The Bedrock of Gravity: Pondering the Grammar of Fall in Geoffrey Hill

In a footnote to his “Version,” as he refers to it, of Ibsen’s Brand, Geoffrey Hill writes, “The best gifts one person can make to another, in this field of endeavour, are technical details; it is the precise detail, of word or rhythm, which carries the ethical burden; it is technique, rightly understood, which provides the true point of departure for inspiration” (Brand xi). As characteristic of anything written by Hill, the comment has a density not for the impatient. As it speaks of burdens, it is itself loaded in more ways than one. To use an adjective favored of the poet himself, it is “ponderable” (“Word” 146; “Envoi (1919)” 85): it is to be mulled over, considered, examined; it is also heavy. Among other things, it invites one to think about the relationship of ethics to poetics. It raises the question of how, exactly, we are to interpret “ethical burden.” It also asks us to consider just how words and rhythms may register, or fail to register, ethical issues and how changes in word and rhythm may shift that burden around. We are thus invited to think about the ethics involved in the choice of word or rhythm, and yet again, along a separate trajectory, about whether indeed, and how, and why, precision might be thought of as having an ethical dimension to it.

With Hill, one should never assume anything less than an exact and absolute scrupulousness about language, what it both entails and enacts. In “The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy,” he asks,

Must men stand by what they write as by their camp-beds or their weaponry or shell-shocked comrades while they sag and cry?¹

(183)

The shape of the question admits of only one answer.² His observation about how the precise detail of word or rhythm carries the ethical burden cannot function in good faith except as it functions self-reflexively, submitting to be bound by what it legislates. The importance, then, of the phrase resides not merely in the general denotable content with which it is freighted, but also in the precise choices of “carries” and “ethical” and “burden” and in the metaphor formed from their complicity. It is the implications of his words and the ethical considerations that they make available to us that this essay will attempt to trace, along with the place of these in the “grammar” structuring Hill’s thinking in some of his earlier works. I will mostly, though not exclusively, be looking at poems from Hill’s first collection, For the Unfallen (1959).

I have here written “grammar” because it appears to me that there is a defined structure and set of relations between the elements in Hill’s writing and thought. The section of Hill’s grammar this essay sets out to consider concerns the syntax of “Fall” as it relates to “unfallen” and also to “gravity,” “heaviness,” “burdens,” and “bearing.” It might be worth beginning with something seemingly straightforward: the title of the collection For the Unfallen. The obvious sense of the “unfallen” is of survivors, those who did not fall in battle, those who remain standing and are still alive. This is a sense, for instance, identified by Knottenbelt, who describes the poems as coming “from one survivor of certain kinds of loss for other survivors of similar and quite different forms of loss, among whom the reader may count himself, depending on the extent to which he understands this” (8). Knottenbelt and others have also been attuned to that other sense of “unfallen,” glossable as being “in a state of innocence without experience” or, simply, “pre-lapsarian” (Knottenbelt 15).

We may, though, arrive at a sharper sense of “unfallen” and the ethical value with which “unfallen-ness” is burdened by looking at its opposite— “fallen-ness”—as it is pondered in “Genesis” and other poems. Hollander has remarked on the “almost Blakean sense of the inherence of the Fall in the very Creation” (300–301) that is found in “Genesis.” While there is indeed such an inherence, and while it...