Treasure in Labyrinths.

Merriman, Emily Taylor

This special edition on the poetry of Geoffrey Hill has its origins in a 2009 Modern Language Association (MLA) roundtable that was part of Christianity and Literature's honoring of Hill with a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2009. Since that award, Hill has continued to achieve, winning election to the position of Oxford Professor of Poetry, and publishing additional poems. Most recently Clutag Press has released Oraclau/Oracles, and four new collections are promised, as well as a Collected Poems 1952-2012, to be published by Oxford University Press in 2013.

Addressing the collocation of "faith and fable," the MLA roundtable participants and the writers in this issue discussed how Hill wrestles creatively with apparent irreconcilables in the realm of religion and language. As Kenneth Haynes says in his opening piece, which valuably surveys Hill's use of the terms "faith" and "fable," Hill dramatizes "how, whether, to combine Athens and Jerusalem, Christianity and literature, style and faith" Analyzing such dramatizations is challenging partly because the way one reads religion in Hill's poems is likely to be influenced by one's own religious (or non-'or anti-religious) orientation. The poetry provides a Rorschach test revealing the reader's own beliefs. Through the critic's self-tinted spectacles, the prevailing direction of Hill's poetry is variously considered to be orthodox Christian, atheist, agnostic, even subtextually Buddhist. In addition, dealing with such a topic under the auspices of the journal Christianity and Literature already tempers the prevailing sound of the discussion to a particular key. While many academics object to taking an overtly religious stance when discussing religion, there are also scholars for whom Christian ideas provide the determining foundation for any interpretation. The primary audience for this particular journal (although not necessarily any of its individual writers or readers) inclines toward the latter.

Without delving any deeper into the theoretical challenges of the inter-disciplinary field "religion and literature," I would like to thank wholeheartedly all the participants in the roundtable and, especially, the contributors to this special edition, who took on the critical task of addressing the interactions between religious belief, religious doubt, and the imagination in the poetry of Geoffrey Hill with circumspection and acuity. In addition to Kenneth Haynes' introduction on "faith and fable" which pinpoints challenging cruces throughout Hill's poetic oeuvre, David Mahan provides an essay that analyzes two early poems in order to address the vexed question of whether Hill's poetry points modern Christians toward the possibility of an "authentic faith." Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec and Alex Shakespeare both focus their attention on Hill's book-length 1985 poem The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy. In their discussions of Peguy as a representative figure for Hill, they reveal much about the religious implications of the poetry, particularly regarding the relationship between Christianity in Europe and the passage of historical time. Kilgore-Caradec mines along the deep vein of a "theology of history" while Shakespeare works at the rich seam of "memory and faith."

To conclude this discussion, I consider "faith and fable" in Hill's later (but by no means last) work, The Orchards of Syon (2002). The poem's opening section (partially quoted by Haynes above), includes the narrator's magician-style instruction: "Watch my hands / confabulate their shadowed rhetoric" (I). According to the OED, "confabulate" cognate to "fable" has a specialist psychiatric definition: "To fabricate imaginary experiences as compensation for loss of memory." In the context of questions of religious faith and history, such an activity, especially rendered even more uncertain by implications of magic and shadow-puppets, indicates an inescapable irony in the narrator's attitude--a dubiousness about the trustworthiness of the results of his creative enterprise. Even the poet is not quite sure what he is up to, or why (although he knows ir is to compensate for loss), or what the product of his work might reveal.

Yet the long poem is not divorced from a longing for holiness; it does not only play, in pleasure or in despair, with words and ideas. To the extent that The Orchards of Syon has a religious aim (1)--arguably the sacramental aim of opening up channels, through duty and labor, to divine grace--that goal is achievable only by indirect means, and those means are linguistic. Language is the angel that Hill wrestles with all night long: "All along, I'm labouring to try out / a numen that endures, exactly placed ..." (LIX). "Numen" here is rich with associations--it is creative energy, presiding spirit of place, and also, in its closeness to "nomen" it is "name" the raw material of poetry that the poet works with and is worked by. Like Jacob, Hill seeks, in the darkness, to win a "blessing" (XIII, XXV).

One roundabout route to sacred space, in which the journey is as important as the arrival, is the labyrinth. On the floor of the cathedral or the forest, the seeker walks a circuitous path that leads eventually to the center. At times the destination appears tantalizingly close, but then the way abruptly veers off in another direction, like Hillian line breaks or scene changes. Significantly, what distinguishes a labyrinth from a maze is that it has no dead ends: every inch of the apparently convoluted architecture is required to reach the inner sanctum--although you must rely on faith and persistence, rather than on your own sense of direction, in order not to get lost. In fact, one may feel lost, or even trapped, like the Minotaur. (2) The labyrinth-walker learns to let go of an absolute trust in his own perceptions, because he may appear further from the destination than someone who is in fact behind him on the path, and vice versa. A labyrinth often serves as a model of the pilgrim's journey, the focus of David Mahan's essay in this special issue.

The labyrinths of peregrination in The Orchards of Syon are made out of the infinitely complex material of human speech and writing. Creating potentially sacred space out of this stuff is a compromised project from the get-go in the Hillian universe, where language is implicated in the Fall. Yet, lapsarian language also acts as a powerful medium, even--in the Christian poetic imagination--as a possible mediator between human and divine, if the word can be reconciled with the Word. Hill's imagination works to create a holy vision of at least the desirability of such a reconciliation. Leaning on Hopkinsian Catholic theology, he described it vividly in an interview with John Haffenden:

   To succeed totally in finding consolation in art would be to enter
   a prelapsarian kingdom. Father Devlin has a very fine phrase to
   define the themes of Hopkins' sermons--"the lost kingdom of
   innocence and original justice" which is a lovely resonant phrase,
   because I think there's a real sense in which every fine and moving
   poem bears witness to this lost kingdom of innocence and original
   justice. In handling the English language the poet makes an act of
   recognition that etymology is history. The history of the creation
   and the debasement of words is a paradigm of the loss of the
   kingdom of innocence and original justice. (88)

So, as Hill has declared elsewhere, language is not only fallen, "But also splendid. Fallen and noble. Sinewy and funny." (3) Hill's uses of the funniness of language are not merely for comic relief. His humor is part of the serious play to which he is committed. The narrator of the poetry in The Orchards of Syon considers himself at play with language and with light--"the Word" and "the Light" are the two titles that are given to Jesus in the opening verses of John's gospel, in its retelling of the Genesis creation story--and this kind of play is introduced from the beginning of the volume: "this shutter / play among words" (I), "La vida es sueno as shadow-play" (III), "The labours of the months are now memory, / indigent wordplay, stubborn, isolate / language of inner exile" (VIII).

It is one thing to say that you play with language, another actually to do so. Sometimes Hill simply jokes grimly, for instance making a goddess out of a disease: "divine Aphasia" (LXXII). Much of the play is with the sounds of language. The collection's first lines, "Now there is no due season. Do not / mourn unduly" presumably refer to the phrase "in due season," used in several places in the King James Bible, including Lev. 26:4: "Then I will give you rain in due season, and the land shall yield her increase, and the trees of the field shall yield their fruit," Prov. 15:23: "A man hath joy by the answer of his mouth: and a word spoken in due season, how good is it!" and Gal. 6:9: "And let us not be weary in well doing: for in due season we shall reap, if we faint not." These biblical allusions subtly prepare the way for the crop offering in the very last lines of the work: "the Orchards / of Syon whatever harvests we bring them" when, presumably, some kind of seasonal reaping, maybe a verbal one, has been made possible. The opening lines of the collection are not just multilayered biblical allusion, however. On the semantic level, their negatives are heavy with sadness, but their repeated sound, "due ... Do ... du," is like a rather cheerful singer testing out his voice, trying to get back to the sound of a familiar but not quite remembered tune. The repetition is also reminiscent of The Police lyrics "De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da" (1980), a song about the power of simple language.

There would be only singing and no wrestling were it not for sin. The positive companion to the Christian doctrine of original sin is that, as Yeats put it, "Love has pitched his mansion in / The place of excrement." It is the sinner's failings that necessitate God's rebirth in human form and sacrifice as redemption. It is because the individual self is powerless to get things right on his own that he must turn to God. Imagistically, one way that this theology appears in The Orchards of Syon is in rainbows. In Genesis, the rainbow is an early sign of God's covenant with all of earth's creatures, a sign of his promise that he will not destroy them again, as he has just done (apart from Noah and his family and two of each living creature). God caused the flood and destruction because "The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence" (6:12). Millennia later, the earth is still corrupt and filled with violence, and in the biblical tradition, the rainbow carries an implicit irony while maintaining its status as divine sign. The Orchards of Syon dust-jacket illustration, after a drawing by D. H. Lawrence, shows a grand full rainbow stretched out over the industrialized former countryside--a vision like that contemplated by Ursula at the end of Lawrence's novel The Rainbow. (There is another rainbow on the cover of Oraclau/Oracles.) The Oxford Companion to English Literature (1985) states that The Rainbow is remarkable "for its sense of mystic procreative continuity within the 'rhythm of eternity' both of the seasons and the Christian year" (807).

The opening line of The Orchards of Syon picks up on this Lawrentian notion of an eternal seasonal and Christian rhythm when it establishes the new myth (to be continually reinterpreted, even gently demolished) that "Now there is no due season." Nonetheless, spills of oil, the fuel of our mobility and industry, display similar bands of spectral colors: "Pub car-park puddles, radiant cauls of oil. / When all else fails, the great rainbow, as Bert / Lawrence saw it or summoned it" (XLVIII). Hill here is meditating in part (as poets often do) on the nature of his own verses--in an ultimate context nothing more than car-park puddles, but with covenantal signs written across them. The religious dimension of such manifestations of light in the dark is further elaborated in the section on the opposite page, which also speaks to the reader about the narratives--the possibly liberating fables--that she might herself create:

   Imagine your own way
   out of necessity; imagine
   no need to do this. Good story, bad
   ending, if narrative is the element
   that so overreaches. Providence
   used to be worked-in, somewhere. I, at best,
   conjecture divination. The rainbow's
   appearance covenants with reality. (XLIX)

In Hill's work, nature is like a language, and language is like a landscape, simultaneously natural and human-made. Roots, in this world, are the roots of trees and also the roots of words. "The Orchards of Syon" of the title can have (like medieval biblical interpretations) literal, moral, allegorical, and anagogical meanings. The natural landscape of the poems speaks with a characteristically Hillian linguistic terminology: "the tinctured willow and frail-textured ash" (XIV), and even autumn has its "hermeneutics" (XXIV), so well interpreted by Hopkins in his poem "Goldengrove" whose trees, with their falling leaves, add another imagined "grove" to the Orchards of Syon, as does Dante's "The Wood of the Suicides," where another poetic landscape turns dead human beings into organic vegetable form (XXXI).

In his 1982 interview with John Haffenden, Geoffrey Hill illuminatingly declared:

   If critics accuse me of evasiveness or the vice of nostalgia, or
   say that I seem incapable of grasping true religious experience, I
   would answer that the grasp of true religious experience is a
   privilege reserved for very few, and that one is trying to make
   lyrical poetry out of a much more common situation--the sense of
   not being able to grasp true religious experience. (89)

Nearly thirty years later, his poetry provides moments that may grasp true religious experience. A better term than "grasping" for how these moments appear in The Orchards of Syon, however, is "breakthrough." A lifetime of making lyric poetry out of endurance, and "the sense of not being able to grasp true religious experience" leads, at times, out of its own impasse. Poem VI begins "I know breakthrough as I tell / the dream surpassed. The Art of Fugue resembles / water-springs in the Negev" Here "dream" evokes the poem's recurring reference to Calderon's "La Vida es Sueno" and the atmosphere of these lines suggests a glimpse of what the dust-jacket calls "the real life to come" It is but a glimpse, however, and the poem moves on and back into irony, and struggle with suffering. Religious certainty creates violence and spills blood. Christianity has developed no satisfactory theodicy. The Hebrew Bible offers the story of Job, quoted here "and I alone escaped to tell thee" which is what the servant bringing the news of all Job's losses says to him. The poem deliberately offers one tentative suggestion: "As order moves by instinct I say trust / faith so far as it goes, or as far as you / can hold its attention" and ends with a thickly Christian reference that encompasses both heaven and hell (to Emmanuel, Isaiah's "man of sorrows" 53:3, from whom we hide our faces, and yet whose sacrifice is said to redeem, here in fire). Discussing "Lacrimae Coactae" (New and Collected Poems 136), J.A.W. Bennett questions Hill's "commitment" because he is "leaving us (and him?) uncertain where he stands and what belief he is reflecting" (195). I propose that Hill's commitment throughout his poetry is beyond question, but it is an unself-satisfied commitment to the human psychological need (which may not be universal) for union with God, blocked as this union is by our waywardness, and to a simultaneous rejection of easy piety and of theologies that defy reason (which is not the same thing as rationality). Some kinds of belief cannot be made certain, static, or plain.

One of the most striking declarations in The Orchards of Syon reads, "Love grows in some / way closer to withdrawn theology" in poem LV, which is at once an autobiographical love poem for an old love, a reflection on Shakespeare's Twelfth Night (in which Hill played Orsino as an adolescent), a discourse on memory, and a theological treatise. It would be a shame to read reductively, "Love grows in some / way closer to withdrawn theology" but its constituent elements are worthy of exploration. In one reading, the line-break highlights a possible emphasis on the word "some" making "way" a demotic adverbial modifier of "closer" and thereby adding a touch of humor. In another reading, "Love grows" like a plant, or a child, or human understanding, and "... in some / way" is consciously awkward, broken by the enjambment, its vagueness acknowledging mystery. Here "withdrawn theology" is a particularly resonant phrase. A "withdrawn theology" could be one that has been removed or suppressed, as in Wittgenstein's, "Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent," but it is also aptly describes the via negativa theology of R. S. Thomas' Later Poems, where the speaker declares, "What resource have I / other than the emptiness without him of my whole / being, a vacuum he may not abhor?" ("The Absence" 123.) The relevant theological term here is kenosis, from "an emptying" in Greek. In Christian theology kenosis is "the relinquishment of the form of God by Jesus in becoming man and suffering death" (American Heritage Dictionary). The significance of kenosis in Hill's work has been well analyzed by several critics including Vincent Sherry, Eleanor J. McNees, Adrian Grafe, and this issue's contributor, Jennifer Kilgore-Caradec, in a previous essay.

McNees also offers a useful summary of how two additional critics have described Hill's struggle with and within language, what one might describe as the limits of his fabulating:

Calvin Bedient and Thomas Getz come closest to pinpointing the relationship between language and faith that is the central crux of much of Hill's poetry. Both see in the poems a conflict between sensuously carnal imagery and severely restrained form.... Bedient argues for a split in the psyche where "Hill's imagination enjoys what his judgment deplores" Bedient regards Mercian Hymns as Hill's best attempt to merge intellect and sense and, consequently, to create a language of presence: "The language is dignified while trying to be what it says: both self and other, judgment and participation." Unfortunately, this presence is only momentarily achieved because Hill's ascetic conscience cannot long indulge itself in such poetic luxury. (154-5, quoting Bedient 21, 22)

I suggest that in The Orchards of Syon, the possibility of real presence is no longer always withdrawn in the way that McNees argues that it is in Hill's earlier work, and that when it is so withdrawn, it is done not only because Communion should be denied to the unabsolved sinner (4) but in order to allow love to "grow closer." The poet is at the "mercy" of some different kinds of accidents:

   Life is a dream. I pitch
   and check, balanced against hazard,
   self-sustained, credulous; well on the way
   to hit by accident a coup de grace. (LVIII)

In "Poetry as 'Menace' and 'Atonement'," Hill says, "It is therefore conceivable that a man could refuse to accept the evident signs of grace in his own work; that he himself could never move beyond that 'sorrow not mingled with the love of God' even though his own poems might speak to others with the voice of hope and love" (Collected Critical Writings 18). The speaker of The Orchards of Syon belongs in a different category--aware that there are indeed "evident signs of grace in his own work"--and therefore not (or at least not only) an adherent of Wallace Stevens' "magnificent agnostic faith" (18). These signs of grace are in the rainbows or the flashes of light that are literal, figurative, and even cautiously mystical. Now, "even in winter, / the sun digs silver out of the evergreen" and the Orchards of Syon are "tenebrous thresholds / of illumination" (LIV), where beams of light may flash upon diamonds and silver, or, less romantically: "eloquence" is "moving / bad conscience forward, backward, across, / like a metal detector" (LXIII). A reader can determine only for herself what kind of treasure is to be found here. It may seem like rubbish to some readers, "plunderers / of subtext, caught flotsam, even of your own / eye-catching inane flare, these other words / borne out beyond your salvage, there as here" (XLVI). The key phrase for how the poems themselves relate to their treasure is Matthew 6:21, with which Hill concludes poem LI: "Where your treasure is, there is your heart also" (6:21; LI). Such a verse has its own challenging richness; its implicit moral demands are almost inconceivable in the currently dominant materialistic culture of the West. The next section repeats the phrase in German, and also recasts it slightly in English, changing "is" to "lies" (the Father of Lies can insinuate himself into our hearts and even into the core of the Christian gospel), then ponders, "Is this even / to be thought?" If one mistakes the nature of the sign and seeks the folldoric gold at the ends of the rainbow, then one may end up on a fruitless quest, a postmodernist journey of endless deferral. In the Church of England the harvest festival is often called the "Harvest Home" as it celebrates the crops being brought home from the fields. Much of The Orchards of Syon is a meditation on home, in both its geographical and spiritual senses. The subject of humanity's final home in death, and whereto thereafter, are primary concerns in this volume written by a man then approaching the end of a long teaching career, "but if this / is the home-straight, where is my fixed home? / City of God unlikely" (XXX). The word "home" is absent from that very last line, "the Orchards / of Syon whatever harvests we bring them," but there is an echo of it in "them," which is semantically odd--you usually reap harvests in orchards, not bring them there. Bringing whatever epiphanies and moments of grace one may have had into the hospitality of God's kingdom is presumably an instance of supreme superfluity, truly pathetic coals to Newcastle. An implicit collocation arises, whereby the Orchards become an unspoken (if unlikely) heavenly home.

One way to enter the Hillian labyrinths is to consider his poems as an engagement with other powers, powers often greater than those of the selfhood of the poet or the individual reader. These powers include nature, human history and the sum of human knowledge, the unconscious, death, aging, and--as key to all the others--language, the medium of the poet's composition. In the Christian theology that suffuses The Orchards of Syon, there are two additional stronger powers: sin and God. These too are engaged through human language, the former, ineradicably till the end of time, for "anger, despair, are inbred / monsters" (XLIII) and the latter, perhaps, conceivable for brief moments--in "the nongrammatical speech of angels" (LVIII).

Hill has been a practicing Anglican as well as a practicing poet. Most of his poetic and scholarly work is imbued with a consideration of the relationship between religion--primarily Christianity--and poetry. Because mainstream contemporary academic scholarship is secular, theological methods of assessment are beyond the prescribed boundaries of literary criticism, even when an intensely religious poet is under consideration. Just as historians analyzing the causes of the First Great Awakening in America cannot propose, "God did it," a contemporary literary critic should only assert, "God--or Christ--is present in these poems" in a thematic sense. Nonetheless, it remains within the realms of academic discourse to suggest that if there were God, some of these poems try to imagine, even to create, scenarios in which such a reality could momentarily be seen, heard, or felt.

The dust-jacket of The Orchards of Syon speaks of such spiritual matters euphemistically, as inclusive religious language requires: "Nature, the remembered landscape of childhood, great poetry and music and images of faith, all offer glimpses into the real life to come--a life not of wisdom or the illusion of wisdom, but of truth," One important phrase here, "not of wisdom or the illusion of wisdom" slightly recasts a phrase from the closing lines of the collection: "neither wisdom / nor illusion of wisdom" (LXXII). In this book's theology, religious truth is something that transcends human wisdom. Such transcendence underscores human wisdom's "fabulous" (both marvelous and erroneous) nature. Yet the book also acknowledges that its mortal speaker and its mortal audience have nothing beyond human wisdom. This means that religious truth is not fully available to human beings, and yet it is not to be dismissed. In the constructions of poetry (and beyond), it can be faithfully worked toward and waited for.

WORKS CITED

Bedient, Calvin. "On Geoffrey Hill." Critical Quarterly 23.2 (1981): 17-26.

Bennett, J.A.W. Poetry of the Passion: Studies in Twelve Centuries of English Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982.

The Church of England. The First Prayer-book of Edward VI, 1549. London: Griffith Farran Browne, 1888.

Drabble, Margaret and Paul Harvey, eds. The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985.

Grafe, Adrian. "Geoffrey Hill as Lord of Limit: the Kenosis as a Theological Context of his Poetry and Thought." LISA e-journal: Litteratures, Histoire des Idles, Images, Societes du Monde Anglophone 7.3 (2009): 50-61.

Hill, Geoffrey. Interview with John Haffenden. "Geoffrey Hill" In Viewpoints: Poets in Conversation with John Haffenden. London: Faber and Faber, 1982.

--. New and Collected Poems, 1952-1992. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

--. Interview with Carl Phillips. "The Art of Poetry LXXX: Geoffrey Hill." The Paris Review 154 (Spring 2000): 272-99.

--. "A Matter of Timing." The Guardian 21 Sept. 2002.

--. The Orchards of Syon. Washington, DC: Counterpoint, 2002.

--. Collected Critical Writings: Geoffrey Hill. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

Kilgore-Caradec, Jennifer. "Kinesis, Kenosis, and the Weakness of Poetry." LISA e-journal Litteratures, Histoire des Idles, Images, Societes du Monde Anglophone. 7.3 (2009): 35-49.

McNees, Eleanor J. Eucharistic Poetry: The Search for Presence in the Writings of John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Dylan Thomas, and Geoffrey Hill. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 1992.

Raine, Kathleen. The Collected Poems of Kathleen Raine. Ipswich: Golgonooza, 2000.

Sherry, Vincent. The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1987.

Thomas, R. S. Later Poems 1972-1982. London: Papermac, 1984.

NOTES

(1) As Hill said in 2000, presumably during the period when he was composing The Orchards of Syon, "the fact that people do find overarching philosophical or polemical shapes in the work doesn't absolutely mean that they are wrong. Those shapes may indeed be there. But ... I didn't plan them" (Interview with Carl Phillips 290-91).

(2) In her poem "Lachesis," Kathleen Raine points to the significance of labyrinths in La vida es sueno, the Spanish play that The Orchards of Syon refers to on its first page and often revisits: "In that life we dream, says Calderon, each soul / Is monster in the labyrinth of its own being" (113). The opening stanza of Raine's poem also resonates with the theme of compensating fables:

   Soul lonely comes and goes; for each our theme
   We lonely must explore, lonely must dream
   A story we each to ourselves must tell,
   A book that as we read is written. (113)

(3) Interview with Carl Phillips (297). "Sinewy" likely comes also from Hopkins--"naked thew and sinew of the English language"--which Hill quotes in a short autobiographical piece published in The Guardian shortly after The Orchards of Syon was published. "Sinew" recalls Jacob's wounding by the angel. Poets who wrestle with language know its muscles and know what kind of wounds it inflicts.

(4) "... so is the daunger great, yf wee receye the same unworthely; for then wee become gyltie of the body and bloud of Christ our sauior, we eate and drinke our owne damnacion ..." (Church of England 196).