Quotidian Epic: Geoffrey Hill's The Triumph of Love

I.

The cover of Geoffrey Hill's The Triumph of Love calls its one hundred and fifty items "A Poem." ¹ Here is, indeed, a long poem made up of numerous brief ones, not for the reason Poe adduced, that the "essentiality" of poetry is its ability to excite "by elevating the soul," which it cannot do over any great length, but for the equally modern and, I would maintain, truer reason that the completest poetry accords both with our experiencing, through mind, wide and quite often immense tracts of time and place and thought, and with the fact that, whatever we experience, we do so now. On the one hand, the "epic" reaching out to larger-than-life meanings; the addressing, perhaps, of more-than-human Beings; and the long trawl of memory, through one's own life and through all the histories with or in which one is concerned. On the other, in Hill's case, the "daily acknowledgement / of what is owed the dead" (CXIX); the taking stock each day of what one is and who one is becoming; what St. Paul calls "redeeming the time" and what Hill also calls, in elucidation of Measure for Measure--with a shocking misalignment of the word which shakes one into thought--redemptive "opportunism" (CXX); the pressure, consequently, of the present moment, in which, moreover, "All / things are eternally present" (CXXV).

The combination, the agreement, of large intent and intense awareness of the instants in which awareness always occurs is founded, here, on the one hundred and fifty psalms of the Psalter, through an act of apparent presumption which suggests, rather, the possibility of an ever-recurring self-derision.

The epic concern is again in part with the nation, especially its failures, and most often those perpetrated in or before the Second World War, which Hill, born in 1932, knew as a boy. The mixing of autobiography and place focuses once more, however, as did Mercian Hymns, on the West Midlands region in which he grew up. He meditates the destruction by the Luftwaffe of the West Midlands city of Coventry, the revenge bombing (unless I am mistaken) of Dresden, and the relation--of slippery morality and dreadful choice--between all that and the cracking, by Turing or by Polish cryptographers, of the Enigma code. This is not a determinedly, polemically, regional poetry, since it plies between a region and a nation intimately involved with each other.

It is true that the single line which constitutes the first poem: "Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp," reads at first like a piece of "pure poetry." In this image at once visionary and real (in conformity with the facts of meteorology, of perception), the imagination seizes the contrast between fire and water, an exact but unexpected color, and the sublimity of that abrupt slope where the rain ends; as the mind perceives the Germanic inventiveness of hyphenated words, in this sudden sighting of the beginning or the ending of a world. One is soon to learn that the image emerges from the poet's childhood, so as to fix memory to a single thing seen, to the glimpsing of a grander, violent and prodigious reality. The word "Romsley" has its own poetic charge, to be released much later in poem, or in section CI, where it is a question of setting out, though "already too late," through "woods / full of wild garlic"; "grove of wild garlic" is the attractively strange etymological sense of that Old-English place-name. One might even think of Imagism--of Pound's "In a Station of the Metro": "The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough"--except that one also senses in Hill's image a conflict between the sun's fine and compact rain, and, in lividity, the color of wounds and of unhealthy flesh. (One comes to sense later...