A Prayer to the Sun -- Geoffrey Hill

(Poem #349) A Prayer to the Sun (in memory of Miguel Hernandez) (1) Darkness above all things the Sun makes rise (2) Vultures salute their meat at noon (Hell is silent) (3) Blind Sun our ravager bless us so that we sleep. -- Geoffrey Hill

Like Adrian Mitchell, Geoffrey Hill has never been afraid to voice very
definite political concerns through his poetry. And the fact that he
isn't as consistently (and vocally) anti-establishment as Mitchell means
that when he _does_ make a statement, it tends to be heard very clearly
and unequivocally.

Today's poem is all the more striking for its visual weight - the
stanzas are like crosses rooted in the graveyard of the blank page; at
the same time, we are reminded of the silhouettes of the black Junkers
bombers that divebombed Hernandez's Spain during the Civil War...

thomas.

[Bios and stuff]

A goatherd in his youth, Hernandez joined the Spanish Communist Party in
1936 and  fought in the Civil War (1936-39). Condemned to death by the
Nationalists after the war, his sentence was commuted to life
imprisonment after international protests. He died in prison soon
afterward, at the age of 31.  Hernandez's predominant themes are love --
particularly of a sorrowful nature -- war, death, and social injustice.

        -- EB

A biography and assessment of Geoffrey Hill can be found accompanying
the text of his most famous poem, the brilliant 'Mercian Hymns', at
poem #37

George Macbeth comments on Hill's ability to fuse ancient history with
the recent past and personal experience to create a unified poetic
whole. Both 'A Prayer to the Sun' and 'Mercian Hymns' exhibit this
quality.

It's been some time since we had an instalment of Poetry 101. (For those
of you who came in late, P101 is an occasional column wherein Martin and
I hold forth on various aspects of poetry in general. Actually,  it's a
_very_ occasional column... ). So here goes.

[Poetry 101]

In my previous essay [1], I talked about the difference between
connotation and denotation, and how that difference was vital to the
creation and interpretation of poetry. In a sense, the essay was about
the 'how' of poetry (at a very basic level, of course) - how poetry uses
connotation (by which I mean association, inference and implication) to
suggest meanings beyond the merely 'dictionary' interpretation of the
poet's words.

Today I'll expand on the same theme, but laying special emphasis on the
'why' - why poetry has to use its own special devices to say what it has
to say.

First, a generalization[2]: the purpose of all writing - poetry and
prose, billboards and tech specs, Babylonian cuneiform and Martian
squiglets - is communication, the transmission of facts, ideas and
emotion. Now, obviously the choice of the method of transmission is
dictated by the matter being transmitted; thus, technical documents
should be written in clear, precise language [3]; while writers of
advertising copy should aim for instant recognition and high retention
value and surrealist critics should cabbage Frink marsupial :-).

You may have realized what I'm getting at here - this, in its most basic
avatar, is the doctrine of form versus content that I'm always making
such a big fuss about [4]. Form follows content; content is  meaningless
without form.

In the case of a technical document, (to use my example of a few
sentences ago), simplicity is king [3]. Hence such documents tend to be
written in dry, descriptive prose, stripped clean of ambiguities and
inconsistencies - "just the facts, madam, just the facts".

Unfortunately, Real Life (tm) cannot be similarly stripped of
ambiguities and inconsistencies; human nature is a Complicated Beastie.
How, then, are writers to communicate the essence of their all-too-human
experience?

Writers of prose approach this problem in different ways. James, Zola
and Proust (for example) examine reality in minutely descriptive prose;
through cataloguing _everything_ about an event, they attempt to capture
its ineffable 'eventness' [5]. Steinbeck and Tolstoy use the strength of
simplicity to create powerful, moving tales of humanity at its best and
worst; although I love their books, I still think they fail to capture
the sheer complexity of all life. Baroque novelists like Pynchon, Eco
and Rushdie dazzle the mind with their ornate intellectual games and
wild inventiveness; their work is dense and complex and immensely
stimulating, but somehow it seems to lack 'heart', sometimes.

The central paradox is this: life is complex; yet any depiction of it
has to be simple in order to be emotionally effective [7].

Which brings us to the idea of poetry. Poetry functions through a
process of simultaneous compression and expansion. On the one hand,
poetic syntax is highly concentrated - there's usually more 'action' in
six lines of taut verse than in 6 pages of flabby prose. There's no
dross, no fluff;  every word is 'chosen smooth and well-fitting', every
phrase is 'just so'. Truly great poems often fit Exupery's famous quote
about elegance in engineering: 'A designer knows he has reached
perfection, not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing
to take away'. And it's this wonderful economy of expression that gives
poetry its power - the concentration of meaning and emotion that make a
great poem leave the reader a changed person.

At the same time, words in a work of poetry never have but one meaning,
only one 'correct' interpretation. They link with each other and with
the poem as a whole, creating complex resonances of sound, structure and
sense; they talk to each other, crafting parallels and paradox side by
side; they talk to the reader, offering new ways of looking at the world
and at themselves, new insights and empathies...

... until what was originally just a pattern of black marks on a page or
a linear sequence of sounds expands into a multidimensional tangle of
sight and smell and sound and sense, an approximation to that marvellous
complexity which we call Life.

thomas.

[Footnotes]

[1] If you missed it, it's archived at poem #270
[2] I'll be making lots of generalizations today <grin>. Feel free to
take issue with the comments you disagree with, and do mail me with lots
of feedback.
[3] This is why jargon is a Bad Thing - anyone who uses 5 syllables
where one will do probably doesn't have anything useful to communicate
in the first place :-)
[4] See, for example, poem #195
[5] Leading one wit (I don't remember who) to remark of James,'He
consistently chews more than he bites off'. [6]
[6] No, I don't like Henry James. How did you guess?
[7] You'll notice that the best speeches use the simplest language -
just think of phrases like 'I have a dream', 'Blood, toil, tears and
sweat' and 'Lend me your ears'.

[Endnote]

Yes, all the points I raised in my essay are touched upon by today's
poem. Read it a few times and you'll see what I mean - it's only 27
words long, but there's a bushel of meaning in it, just waiting to be
discovered.

Mercian Hymns -- Geoffrey Hill

extracts from

(Poem #37) Mercian Hymns I King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5: architect of the historic rampart and ditch, the citadel at Tamworth, the summer hermitage in Holy Cross: guardian of the Welsh Bridge and the Iron Bridge: contractor to the desirable new estates: saltmaster: money-changer: commissioner for oaths: martyrologist: the friend of Charlemagne. 'I liked that,' said Offa, 'sing it again.' VII Gasholders, russet among fields. Milldams, marlpools that lay unstirring. Eel-swarms. Coagulations of frogs: once, with branches and half-bricks, he battered a ditchful; then sidled away from the stillness and silence. Ceolred was his friend and remained so, even after the day of the lost fighter: a biplane, already obsolete and irreplaceable, two inches of heavy snub silver. Ceolred let it spin through a hole in the classroom-floorboards, softly, into the rat-droppings and coins. After school he lured Ceolred, who was sniggering with fright, down to the old quarries, and flayed him. Then, leaving Ceolred, he journeyed for hours, calm and alone, in his private derelict sandlorry named Albion. XVII He drove at evening through the hushed Vosges. The car radio, glimmering, received broken utterance from the horizon of storms... 'God's honours - our bikes touched: he skidded and came off.' 'Liar.' A timid father's protective bellow. Disfigurement of a village king. 'Just look at the bugger...' His maroon GT chanted then overtook. He lavished on the high valleys its haleine. XXV Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg. The nailshop stood back of the cottage, by the fold. It reeked stale mineral sweat. Sparks had furred its low roof. In dawn-light the troughed water floated a damson-bloom of dust --- not to be shaken by posthumous clamour. It is one thing to celebrate the 'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire. Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother, whose childhood and prime womanhood were spent in the nailer's darg. -- Geoffrey Hill

from 'Mercian Hymns', 1971.

Quoting extensively from George Macbeth (since I have no other sources
for this poem):

"This comparatively short, but very wide-ranging and pregnant, sequence
is Hill's most ambitious work to date. With Ted Hughes' "Crow" and
Seamus Heaney's "North" [both of which I will run in the near future -
t.] it has perhaps been the most discussed and studied new book of verse
of the 70s - deservedly, since its rich qualities yield themselves only
gradually. The originality of the sequence lies firstly in Hill's merger
of elements from the career of King Offa of Mercia, the last great king
of the midlands, with details from his own childhood in the 1930a and
during the war. We confront a small boy proud and recalcitrant,
identifying his lonely genius with the royalty of a past local monarch,
honouring his family and his country through the enriching metaphors of
history. Although quite brief, the poems is buttressed with a series of
impregnable footnotes, recalling Eliot's notes to "The Wasteland"
[another poem I'll be sending soon - t.] in their scholarly irrelevance.
Everywhere the tone and drive of the style is deeply original, and
justifies large claims for the status of Hill, even on the basis of so
few lines. At one swoop he has naturalised the prose poem as an English
form, and freed it once and for all of French associations."

I find Hill's early poems (those published in the 50s and 60s) dense and
impenetrable - they may have hidden depths, but I cannot grasp their
meaning with any surety. I much prefer his later work, especially
today's sequence - quite apart from the many resonances with history and
myth, they have a simple beauty and flow to their language which I like.

Returning to Macbeth:

"I. This hymn and commentary form to the best of my knowledge, the one
flash of humour in Hill's work
VII. A recollection of massacring frogs in  wartime, and of a
schoolfriend losing a cherished model aeroplane. The two names 'Ceolred'
and 'Albion' are almost all that link these memories with the England of
the past, but they are enough.
XVII. There seems here to be a memory of a childhood bicycle accident
sandwiched between two brief images of a later, slightly dangerous piece
of driving between France and Spain. The word 'haleine' (breath) is
meant to conjure up the idea of the horn of the hero Roland, and the
word 'chanted' suggests the Chanson de Roland in which his adventures
are recorded. The village-king is presumably Hill-Offa, who has been
hurt in the accident.
XXV. An elegy for the poet's grandmother, who worked making nails. There
is a grim bitterness in the comparison between the traditional
literariness of a Shakespearean phrase like 'quick forge', and the
brutal reality of the disfigurement inevitable in using the tools of the
nail-maker's trade. The repetition of the opening paragraph, at first a
surprising device in so concentrated a piece of writing, serves to
create both a harsh re-emphasis and perhaps also the ritual effect of a
chorus in a dirge. 'Fors Clavigera' is Ruskin's collection of letters to
the workmen and labourers of England, published in 1871-84. The title
refers to the image of Fortune bearing a club, a key and a nail."

Nothing much more for me to say.

thomas.