Funeral Music

William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450
John Tiptoft, Earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470
Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483

Processionals in the exemplary cave,

Benediction of shadows. Pomfret. London.

The voice fragrant with mannered humility,

With an equable contempt for this world,

‘In honorem Trinitatis’. Crash. The head

Struck down into a meaty conduit of blood.

So these dispose themselves to receive each

Pentecostal blow from axe or seraph,

Spattering block-straw with mortal residue.

Psalteries whine through the empyrean. Fire

Flares in the pit, ghosting upon stone

Creatures of such rampant state, vacuous

Ceremony of possession, restless

Habitation, no man’s dwelling-place.

For whom do we scrape our tribute of pain—

For none but the ritual king? We meditate

A rueful mystery; we are dying

To satisfy fat Caritas, those

Wiped jaws of stone. (Suppose all reconciled

By silent music; imagine the future

Flashed back at us, like steel against sun,

Ultimate recompense.) Recall the cold

Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn,

Wakefield, Tewkesbury: fastidious trumpets

Shrilling into the ruck; some trampled

Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet,

Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind’s

Flurrying, darkness over the human mire.

They bespoke doomsday and they meant it by

God, their curved metal rimming the low ridge.

But few appearances are like this. Once

Every five hundred years a comet’s

Over-riding stillness might reveal men

In such array, livid and featureless,

With England crouched beastwise beneath it all.

‘Oh, that old northern business …’ A field

After battle utters its own sound

Which is like nothing on earth, but is earth.

Blindly the questing snail, vulnerable

Mole emerge, blindly we lie down, blindly

Among carnage the most delicate souls

Tup in their marriage-blood, gasping ‘Jesus’.

Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not

Endure. Soul grasps its price, begs its own peace,

Settles with tears and sweat, is possibly

Indestructible. That I can believe.

Though I would scorn the mere instinct of faith,

Expediency of assent, if I dared,

What I dare not is a waste history

Or void rule. Averroes, old heathen,

If only you had been right, if Intellect

Itself were absolute law, sufficient grace,

Our lives could be a myth of captivity

Which we might enter: an unpeopled region

Of ever new-fallen snow, a palace blazing

With perpetual silence as with torches.

As with torches we go, at wild Christmas,

When we revel in our atonement

Through thirty feasts of unction and slaughter,

What is that but the soul’s winter sleep?

So many things rest under consummate

Justice as though trumpets purified law,

Spikenard were the real essence of remorse.

The sky gathers up darkness. When we chant

‘Ora, ora pro nobis’ it is not

Seraphs who descend to pity but ourselves.

Those righteously-accused those vengeful

Racked on articulate looms indulge us

With lingering shows of pain, a flagrant

Tenderness of the damned for their own flesh:

My little son, when you could command marvels

Without mercy, outstare the wearisome

Dragon of sleep, I rejoiced above all—

A stranger well-received in your kingdom.

On those pristine fields I saw humankind

As it was named by the Father; fabulous

Beasts rearing in stillness to be blessed.

The world’s real cries reached there, turbulence

From remote storms, rumour of solitudes,

A composed mystery. And so it ends.

Some parch for what they were; others are made

Blind to all but one vision, their necessity

To be reconciled. I believe in my

Abandonment, since it is what I have.

‘Prowess, vanity, mutual regard,

It seemed I stared at them, they at me.

That was the gorgon’s true and mortal gaze:

Averted conscience turned against itself.’

A hawk and a hawk-shadow. ‘At noon,

As the armies met, each mirrored the other;

Neither was outshone. So they flashed and vanished

And all that survived them was the stark ground

Of this pain. I made no sound, but once

I stiffened as though a remote cry

Had heralded my name. It was nothing …’

Reddish ice tinged the reeds; dislodged, a few

Feathers drifted across; carrion birds

Strutted upon the armour of the dead.

Not as we are but as we must appear,

Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we

Desire life but as they would have us live,

Set apart in timeless colloquy.

So it is required; so we bear witness,

Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,

Each distant sphere of harmony forever

Poised, unanswerable. If it is without

Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or

If it is not, all echoes are the same

In such eternity. Then tell me, love,

How that should comfort us—or anyone

Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,

Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

Copyright Credit: Geoffrey Hill, “Funeral Music” from New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992. Copyright © 1994 by Geoffrey Hill. Used with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Source: New and Collected Poems 1952-1992 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994)