Like Briefly Discovering You Are Sane
On Geoffrey Hill's last poem
The latest issue of PN Review opens with a story about a gathering of poets at Buckingham Palace which included the magazine’s editor, Michael Schmidt:
The palace had put on display a number of the poetic treasures from the royal archive. The one I best remember is the copy of George Herbert’s The Temple which Charles I was reading the night before his execution. Again her Majesty […] moved among the poets. A few of us hoary male writers were gathered to hold a conversation with her, which we did. Then, as I walked around enjoying the opulence, a voice hissed, “Schmidt!” It was Geoffrey Hill, sitting apart. He had had enough. “Get me out of here,” he said, and that’s what I did. I took his elbow and led him down to the street. And afterwards, I couldn’t get back in.
The dead-end punchline of this anecdote reminded me of Hill’s posthumously published long poem, The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin (2019). Hill appears to have embarked on it in his eighties as a deliberately open-ended work, to be continued until he died — which was in June 2016, two weeks after the Brexit referendum (the final section alludes to “the shock of exit”).
I thought it was one of the best books of poetry that year, but for various reasons it wasn’t widely noticed: a) it was published by Oxford University Press — which doesn’t have a poetry list — as a £20 hardback; b) it’s made up of 271 sections of long lines, filling 150 pages; c) like much of Hill, it’s densely allusive to specific literary and historical knowledge; d) the title, which alludes to a heretical creation myth (see c)).
Here’s a bit of what I wrote at the time:
The Book of Baruch [ …] rhymes, but with a spry, hopscotching looseness. Hill’s eloquence now pours itself into “rough paragraphs” of prose, across which he skims like-sounding words like flicked stones.
The rhythmically unpredictable, clangingly associative sentences that result may be the greatest doggerel ever written in English. […] Here, for example, he evokes the fall of one of Wren’s London churches during the Blitz: “Burning St Mary-le-Bow, in ravishing show, saluted by her own bells, a last cascade of thrashing, mangled squeals as down they go.”
Michael Schmidt’s story reminded me of Hill’s curmudgeonly music in The Book of Baruch. Sitting among the mythical grandeur and trappings of English history and poetry, he hisses that he wants out — and yet, he was there.
The Book of Baruch can feel indigestibly disagreeable, especially once it goes beyond the dazzling opening poems on London in the Blitz. But the loose rhymes that run through its end-stopped lines travel like cracks along a whip, and these are what I read it for. Among other things, Hill’s last poem is a notebook of satirical aphorisms about poetry ravelled in the argument of an academic monograph. Here are a few:
No upright poem in its uptight English can seem to me quite free from limescale under its rim.
Poems that have you feel “how true” are variable forms of trompe-l’œil.
The occasional royal hand is extended to poetry still, perhaps because otherwise it is so unmemorable. Certainly the Queen has not remembered it in her will.
High poetry is another name for the lottery.
To come up with a good line is like briefly discovering you are sane.
Whether poetry is unreal is best tested by using it to settle a hotel bill.