Earth's abundance. The God-ejected Word
resorts to flesh, procurescarrion, satisfies
its white hunger. Salvation's travesty

a deathless metaphor: the stale head
sauced in original blood; the little feast
foaming with cries of rapture and despair.

An order of service - a poem by Geoffrey Hill

As I'm heading north for a conference this week, I think it is a suitable way to end the blogging of the month of November with a poem by Geoffrey Hill, whose imagery plays with the frozen landscapes that might be awaiting.

An order of service

(From King Log, 1968)

He was the surveyor of his own ice-world,
Meticulous at the chosen extreme,
Though what he surveyed may have been nothing.

Let a man sacrifice himself, concede
His morality and be done with it;
There is no end to that sublime appeal.

In such a light dismiss the unappealing
Blank of his gaze, hopelessly vigilant,
Dazzled by renunciation's glare.

History as Poetry - a poem by Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill is one of my favourite poets in any language,and reading him takes my mind back to the spring of 2011 when I was reading his poems while beginning in earnest to establish myself as a medievalist in the second semester of my MA studies. Much has changed since then, including myself, and the England I explored while exploring his poems now seems like a lost dream, a broken promise, in part due to the political development, in part because I have become disenchanted with English academia, in part because of personal disappointmnts. I was a staunch anglophile once, and I'm still fond of many things English, not least the many medieval buildings I have not yet seen in the flesh - or in the stone, rather - but the youthful, all-encompassing excitement of those spring days of 2011 is now a thing of the past. Occasionally, however, when reading Geoffrey Hill's early poems, I find my way back to that excitement, I reconnect with those feelings of wonder and novelty that made me love England and that made me long for it, and thus, for a brief window of time, as my eyes scan the lines of the poem, I relive that love of England that I no longer can claim.


History as poetry

Poetry as salutation; taste
Of Pentecost's ashen feast. Blue wounds.
The tongue's atrocities. Poetry
Unearths from among the speechless dead

Lazarus mystified, common man
Of death. The lily rears its gouged face
From the provided loam. Fortunate
Auguries; whirrings;tarred golden dung:

'A resurgence' as they say. The old
Laurels wagging with the nw: Selah!
Thus laudable the trodden bone thus
Unanswerable the knack of tongues.

- From King Log (1968)

Holy Thursday - a poem by Geoffrey Hill

Since this is the paschal time, I present you one of Geoffrey Hill's early poems, taken from his first collection For the Unfallen from 1958, whose title is relevant for the season.


Holy Thursday

Naked, he climbed to the wolf's lair;
He beheld Eden without fear,
Finding no ambush offered there
But slep under the harbouring fur.

He said: 'They are decoyed by love
Who, tarrying through the hollow grove,
Neglect the seasons' sad remove.
Child and nurse walk hand in glove

As unaware of Time's betrayal,
Weaving their innocence with guil.
But they must cleave the fire's peril
And suffer innocence to fall.

I have been touched with that fire
And have fronted the she-wolf's lair.
Lo, she lies gentle and innocent of desire
Who was my constant myth and terror.'

Spanish poetry for World Book Day

Today, April 23rd, is World Book Day, an international celebration of books that has taken its date from the death-day of Miguel de Cervantes, William Shakespeare, and Inca Garcilaso de la Vega. The tradition of World Book Day began in 1926. In honour of this wonderful day, I will here present some of my favourite Spanish poetry to mark that this day is a Spanish invention, founded by the writer Vicente Clavel (1888-1967). The poems below are taken from The Penguin Book of Spanish Poetry, and the translations are made by the book's editor, J. M. Cohen.



Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola

Lupercio Leonardo de Argensola (1559-1613) was poet and historian, and this untitled poem was one of my first exposures to the Spanish sonnet. I learned of it through a reworking of the poem into English by Geoffrey Hill, and it remains one of my favourite poems.


Llevó tras sí los pámpanos otubre,
y con las grandes lluvias insolente,
no sufre Ibero márgenes ni puente,
mas antes los vecinos campos cubre.

Moncayo, como suele, ya descubre
coronada de nieve la alta frente,
y el sol apenas vemos en Oriente
cuando la opaca tierra nos lo encubre.

Sienten el mar y selvas ya la saña
del aquilón, y encierra su bramido
gente en el puerto y gente en la cabaña.

Y Fabio, en el umbral de Tais tendido,
con vergonzosos lágrimas lo baña,
debiéndolas al tiempo que ha perdido.

(October has taken the vine-leaves with it, and swollen with the great rains, Ebro will suffer neither banks nor bridges, but rather covers the neighbouring fields.
Moncayo, as usual, now reveals her tall brow crowned with snow, and no sooner do we see the sun in the East than the opaque earth conceals it from us.
Now the sea and the woods feel the north-wind's anger, and its roaring shuts people up in port and people in their cottages.
And Fabio, lying on Thais' threshold, wets it with shameful tears, his debt to the time that he has wasted.)


Lope de Vega Carpio

Lope de Vega (1562-1613) is one of the foremost writers of Spanish literature. He is predominantly remembered for his numerous plays, but his religious poetry has also achieved well-deserved fame. The following untitled poem is another verse to which I came through a reworking by Geoffrey Hill, and it is a hauntingly direct, unvarnished grappling with issues of personal faith.


Qué tengo yo que mi amistad procuras?
Qué interés se te sigue, Jesús mío,
que a mi puerta, cubierto de rocío,
pasas las noches del invierno escuras?

Oh, cuánto fueron mis entrañas duras
pues no te abrí! Qué extraño desvarío
si de mi ingratitud el hielo frío
secó las llagas de tus plantas puras!

Cuántas veces el ángel me decía:
"Alma, asómate agora a la ventana,
verás con cuanto amor llamar porfía!"

Y cuántas, hermosura soberana:
"Mañana te abriremos" - repondía,
para lo mismo responder mañana!

(What have I that you should sue for my friendship? What interest brings you, dear Jesus, to spend the dark winter nights at my door, covered in dew?
Oh how hard was my heart that I did not open to you! What strange madness was it if the cold frost of my ingratitude chapped the wounds on your pure feet?
How many times did the angel say to me: 'Now, soul, look out of your window, and you will see how lovingly he persists in knocking!'
And how many times, oh supreme beauty, did I reply: 'I will open tomorrow', only to make the same reply upon the morrow!)


Miguel de Guevara

This final poem is a religious sonnet is attributed to the sixteenth-century Mexican priest Miguel de Guevara (dates unknown), and it is one of the most moving religious poems that I know of.


A Cristo crucificado

No me mueve, mi Dios, para quererte,
el cielo que me tienes prometido,
ni me mueve el infierno tan temido
para dejar pos eso de ofenderte.

Tú me mueves, Señor; muéveme el verte
clavado en esa cru, y escarnecido;
muéveme el ver tu cuerpo tan herido,
muévenme tus afrentas, y tu muerte.

Muéveme, al fin, tu amor, y en tal manera,
que aunque no hubiera cielo, yo te amara,
y aunque no hubiera infierno te temiera.

No me tienes que dar porque te quiera;
pues aunque lo que espero no esperara,
lo mismo que te quiero te quisiera.

(To Christ Crucified
It is not heaven that You have promised me, my God, that moves me to love You, nor is it the hell I so fear that moves me to cease sinning against You.
You move me, Lord; it moves me to see You nailed to that cross and despised; it moves me to see Your body so wounded; the insults You suffered and Your death move me.
Finally, Your love moves m, and so much that even if there were no heaven, I should love You; and even in there were no hell, I should fear You.
You have not to give me anything to make me love You; for even if I did not hope for what I do hope for, I should love You just as I do.)

Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings - a poem by Geoffrey Hill

For a quiet end to the month of February, here is a favourite sonnet of mine by the sorely missed Geoffrey Hill. Text from this website.


Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings

 

For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores,

Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good,

To sound the constitution of just wars,

Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood.

 

Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust, 

Their usage, pride, admitted within doors;

At home, under caved chantries, set in trust, 

With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs 

They lie; they lie; secure in the decay

Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted, 

Before the scouring fires of trial-day

Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head, 

Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea 

Across daubed rock evacuates its dead.

Geoffrey Hill's "The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian"

Today is the feast of Saint Sebastian, who, according to tradition, was a Christian soldier in the Roman army during the reign of Diocletian. Since Christianity was forbidden, Sebastian was arrested when his Christianity was found out, and he is said to have suffered martyrdom around 300. This martyrdom is often depicted as Sebastian being tied to a tree and pierced by arrows, but this was only the first part of his passion story. According to legend, Sebastian was later taken care of by a woman called Irene, later known as Irene of Rome, and he recovered from his wounds. His martyrdom was later consummated when Diocletian had his soldiers beat him to death with clubs when Sebastian confronted the emperor.

The story of Sebastian has enjoyed varied but immense popularity through the Middle Ages, and the arresting quality of his iconography - owing in part to its likeness with Christ's crucifixion - has inspired later legends as well as later art.

The image of Saint Sebastian has been used as the starting  point of a poem by Geoffrey Hill in his sequence Of Commerce and Society from his first poetry collection. The poem itself is a social commentary and has little to do with the story of Sebastian itself, and even his cause of death is incorrectly stated as being the arrows. Nonetheless, it is a beautiful poem whose reliance on the haunting imagery of Sebastian's passion story heightens the sense of drama and adds drama to the social commentary.



From Of Commerce and Society

6 The Martyrdom of Saint Sebastian

Homage to Henry James
'But then face to face'

Naked, as if for swimming, the martyr
Catches his death in a little flutter
Of plain arrows. A grotesque situation,
But priceless, and harmless to the nation.

Consider such pains 'crystalline': then fine art
Persists where most crystals accumulate.
History can be scraped clean of its old price.
Engrossed in the cold blood of sacrifice

The provident and self-healing gods
Destroy only to save. Well-stocked with foods,
Englarged and deep-oiled, America
Detects music, apprehends the day-star

Where, sensitive and half-under a cloud,
Europe muddles her dreaming, is loud
And criticial beneath the varied domes
Resonant with tribute and with commerce.
- Published in For the Unfallen (1959)

Martyrdom of Sebastian
Aix-en-Provence - BM - ms. 0016, f.278, Book of Hours, Use of Paris, between 1480-90
(Courtesy of enluminures.culture.fr)

For other blogposts on Saint Sebastian:


Poems on Saint Sebastian

On Sebastian and hedgehog iconography in the legend of Saint Edmund Martyr

Guillaume Dufay's two motets for Saint Sebastian

On Sebastian depicted with a beard

Two Tuscan depictions of Sebastian's martyrdom

Quietly marking the beginning of winter with a poem by Geoffrey Hill

The first snow arrived in Odense yesterday afternoon, and today I woke up to a ground dotted with fragile patches of snow that helped refract the light of a grey sun enough to take away some of the morning darkness. This first snow will not lie long, and it has already begun to recede. Snow is not as common here in Denmark as it is in my native Norway, and it is at this point unusually cold. I spoke to my local greengrocer about this temperature earlier today, and he then pointed out to me that this cold came from Norway. I took responsibility, of course.

The first day of snow and the first day of winter finds me shoulder-deep in thesis work, alternating between intense bouts of writing and slightly less intense bouts of reading. As a consequence, there is not much energy left for blogging, so I will mark the beginning of the winter very quietly, with one of the early poems by Geoffrey Hill.


In memory of Jane Fraser

When snow like sheep lay in the fold
And winds went begging at each door,
And the far hills were blue with cold,
And a cold shroud lay on the moor,

She kept the siege. And every day
We watched her brooding over death
Like a strong bird above its prey.
The room filled with the kettle's breath.

Damp curtains glued against the pane
Sealed time away. Her body froze
As if to freeze us all, and chain
Creation to a stunned repose.

She died before the world could stir.
In March the ice unloosed the brook
And water ruffled the sun's hair.
Dead cones upon the alder shook.

- Published in For the Unfallen (1959)

Modern echoes of Ovid - from the works of Derek Walcott and Geoffrey Hill

I'm currently reading a collection of essays by Thea Selliaas Thorsen, classical scholar at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology and Norway's foremost translator of Ovid. The collection contains fifty very short essays on selected pieces from literary history, with an emphasis on the classical heritage. Its title, Kom ikke uten begjær (come not without desire), is taken from an epigram by Paul Valéry. This book is an illuminating and entertaining collection, and to me as a medievalist not as well-versed in the classical literature, it is highly educational. And it also serves as a good reminder of how resilient past texts are even into our modern age.

This latter issue is something that has been on my mind ever since I took a course in Latin poetry in 2012, a course taught by Thea. During that term I started to reflect on the numerous allusions to Ovid - and other classical poets - in works by modern poets whom I had discovered at university and was by then consuming avidly. By reading Thea's essays, a great number of which feature Ovid in some capacity, I was again brought back to this topic, and I was reminded that I have wanted to write something about this for years now. So when I serendipitously opened one of Derek Walcott's early collections and found a sequence of poems titled Metamorphoses after Ovid's magnum opus, I wanted to share it here. In addition to an exctract from Walcott's sequence, I also present an extract from the similarly-titled sequence of poems by Geoffrey Hill.


From Metamorphoses, by Derek Walcott

I - Moon

Resisting poetry I am becoming a poem.
O lolling Orphic head silently howling,
my own head rises from its surf of cloud.

Slowly my body grows a single sound,
slowly I become
a bell,
an oval, disembodied vowel,
I grow, an owl,
an aureole, white fire.

I watch the moonstruck image of the moon burn,
a candle mesmerized by its own aura,
and turn
my hot congealing face, towards that forked mountain
which wedges the drowned singer.

That frozen glare,
that morsured, classic petrification.
Haven't you sworn off such poems for this year,
and no more on the moon?

Why are you gripped by demons of inaction?
Whose silence shrieks so soon?

- From The Gulf, 1969

Apollo and Daphne, from Ovid's Metamorphoses
Antonio del Pollaiolo, probably 1470-80, National Gallery, London
(Courtesy of Wikimedia)

From Metamorphoses, by Geoffrey Hill

3 The re-birth of Venus

And now the sea-scoured temptress, having failed
To scoop out of horizons what birds herald:
Tufts of fresh soil: shakes off an entire sea,
Though not as the dove, harried. Rather, she,

A shark hurricaned to estuary-water,
(The lesser hunter almost by a greater
Devoured) but unflurried, lies, approaches all
Stayers, and searches of the fanged pool.


4 Drake's drum

Those varied dead. The undiscerning sea
Shelves and dissolves their flesh as it burns spray

Who do not shriek like gulls nor dolphins ride
Crouched under spume to England's erect side

Though there a soaked sleeve lolls or shoe patrols
Tide-padded thick shallows, squats in choked pools

Neither our designed wreaths nor used words
Sink to their melted ears and melted hearts.

- From For the Unfallen, 1959

Two Poems by Geoffrey Hill

August has been a terribly hectic month for me so far, and that has taken its toll on my blogging. For years, my aim has been to provide at least four blogpost each month, and sometimes this can only be achieved by some filler-pieces like the one you are reading now. Nonetheless, I want also these filler-pieces to be meaningful or to be worth reading, and so I have decided this time to unearth two lesser-known poems by one of my favourite poets, Geoffrey Hill. Frequent readers of this blog will have noticed my love for his verses several times, and indeed this is only one of several blogposts featuring his poetry. These poems are both taken from his first collection, For the Unfallen (1959).





The Bibliographers

Lucifer blazing in superb effigies
Among the world's ambitious tragedies,
Heaven-sent gift to the dark ages,

Now, in the finest-possible light,
We approach you; can estimate
Your not unnatural height.

Though the descrete progeny,
Out of their swim, go deflated and dry,
We know the feel of you, archaic beauty,

Between the tombs, where the tombs still extrude,
Overshadowing the sun-struck world:
(The shadow-god envisaged in no cloud)




Orpheus and Eurydice

Though there are wild dogs
   Infesting the roads
We hace recitals, catalogues
   Of protected birds;

And the rare pale sun
   To water our days.
Men turn to savagery now or turn
   To the laws'

Immutable black and red.
   To be judged for his song,
Traversing the still-moist dead,
   The newly-stung,

Love goes, carrying compassion
   To the rawly-difficult;
His countenance, his hands' motion,
   Serene even to a fault.




Similar blogposts


Epitaph for Geoffrey Hill

A selection of Geoffrey Hill's poems

Damon's Lament for his Clorinda, Yorkshire 1654

The Herefordshire Carol

That which is taken from me is not mine - epitaph for Geoffrey Hill

Dawnlight freezes against the east-wire.
The guards cough 'raus! 'raus! We flinch and grin,
Our flesh oozing towards its last outrage.
That which is taken from me is not mine.
- Geoffrey Hill, "I had hope when violence was ceas't", from King Log (1968)


For years I have been an avid reader, and an avid re-reader, of Geoffrey Hill's poetry. I no longer remember when I became enthralled by his verse, but it must have been about six or seven years ago. At that time I had already studied one of his poems, "September Song", in an English course on poetry and drama, but I do know that it was not this poem which caught my attention. Rather, I discovered his verses while browsing through the Norton Anthology of English Poetry, whose fourth edition contains a selection of some of his greatest works, including excerpts from the sonnet cycle "An Apology on the Revival of Christian Architecture in England" (its title taken from a book by Augustus Welby Pugin from 1895), excerpts from Mercian Hymns, and his homage to Helen Waddell, "Veni Coronaberis". The poetry of these verses spoke to me, with their references, their sure sense of rhythm, with their evocative images and - for some - with their epigraphs, for which I have a big soft spot.

In the following years, I kept reading Hill's poems, and when I studied in York for the spring term of 2011, I bought a copy of edition of Collected poems from 1985 by Penguin Publishing. This volume contains the complete first four collections, in addition to two longer poems published separately in 1983 and 1984. This book became a constant companion on my walks around in York, and I would often read it in the Yorkshire Museum Garden while enjoying the peace and quiet of the surroundings and the sense of history which is so very strong in that particular place. As a consequence, Geoffrey Hill became a travelling companion as I explored the streets and history of York, and his poems became part of my understanding and comprehension of York itself. When I read some of my favourite verses, such as "The Laurel Axe" from "An Apology...", or "The Distant Fury of Battle", I immediately think of York in springtime, in its changing moods. It was also in York, in september 2011, that I bought and read his collection Clavics, which was a pleasant return to form for a poet whose verse - in my opinion - is at its best when rendered in verse.

It is fitting, therefore, that it was in York I learned of Geoffrey Hill's tragic passing. I received the news the day after, while accidentally overhearing someone at the University of York mentioning the fact to a colleague. I was in York to attend a conference organized by my job, the Centre for Medieval Literature, and during lunch I came to learn of the loss of one of the greatest poets of the English language. I still carried with me the volume bought in 2011, and I had read the entire "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England" on the day of his passing without knowing he was dead, and somehow it pleased me think of this unwitting homage. The day when I heard that he was dead, however, I again picked up the collection and read the beautiful magic realism of Mercian Hymns.

The poetry of Geoffrey Hill has meant a lot to me in the past few years. They have teased my historical imagination with their evocation of past epochs, they have satisfied my delight in rhymed verse, they have dazzled me with their lyrical and playful use of language and imagery, and they have opened up doors to other books and other literatures for me. To me, when talking about Hill's poetry, it will always be his earliest collections I think of with greatest admiration, when he relied chiefly on rhyme but not strictly so, and when he still wrote sonnets. Among his early poems there are many often overlooked gems, some of which are very short, which evoke in my mind an England which is that England of an ever distant past which is partly the reason for my abiding anglophilia - the dark sides of contemporary English culture and society notwithstanding. In a way, Geoffrey Hill's early poems are windows into a lost world - not a better world, but one which it is delightful to explore through these particular verses.

The front page of the collected poems by Geoffrey Hill
Oxford University Press, 2014
(Photo credits, bookdepository.com

As a conclusion to this very personal epitaph, I will include one poem from King Log, whose opening frequently comes to my mind, and which is one of the most beautiful verses crafted by Geoffrey Hill.

The Imaginative Life

Evasive souls, of whom the wise lose track,
Die in each night, who, with their day-tongues, sift
The waking-taste of manna or of blood:

The raw magi, part-barbarians,
Entranced by demons and desert frost,
By the irregular visions of a god,

Suffragans of the true Seraphs. Lust
Writhes, is dumb savage and in their way
As a virulence natural to the earth.

Renewed glories batten on the poor bones;
Gargantuan mercies whetted by a scent
Of mortal sweat: as though the sleeping flesh

Adored by Furies, stirred, yawned, were driven
In mid-terror to purging and delight.
As though the dead had Finis on their brows.




For similar blogposts:


House of Solitudes

Containing "Veni Coronaberis"

The Herefordshire Carol

Damon's Lament for his Clorinda, Yorkshire 1654

A selection of Geoffrey Hill's early verse

Geoffrey Hill - a selection

I have made it a policy to keep the blog going with at least four blogposts a month, in order to ensure continued activity. However, since my time is greatly consumed by my work with Latin and also my job as a teaching assistant for the history freshmen and -women, not every blogpost can be equally meticulously researched or verbose. As a consequence, the last blogpost of this month is a selection of poetry from one of my favourite poets in the English language, Geoffrey Hill.

During my stay in York in the spring of 2011, I kept an edition of Geoffrey Hill's collected poems (published by Penguin in 1985) in my bag at all times. Consequently, many of his early poems - which to my mind are his best - evoke the particular atmosphere of York which I love so much, and even certain specific locations. In part, therefore, this blogpost is an expression of nostalgia, a nostalgia both for those days I have myself experienced, and a constructed nostalgia for the days evoked by Hill's verse. The copyright of the poems lies with Geoffrey Hill and Penguin publishing.

The Distant Fury of Battle

Grass resurrects to mask, to strangle,
Words glossed on stone, lopped stone-angel;
But the dead maintain their ground -
That there's no getting round -

Who in places vitally rest,
Named, anonymous; who test
Alike the endurance of yews,
Laurels, moonshine, stone, all tissued;

With whom, under licence and duress,
There are pacts made, if not peace.
Union with the stone-wearing dead
Claims the born leader, the prepared

Leader, the devourers and all lean men.
Some, finally, learn to begin.
Some keep to the arrangement of love
(Or similar trust) under whose auspices move

Most subjects, toward the profits of this
Combine of doves and witnesses.
Some, dug out of hot-beds, are brought bare,
Not past conceiving but past care.


The Guardians

The young, having risen early, had gone,
Some with excursions beyond the bay-mouth,
Some toward lakes, a fragile reflected sun.
Thunder-heads drift, awkwardly, from the south;

The old watch them. They have watched the safe
Packed harbours topple under sudden gales,
Great tides irrupt, yachts burn at the wharf
That on clean seas pitched their effective sails.

There are silences. These, too, they endure:
Soft comings-on; soft after-shocks of calm.
Quietly they wade the disturbed shore;
Gather the dead as the first dead scrape home.


After Cumae

The sun again unearthed, colours come up fresh,
The perennials; and the laurels'
Washable leaves, that seem never to perish,
Obscure the mouthy cave, the dumb grottoes.

From the beginning, in the known world, slide
Drawn echoing hulls, axes grate, and waves
Deposit in their shallow margins varied
Fragments of marine decay and waftage;

And the sometimes-abandoned gods confuse
With immortal essences men's brief lives,
Frequenting the exposed and pious: those
Who stray, as designed, under applied perils,

Whose doom is easy, venturing so far
Without need, other than to freeze or burn,
Their wake, on spread-out oceans, a healed scar
Fingered, themselves the curios of voyage.

November Poetry - part I

For the past month this blog has been dormant as a consequence of my thesis work. I have now handed in the thesis to the Department and await the defence in medio December. I'm nonetheless trying to keep up four posts a month, and to achieve this I'm going the easy route: poetry posts. The first one is Geoffrey Hill's second sonnet from his cycle An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England, printed in Tenebrae, 1978.


II) Damon's Lament for his Clorinda, Yorkshire 1654

November rips gold foil from the oak ridges.   

Dour folk huddle in High Hoyland, Penistone.   

The tributaries of the Sheaf and Don

bulge their dull spate, cramming the poor bridges.

The North Sea batters our shepherds’ cottages   

from sixty miles. No sooner has the sun   

swung clear above earth’s rim than it is gone.   

We live like gleaners of its vestiges

knowing we flourish, though each year a child   

with the set face of a tomb-weeper is put down   

for ever and ever. Why does the air grow cold

in the region of mirrors? And who is this clown   

doffing his mask at the masked threshold   

to selfless raptures that are all his own?

The Herefordshire Carol

This is the truth sent from above,
The truth of God, the God of love:
- The Herefordshire Carol, traditional

One of the most beautiful Christmas carols in the English language is in my opinion This is the truth sent from above as arranged by composer Ralph Vaughan Williams in the early 20th century. The song is found in at least three renditions of varying length and the one collected and arranged by Williams comes from Herefordshire, hence commonly known as The Herefordshire Carol. Its complete text can be found here, and I bring this to you with my best wishes for a blessed Christmas.

The Herefordshire Carol is also the title of Geoffrey Hill's concluding implement of his sonnet sequence An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England, here taken from The Collected Poems, Penguin, 1985. Aside from the title there is little textual coherence between the two works, but since it is a beautiful poem I have added it as an extra Christmas gift.

The Herefordshire Carol

So to celebrate that kingdom: it grows

greener in winter, essence of the year;

the apple-branches musty with green fur 

In the viridian darkness of its yews

it is an enclave of perpetual vows

broken in time. Its truth shows disrepair,

disfigured shrines, their stones of gossamer,

Old Moore's astrology, all hallows,

the squire's effigy bewigged with frost,

and hobnails cracking puddles before dawn.

In grange and cottage girls rise from their beds

by candlelight and mend their ruined braids.

Touched by the cry of the iconoclast,

how the rose-window blossoms with the sun!


Merry Christmas

A Companion to Owls

I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.

- The Book of Job, 30:29

The oule eek, that of dethe the bode bringeth

- The Parlement of Foules, Geoffrey Chaucer

An owl plunges to its tryst

- Three Baroque Meditations, Geoffrey Hill

If you have ever stood face to face with a wild animal and met its gaze, neither of you flinching, each scanning the other with a primal curiosity until you have seen your own face mirrored in its pupil, you will know what this blogpost is all about.

Since this summer Owl Adventures, a local falconry company, has offered people the opportunity to have their picture taken with a bird of prey. Having learned this from a friend and former flatmate in York, I was determined to grasp the opportunity with both hands since I have a well-nurtured fascination for falconry, partly owing to growing up in rural Norway where birds of prey are frequently seen, partly owing to my love for things Medieval.

In the Middle Ages falconry, or hawking, was a popular pastime for European nobility and royalty. The sport was introduced to England by the Normans and its importance throughout Europe can be attested from a wide variety of sources. For instance in Regesta Norvegica, a collection of Medieval correspondence, we learn that King Henry III of England expressed his gratitude to King Håkon IV Håkonsson of Norway for his gifts of birds of prey. Falcons and hawks from Norway and Iceland were considered the best in Europe and were naturally highly sought after.

A man taking his fascination of falconry to a level of his own was Friedrich II, Holy Roman Emperor and a contemporary of the aforementioned kings. He wrote De Arte Venandi Cum Avibus, an almost proto-empirical treatise on the art of falconry, and, as a friend pointed out after her trip to Neustadt, German, he is frequently depicted in the company of birds of prey. I also suspect that this feature of Friedrich II has been a key source of inspiration to Erik Fosnes Hansen's wonderful novel Falketårnet, the Falcon Tower which is set during his reign.

A companion to owls. And eagles.

During my time as a student in York I came across the nobility's preoccupation with falconry several times in the course of a module on Middle English romances, for instance in Sir Degrevant where the following lines occur:

He wold be upp or the day
To honte and to revay.

I was quite pleased to come across this since it reminded me of one of the reasons why I am fascinated by falconry, namely its vocabulary. I often seek to expand my own vocabulary, imping it, as it were, with words from various disciplines, taking delight in the wide range of choices available. What brought my attention to the language of falconry a couple of years back was the use of terms from falconry found in the poetry of Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare, opening up a small but exciting world to me. Revay, for instance, designates the hunting of ducks and geese along riverbanks.

In other words it should come as no surprise that I was quite eager to seek out the birds of prey in York and finally one day I did. That day they had no falcons or hawks available, but instead they had a beautiful selection of owls and I decided to have my picture taken with each of them in turn.

A little owl of the species little owl.

First I was handed the little fellow above. He was small enough that I dared place him right in front of my face, so we stood for a brief while looking into each other's eyes and I could see myself mirrored in his pupil, my own face reflected in a puny orb as black as black can be, eye to eye with an animal who, although tamed, can never be anything but wild. As we stood there I felt a childish excitement about being this close to something primal and that moment of a brief aeon was in itself a consummation of all I had hoped for.

The ill-faste Owle, deaths dreadfull messengere

- The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser

Unlike the inquisitive little owl the barn owl was quite sedate and tired having just pruned her feathers so she cared little for what took place around her. When she had been placed on my hawking glove the photographer stroked her little beak a couple of times to wake her up, although I felt it was somewhat unnecessary to bother her like that, poor thing. This was the first time I had ever seen a real-life barn owl since we don't have them at home and I have always been somewhat mystified by its strange face which is at once both beautiful and deformed. 

 

A male eagle owl. You can tell, they told me, from its lesser size.

The eagle owl was perhaps what I was looking most forward to become briefly acquainted with, partly because of its rather quaint majesty, partly because I have been somewhat dazzled by eagle owls since childhood. As the manager placed him on my glove I was told to hold steady lest he should interpret my wavering as a signal for him to return to his log since he expressed a certain impatience to have this thing over and done with. As he was about to settle on my hand he beat his wings somewhat and hit me in the face as he did, and I confess that it too gave me a certain sense of coming close to the wild animal perching behind its domesticated appearance.

All in all it was a great experience to come this close to owls, something I haven't been since my youngest sister and I came across two young tawny owls in an abandoned farm back home, and even then I didn't get to stare deep into its face in the same way. There is something hauntingly beautiful about owls, a appearance of senescence that makes us believe them to be sapient, mystical creatures and that, in turn, might be part of the reason why it is such a thrill to peer into an owl's eyes, looking for something you have lost in yourself, bound to fail in your quest to retrieve it.

In all the excitement I forgot to ask them to take the pictures with my own camera and consequently I got photographs rather than digital pictures. However, to give you an idea of how the sensation was, I have posted a few pictures of the photographs in question below. For the remainder of my travel I kept them safe in an edition of Geoffrey Hill's poetry collection Clavics bought in York, a volume, as you can see, featuring an owl on its cover and a sequence of poems as hauntingly captivating as an owl. 

 (...) but then face to face

1 Corinthians 13:12 

The Realm of Love Renews

The ioyous time now nighest fast,
That shall alegge this bitter blast,
And slake the winters sorowe.

- The Shepheardes Calender - March, Edmund Spenser

(...) the realm of love renews

The battle it was born to lose

- Venis Coronaberis, Geoffrey Hill

Woodcut illustration to the March eclogue of Spenser's innovative The Shepheardes Calender (1579), taken from the University of Oregon's splendid website. The third eclogue is dedicated to a debate on love and fits nicely with Geoffrey Hill's image of love's realm renewing.

The first day of spring appeared in all its sunlit splendour when I awoke. After having spent some time reading in William of Malmesbury's History of the English Kings I decided to make my errand to King's Manor a combination of pleasure and duty. Accordingly, between delivering a couple of books and reading an article on medieval romances, I roamed about York for about an hour, delighting in the sun's return after days of absence and in the city's many amusements big and small.

Due to the weather and the flowers of the Yorkshire Museum Garden I was reminded of Geoffrey Hill's beautiful poem Veni Coronaberis which suits a day like today perfectly. The poem, whose title translates roughly as "come and be garlanded", is an homage to the latinist Helen Waddell and I have quoted it below in its entirety, although not coherently.

Today was not an eventful day so I shall refrain from elaborating on what I did in too many words. Instead I present a selection of pictures that will illustrate the pleasant aspects of the day quite fittingly.

Flora now calleth forth eche flower,
And bids make ready Maias bowre,
That newe is vpryst from bedde.

- The Shepheardes Calender - March, Edmund Spenser

the fields of March will detonate the crocus
- North and South, Derek Walcott

What more felicitie can fall to creature
Than to enioy delight with libertie

- Muiopotmos or Fate of the Butterflie, Edmund Spenser

For ah! we know not what each other says,

These things and I; in sound I speak—

Their sound is but their stir, they speak by silences.

-The Hound of Heaven, Francis Thompson

The crocus armies from the dead

Rise up; the realm of love renews

The battle it was born to lose,

Though for a time the snows have fled

- Veni Coronaberis, Geoffrey Hill

and old stones blossom in the south

with sculpted vine and psaltery

and half-effaced adultery

The bird-dung dribbling from its mouth;

- Veni Coronaberis, Geoffrey Hill

and abstinence crowns all our care

with martyr-laurels for this day.

Towers and steeples rise away

into the towering gulfs of air.

- Veni Coronaberis, Geoffrey Hill

 I stumbled upon these fellows during a photoshoot. At first I didn't understand the occasion...

...but then I remembered this poster, and considering they were accompanied by a mummy it seems like a probable conjecture linking these together.

She'll be ruling the bloody country next.

 Starlings are tough but the lions are made of stone

- Lions, Dire Straits

 Against the red throb of its sunset-heart

I laid my own to beat,

And share commingling heat;

- The Hound of Heaven, Francis Thompson