Finalists

1 4 Y F I N A L I S T S G E O F F R E Y H I L L 1: after Paul Éluard, ‘Couvre-feu’, 1942 So what big deal forbidden doors so who came forth if no escape so what’s to say no-one got through so what the cité interdit that’s how it goes the people starved so there’s a thing the ammo gone so what what if the curfews toll so there so there so there our love 2: after some lines of Pierre Jean Jouve, ‘Gravitation’, 1948 • That all are guilty though a shameful verdict • monstrous as becoming lords of heaven • mortality o’ertravailed in its dying • that the Last Judgement knows not what it does • 1 5 R 3: after André Frénaud, ‘Exhortation aux Pauvres’, 1942 Inescapable as dearth this fury inexpressible our words’ attrition nor yet inseparably single-minded: there will be dawn it is not here assigned us not now as earth grows gravid for the taking something new laboured wails upon the silence: salut! the killing wheel is hereby broken signals abroad tomorrow shall atone us streetlamps hate’s gallows and the eyes for love In preparing Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012 (2013), the final edition of his collected poems, Geo√rey Hill made a number of additions and revisions to his previous books of poetry. Some of these additions he decided, in the end, not to publish. For instance, he once envisaged, but finally decided against, expanding the poem ‘‘The Oath’’ in The Treatise of Civil Power (2007) so that it would appear as the first in a sequence (collectively entitled ‘‘Finalists’’) to consist of four poems that adapted or responded to French works. The three additional poems he drafted for this purpose, all in response to French verse published in the 1940s, are printed here. Hill’s very free response to some lines from Jouve’s ‘‘Gravitation’’ was itself an extensive revision to the free adaption of Jouve’s poem which he had originally made for the first draft of ‘‘Finalists’’: That all stand guilty though obscene the verdict that love’s an ordure of divine emission hope’s umbilicus a red-raw halter that such monstrosities are lords of heaven that God has masturbated his creation that living’s overlaboured in its dying that death withdraws its terminating labour – nothing scry nothing – that the Last Judgement knows not what it does In the end, Hill dropped all these additions to The Treatise of Civil Power from Broken Hierarchies. – Kenneth Haynes ...