from The Triumph of Love

Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp.

XIII

Whose lives are hidden in God? Whose?

Who can now tell what was taken, or where,

or how, or whether it was received:

how ditched, divested, clamped, sifted, over-

laid, raked over, grassed over, spread around,

rotted down with leafmould, accepted

as civic concrete, reinforceable

base cinderblocks:

tipped into Danube, Rhine, Vistula, dredged up

with the Baltic and the Pontic sludge:

committed in absentia to solemn elevation,

Trauermusik, musique funèbre, funeral

music, for male and female

voices ringingly a cappella,

made for double string choirs, congregated brass,

choice performers on baroque trumpets hefting,

like glassblowers, inventions

of supreme order?

XIV

As to bad faith, Malebranche might argue

it rests with inattention. Stupidity

is not admissible. However, the status

of apprehension remains at issue.

Some qualities are best

left unrecognized. Needless to say,

unrecognized is not

unacknowledged. Unnamed is not nameless.

XVII

If the gospel is heard, all else follows:

the scattering, the diaspora,

the shtetlach, ash pits, pits of indigo dye.

Penitence can be spoken of, it is said,

but is itself beyond words;

even broken speech presumes. Those Christian Jews

of the first Church, huddled sabbath-survivors,

keepers of the word; silent, inside twenty years,

doubly outcast: even so I would remember—

the scattering, the diaspora.

We do not know the saints.

His mercy is greater even than his wisdom.

If the gospel is heard, all else follows.

We shall rise again, clutching our wounds.

XXXV

Even now, I tell myself, there is a language

to which I might speak and which

would rightly hear me;

responding with eloquence; in its turn,

negotiating sense without insult

given or injury taken.

Familiar to those who already know it

elsewhere as justice,

it is met also in the form of silence.

XXIX

Rancorous, narcissistic old sod—what

makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather,

he might be dead. Too bad. So how

much more does he have of injury time?

For wordly, read worldly; for in equity, inequity;

for religious read religiose; for distinction

detestation. Take accessible to mean

acceptable, accommodating, openly servile.

Is that right, Missis, or is that right? I don’t

care what I say, do I?

XLI

For iconic priesthood, read worldly pique and ambition.

Change insightfully caring to pruriently intrusive.

Delete chastened and humbled. Insert humiliated.

Interpret slain in the spirit as browbeaten to exhaustion.

For hardness of heart read costly dislike of cant.

XLII

Excuse me—excuse me—I did not

say the pain is lifting. I said the pain is in

the lifting. No—please—forget it.

XLIII

This is quite dreadful—he’s become obsessed.

There you go, there you go—narrow it down to obsession!

Whatever may be meant by moral landscape,

it is for me increasingly a terrain

seen in cross-section: igneous, sedimentary,

conglomerate, metamorphic rock-

strata, in which particular grace,

individual love, decency, endurance,

are traceable across the faults.

LII

Admittedly at times this moral landscape

to my exasperated ear emits

archaic burrings like a small, high-fenced

electricity sub-station of uncertain age

in a field corner where the flies

gather and old horses shake their sides.

LXVI

Christ has risen yet again to their

ritual supplication. It seems weird

that the comedy never self-destructs.

Actually it is strengthened—if

attenuation is strength. (Donne

said as much of gold. Come back,

Donne, I forgive you; and lovely Herbert.)

But what strange guild is this

that practises daily

synchronized genuflection and takes pride

in hazing my Jewish wife? If Christ

be not risen, Christians are petty

temple-schismatics, justly

cast out of the law. Worse things

have befallen Israel. But since he is

risen, he is risen even for these

high-handed underlings of self-

worship: who, as by obedience,

proclaim him risen indeed.

LXVII

Instruct me further in your travail,

blind interpreter. Suppose I cannot

unearth what it was they buried: research

is not anamnesis. Nor is this a primer

of innocence exactly. Did the centurion

see nothing irregular before the abnormal

light seared his eyeballs? Why do I

take as my gift a wounded and wounding

introspection? The rule is clear enough: last

alleluias forte, followed by indifferent

coffee and fellowship.

LXIX

What choice do you have? These are false questions.

Fear is your absolute, yet in each feature

infinitely variable, Manichean beyond dispute,

for you alone, the skeletal maple, a loose wire

tapping the wind.

LXX

Active virtue: that which shall contain

its own passion in the public weal—

do you follow?—or can you at least

take the drift of the thing? The struggle

for a noble vernacular: this

did not end with Petrarch. But where is it?

Where has it got us? Does it stop, in our case,

with Dryden, or, perhaps,

Milton’s political sonnets?—the cherished stock

hacked into ransom and ruin; the voices

of distinction, far back, indistinct.

Still, I’m convinced that shaping,

voicing, are types of civic action. Or, slightly

to refashion this, that Wordsworth’s two

Prefaces stand with his great tract

on the Convention of Cintra, witnessing

to the praesidium in the sacred name

of things betrayed. Intrinsic value

I am somewhat less sure of. It seems

implicate with active virtue but I cannot

say how, precisely. Partaking of both

fact and recognition, it must be, therefore,

in effect, at once agent and predicate:

imponderables brought home

to the brute mass and detail of the world;

there, by some, to be pondered.

XCVI

Ignorant, assured, there comes to us a voice—

Unchallengeable—of the foundations,

distinct authority devoted

to indistinction. With what proximity

to justice stands the record of mischance,

heroic hit-or-miss, the air

so full of flak and tracer, legend says,

you pray to live unnoticed. M^r Ives

took Emersonian self-reliance the whole

way on that. Melville, half-immolated,

rebuilt the pyre. Holst, some time later,

stumbled on dharma. What can I say?—

At worst and best a blind ennoblement,

flood-water, hunched, shouldering at the weir,

the hatred that is in the nature of love.

CXVIII

By default, as it so happens, here we have

good and bad angels caught burning

themselves characteristic antiphons;

and here the true and the false

shepherds discovered

already deep into their hollow debate.

Is that all? No, add spinners of fine

calumny, confectioners of sugared

malice; add those who find sincerity

in heartless weeping. Add the pained,

painful clowns, brinksmen of perdition.

Sidney: best realizer and arguer

of music, that ‘divine

striker upon the senses’, steady my

music to your Augustinian grace-notes,

with your high craft of fret. I am glad

to have learned how it goes

with you and with Italianate-

Hebraic Milton: your voices pitched exactly—

somewhere—between Laus Deo and defiance.

CXIX

And yes—bugger you, MacSikker et al.,—I do

mourn and resent your desolation of learning:

Scientia that enabled, if it did not secure,

forms of understanding, far from despicable,

and furthest now, as they are most despised.

By understanding I understand diligence

and attention, appropriately understood

as actuated self-knowledge, a daily acknowledgement

of what is owed the dead.

CXX

As with the Gospels, which it is allowed to resemble,

in Measure for Measure moral uplift

is not the issue. Scrupulosity, diffidence,

shrill spirituality, conviction, free expression,

come off as poorly as deceit or lust.

The ethical motiv is—so we may hazard—

opportunism, redemptive and redeemed;

case-hardened on case-law, casuistry’s

own redemption; the general temper

a caustic equity.

CXXI

So what is faith if it is not

inescapable endurance? Unrevisited, the ferns

are breast-high, head-high, the days

lustrous, with their hinterlands of thunder.

Light is this instant, far-seeing

into itself, its own

signature on things that recognize

salvation. I

am an old man, a child, the horizon

is Traherne’s country.

CXLVII

To go so far with the elaborately-

vested Angel of Naked Truth:

and where are we, finally? Don’t

say that—we are nowhere

finally. And nowhere are you—

nowhere are you—any more—more

cryptic than a schoolyard truce. Cry

Kings, Cross, or Crosses, cry Pax,

cry Pax, but to be healed. But to be

healed, and die!

CXLVIII

Obnoxious means, far back within itself,

easily wounded. But vulnerable, proud

anger is, I find, a related self

of covetousness. I came late

to seeing that. Actually, I had to be

shown it. What I saw was rough, and still

pains me. Perhaps it should pain me more.

Pride is our crux: be angry, but not proud

where that means vainglorious. Take Leopardi’s

words or—to be accurate—BV’s English

cast of them: when he found Tasso’s poor

scratch of a memorial barely showing

among the cold slabs of defunct pomp. It

seemed a sad and angry consolation.

So—Croker, MacSikker, O’Shem—I ask you:

what are poems for? They are to console us

with their own gift, which is like perfect pitch.

Let us commit that to our dust. What

ought a poem to be? Answer, a sad

and angry consolation. What is

the poem? What figures? Say,

a sad and angry consolation. That’s

beautiful. Once more? A sad and angry

consolation.

CXLIX

Obstinate old man—senex

sapiens, it is not. Is he still

writing? What is he writing now? He

has just written: I find it hard

to forgive myself. We are immortal. Where

was I?—

Sun-blazed, over Romsley, the livid rain-scarp.

Copyright Credit: Geoffrey Hill, I, XIII, XIV, XVII, XXXV, XL, XLI, XLII, XLIII, LI, LII, LIII, LXVI, LXVII, LXIX, LXX, XCVI, CXVIII, CXIX, CXX, CXXI, CXXII, CXXIV, CXLVII, CXLVIII, CXLIX, CL from The Triumph of Love Copyright © 1998 by Geoffrey Hill. Used with the permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

Source: The Triumph of Love (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1998)