Hearts of stone, feet of clay: Geoffrey Hill's troubled pilgrims.

Mahan, David C.

Abstract: Through close readings of "The Bidden Guest" and the sequence "Lachrimae," this essay explores ways that Geoffrey Hill portrays the travails of modern "pilgrimage," as a troubled quest for authentic faith. At the forefront of this study are questions about Hill's treatment of Christian themes and practices through the voices of his personae. One larger question concerns whether these poems bear witness to a faith still viable for disaffected contemporary readers. It is argued that, while the mood of Hill's pilgrims registers an anxious ambiguity about the prospects of personal belief, the effects of the poetry provoke a renewed attentiveness to that very possibility.

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Over halfway through The Triumph of Love, Geoffrey Hill's poet-persona pleads, "Remove my heart of stone. Replace / my heart of stone" (LXVIII). Echoing its scriptural provenance, the plea--invigorated by the enjambed trio "Replace," "Inspire," "Stir"--resonates with Christian confessional literature in its most urgent form. (1) The imagery also echoes other moments in Hill's corpus, from his earliest work: Now I lack grace to tell what I have seen; For though the head frames words the tongue has none. And who will prove the surgeon to this stone? ("God's Little Mountain") Still beneath Live skin stone breathes, about which fires but play, Fierce heart that is the iced brain's to command To judgment. ("Two Formal Elegies" I)

The heart's condition, the heart as site of resistance and receptivity to the divine, becomes in Geoffrey Hill's poetry a focus of much of his religious sensibility, including the felt lack of religious sensibility.

Hill's longstanding commentary on the heart proves far from transparent, however, or traditional. In this same section from The Triumph of Love, for example, the traditional quickly diverts into the comic and ironic, as Hill's supplicant elaborates, "Inspire/cardio-vascular prophylaxis. Stir / psychotic iconoclasts--Jan / van Leyden's crew--to a fresh blood-feast." The tone of "Inspire cardio-vascular prophylaxis" could be thought merely flippant, if not for the spiritual climate of an apparent penitent lamenting his petrified heart. References to "psychotic iconoclasts" and "blood-feast" then jolt us onto a different track: religious fanaticism mingles with Eucharistic sacrifice, the profane with the sacred (the sacred in a profane state?), followed by Mosaic law and Jesus, "the rabbi who died / slowly by torture" The cavalcade of images and allusions disorients; repentance for having a heart of stone is transposed beyond the familiar or obvious in the resulting tumble that incorporates Christian violence as well as Christ's submission to violence.

Who is this would-be penitent? How do we define his disposition toward a faith which from his perspective is as imbued with bloodletting as with the prospect of personal transformation? As another of Hill's speakers famously declares in the early poem "Genesis" V, By blood we live, the hot, the cold, To ravage and redeem the world: There is no bloodless myth will hold.

The duplicitous ravaging and redeeming by blood, which characterizes human history as well as those myths proffered to give it meaning, complicates all claims to authority and with such claims, the summons to belief. Similarly, again from Section LXVIII of Triumph, the phrase "Must I make my peace"--given added emphasis by the line break after "peace"-designates a problem as much as any such prospect for faith. As throughout this long poem, the "triumph of love"--or faith, or hope, or peace, or any of the great promises of Christianity--stands as a question mark over the whole, the evidently resolute poet-persona who would have a new heart caught in equally evident irresolution.

The mood is classic Hill in its troubled ambiguity, an ambiguity that accompanies much of what the poet has crafted where faith is concerned. Hill often writes as someone with a distinctively Christian sensibility, most forthrightly in his critical work, acknowledging a personal faith in those works as well as in his poetry. Through the many personae he adopts in his verse (2) when speaking of faith, and of Christian faith specifically, we at times find the earnestness of a true believer. But the relationship of Hill's poetic speakers to faith is rarely straightforward, the outlook at times more inclined toward agnosticism than belief. How, then, are we to receive this often un-affirming posture toward faith that we find in Hill's poetry? (3) Is the posture of his personae the poet's own posturing of some kind (as Kenneth Haynes notes, a possibly improper, if urgent, question to ask), and if so, what can we glean from his method of portraying faith?

In what follows we will consider this problem by close readings of two poems from Geoffrey Hill's earlier verse. The selection is necessarily limited and is intended only to make our way into a larger pattern of worried and worrying engagement with religion given voice through Hill's personae, who wrestle with the contents as well as the implications and practices of Christian faith. It will be seen that Hill casts this struggle as both an interior drama, the nexus of which is the heart of a disquieted adherent or would-be believer, and as an external phenomenon, his speakers often portrayed standing apart from faiths objects and from the faith observed in others--at times as admirers, more commonly as interrogators and skeptics, in nearly every instance as people with "feet of clay" who find it difficult to commit.

As we proceed, we also will hold in view the figurative landscape of that poetic environment in and by which Hill addresses the difficulty of religious belief. Images of wind and fire, of mud and mire, of bodies, body parts, blood and bone generate the "pitch" (4) of his protracted attention to Christian faith, in its historical as well as its devotional comport. It will be observed that such descriptions and imagery refuse treatment of religion or religious experience as merely an ethereal concern. Rather, they energize the quest for authentic faith--a faith of "imponderables" such as love and grace, forgiveness and hope, that must be "brought home / to the brute mass and detail of the world" (Triumph of Love LXX).

From these close readings, finally, we will consider the above in terms of a "modern pilgrimage," fraught with the doubts and hesitancies toward faith characteristic of modern or late-modern sensibilities. Such "pilgrims," then, are deemed so as ones who wrestle with and for faith, rather than as simply the committed faithful. Viewed in this light we may also ask: given the mixed disposition of Hill's personae toward Christian faith, are we to receive his portrayals of modern pilgrimage as reinforcement of that faiths present prospect as a viable vision of life, or do his personae's "hearts of stone" and "feet of clay" discourage such affirmation? Can we read Hill's verse as in some sense a poetry of Christian witness?

To contemplate this question risks two mistaken extremes. On one hand, if by such an inquiry one draws correspondences between the poet and the evangelist, neither role survives its respective office with integrity. Poetry becomes merely an instrumental good, effaced for the sake of what lies beyond it rather than appraised for what lies within it. Furthermore, with Geoffrey Hill in particular, to assign some premeditated intention of bearing witness to religious faith risks straining his sense of the creative process as well as the poetic product. While Hill admits the aim of witnessing [in general] through his poetry, (5) when asked about the consistency of his voice over time he replies that, ultimately "the only answer is the poem itself, the made thing" (Paris Review 289). In a similar vein, he states elsewhere, "I don't ... write poems to be polemical; I write to create a being of beautiful energy." (6) It is that testimony of the made thing, the beautiful energy of the poem as a living creation, which does the work for Hill, such that one is cautioned not to attach or impose some extrinsic order of effect when speaking of its "witness."

On the other hand, and at the other extreme, to divorce a study of Hill's poetry from consideration of the shape or manner of Christian witness when the poetry encourages this interest risks committing a similar error. It makes faith an instrumental good--a mere stage prop or literary convenience incidental to the poetry. The same could be said for Hill's abiding interest in memory and memorializing, were one to evacuate those things remembered of the force of attention he seeks to give them, as some may do for the sake of advancing certain notions of "pure poetry."

This essay aims to navigate between these extremes, not seeking to identify the strategies of a poet-evangelist but to understand the effects of the poetry on one's response to Christian faith and practices. While Hill's modern pilgrims are indeed "troubled" it would be naive to conclude that because they register unease, doubt, or even downright skepticism toward the faith that the poetry witnesses only to Christianity's demise. This essay argues, rather, that what emerges from the poetry--in our limited examples, but as instances of Hill's treatment throughout his corpus--affirms that Christian faith remains viable, albeit out of the strain of anxious but earnest questioning on the part of the poet's reluctant pilgrims. Our close readings will consider how these poems urge Hill's readers to take faith seriously, while not offering any easy resolution to the difficulties and ambiguities that arise where religion is concerned. In these "harsh times / with hag Faith going the rounds" (TL LXXXVI) Dante-pilgrim Hill's pilgrims are not; and yet the tacit--and at times explicit--pleas for understanding, for grace and forgiveness, despite the cries of dismay and disdain, give voice to a quest for authentic religious conviction. "No matter how / grace is confused, repeatedly, with chill / euphoria,' his speaker declares later in Section CIX of Triumph, still we are commended "to loving / desperately, yet not with despair, not / even in desperation" (57).

One of Hill's early poems, "The Bidden Guest" (For the Unfallen, 1959, 9-10), establishes in Hill's corpus this complex of sincere but troubled seeking for faith. The setting is the Eucharist, the central site for Christian affirmation and a common point of reference in Hill's poetry. Attention focuses on the heart of the communicant, his "heart's unbroken room" (line 7), which he feels unable to escape; a heart that "has ceased to breathe" (22), his "heart's tough shell ... still to crack" (34). Despite this condition, his is not a state of disbelief but, one could say, of distressed belief.

The poems drama of faith develops first through the imagery of fire and flame: the literal appearance of the "starched unbending candles" (1) stirred to life when lit, which in turn enact the metaphor of Pentecostal tongues. The communicant believes--"I believe in the spurred flame" (5)-but cannot engage, cannot "feel the lips of fire among / The cold light and the chilling song" (8-9). His heart remains closed in its "unbroken room" a condition reinforced by his impressions of the "unbending candles" and "the stiffly-linened priest" (16). He also remains stiff, unbending, more a spectator than a participant in the very ritual that, presumably, would undo indifference. He observes his fellow worshipers and senses insincerity: The broken mouths that spill their hoard Of prayer like beads on to a board. There, at the rail, each muffled head Swings sombrely. (10-13)

"Going through the motions" we would say colloquially, here rendered poignantly through images of worshipers whose actions resemble the behavior of a mechanical device or the forlorn swaying and meaningless utterances of Eliot's "hollow men."

But what business, we may ask, does Hill's persona have scrutinizing them, let alone passing silent judgment on their sincerity? Are we meant to agree with his appraisal, or does his disposition only further reinforce the deadness of his own heart--of one who finds it difficult to imagine that any

human could be sincere, given his own "wounded" condition? The question deepens the ambiguity over the identity of the "hidden guest" in the title. Is it God whom the rite (and the poem) bids attend, or the communicant who stands aloof as though a guest in that presence?

The communicant admits that healing is possible, made available through the sacrament: All wounds of light are newly dressed, Healed by the pouring-in of wine From bitter as from sweet grapes bled. (17-19)

The image is complex, "wounds of light" perhaps referring to divine light that opens and exposes the darkness of the human heart; although such wounds "newly dressed" are also tended, and tended to "by the pouring-in of wine" also born of wounds. But that healing power of the bread and wine fails to transfer to him personally.

Alluding to Jonah, he next compares his heart to another vine, the dead vine that had shaded the prophet when in distress over the repentance of the Ninevites (Jonah 4:7). God sends a worm to destroy that vine, then questions the angry prophet about where his sympathies ought to lie. Our communicant's identification with this exchange veers curiously from the original, however: "(Though there God's worm blunted its head / And stayed). And still I seem to smile" (23-24). The demise of Jonah's vine proved final. Is the "seeming" smile of the speaker, then, one of mockery, or does it belie a quiet (hut perhaps naive) hope that his heart's "vine" will not suffer the same fate? If the latter, why, then, the comparison with Jonah? The prophet submitted reluctantly to the will of God, but took no pleasure in that obedience because its outcome offended his sense of justice. Is Hill's speaker in the same place, recognizing obedience but not grace?

The familiar theological cast of that tension is more than academic. The communicant feels it personally, as "smile" fades once more into "Wounds" in the next line. Darkness runs deep in him. Quoting an unidentified source he continues:

"Yet there are wounds, unquenched with oil, And blazing eyes that would compel Evil to turn, though like a mole It dug blind alleys down the soil." (27-30)

Can God's grace, achieved uniquely by the wounds of His Son, reach so deep to uproot and heal the evil that lies buried in the "blind alleys" of the human heart? Can the "quiet deed" of the Eucharist (13) mediate such grace? Is it not justice, moreover, and not forgiveness that this condition warrants (as Jonah would affirm), and if so, wherefore grace?

On the verge of addressing these matters, the poem closes abruptly as the rite ends, time itself now the barrier of his barricaded heart. The communicant's attention shifts--"So I heard once. But now I hear" (31)the noises of "A grinding heel; a scraped chair" startling him out of his meditation "like shifted blows at my numb back" (32-3). The poem that began with Pentecostal energy--"wind" "surging" host, "charged" air, "racing tongues"--but also "cold light" and "chilling song" ends with images of the latter, the altar now desolate, "Wreathed in its sour breath, cold and dead" (37). The crash of images in these final lines, then, recall the passion of Christ: blows on the back, a grinding heel, sour wine, darkness falling. It is as if the resurrection has not occurred, or has not occurred for the communicant. Though he "believes in the spurred flame" his heart remains closed, its "tough shell ... still to crack" (34), the "spent" and "unwinking" altar mirroring the condition of his heart.

What are we to make of this? Does the experience of Hill's persona signify a failure of his own, or of the means of grace made available? The presence promised but then withdrawn (withdrawn from?) does seem to question the power of the Eucharist to penetrate the human soul; that on which even "the leanest heart may feed" (15) failing to feed this pilgrim's own heart. Where, then, and with what prospects for faith does this episode leave us?

Such questions remain unresolved, as incomplete as the experience of the communicant who remains in that same state of disaffection as when the poem began. What we are left to ponder, then, is the condition of the pilgrim as we find him, one both spiritually astute--in regard to the darkened state of his heart--and spiritually impaired, a "Jonah" unable fully to perceive, and so receive, grace and healing. By sustaining that dynamic throughout, the poem underscores the difficulty of having grace mediated to us by material means. Can a poem, can this poem, itself a material form of mediation, achieve more? Or if not more, can a poem advance the prospect of faith by opening readers to faith's possibility?

Although not a means of grace in any strongly sacramental sense, a poem that portrays pilgrimage such as we find here can serve as a means to prepare one for the contemplation of grace. On this account, the ambiguity of the communicant's spiritual state is productive of a more pointed moment for us as readers. "The Bidden Guest" bids consideration on our part, as the poem generates a muted longing for the authentic, a yearning for contact with spiritual reality, brought into relief through the acute dissatisfaction exhibited by Hill's communicant. His pilgrim's apparent incapacity, in other words, generates heightened self-reflection on the part of attentive readers. Have we contemplated our own hardness of heart and need for, or perhaps resistance to, grace? (The question could be posed to the believer as much as the non-believer.) In this respect, the poem also serves as a means of provocation and call to attention. Its effects may include what Hill has called a "shocking encounter with empirical guilt" (Lords of Limit 17), spoken of poets but applicable to any person of awakening conscience. The double sense of wounded/wounding as both compunction and the means of healing in the poem reinforces this reading.

More profoundly, to elaborate an earlier point, the ambiguity of the title "bidden guest" prompts reflection on one's basic disposition toward God. What first holds the communicant's, and our, attention in the Eucharistic service, and so on the surface of the poem, are the physical trappings of the ritual animated through the poems dramatic imagery. What is meant to capture attention, however, is the presence of Christ who is both wounded and healer, and both wound-er and healer of the human conscience. Christ as "guest" in his own house displaces his presence; the communicant as guest displaces him from that presence. The question "Where is Christ?" which the poem provokes, emerges, then, with no less force than the question "Where am I?" Both questions are meant to register with us as readers in the form of awakened attentiveness. One recalls here the point Hill makes in his lectures "Rhetorics of Value": speaking of the "sustained powers of attention" engendered by George Eliot's "achieved style" in Middlemarch, he says of this faculty that it is "attention conceived of, moreover, as a redemptive power" (Critical Writings 472). I would suggest that Hill manifests his own achievement of this quality in "The Bidden Guest"; leaving us, perhaps, to plead alongside his poet-pilgrim in The Triumph of Love, "mend our attention / if it is not too late" (TL LXXXVII).

In the "Lachrimae" sequence from Tenebrae (1978) Hill stages his own version of Renaissance composer John Dowland's "Seven Tears Figured in Seven Passionate Pavans" (grave and stately dances or the music for these dances). Directly influenced by Spanish mystical verse and other works of that era's poetic and mystical tradition, the seven rhyming sonnets of this sequence reach toward a broader purview than the more intimate, more formal setting of "The Bidden Guest."

The first and last sonnets bracket the sequence thematically. In the first, "Lachrimae Verae" ("true tears") Hill's persona confesses, I cannot turn aside from what I do; you cannot turn away from what I am. You do not dwell in me nor I in you. (9-11).

In the last, "Lachrimae Amantis" ("loving" or "affectionate tears"), he queries Christ, What is there in my heart that you should sue so fiercely for its love? What kind of care brings you as though a stranger to my door through the long night and in the icy dew seeking the heart that will not harbour you, ...? (1-5)

As in "The Bidden Guest," the speaker locates the barrier to personal devotion within, presenting himself as both supplicant and plaintiff. Unlike that poem, however, the deliberations of Hill's "Lachrimae" pilgrim (or pilgrims) get cast in a broader, historical context. In view is the history of spirituality and particularly the via negativa of the Christian mystics, wrestling once more with the question about where the true path to the divine might lie. But like "The Bidden Guest" the sequence also considers this challenge as a poetic problem of representation, of mediated forms: You are the crucified who crucifies, Self-withdrawn even from your own device, ... What grips me then, or what does my soul grasp? If I grasp nothing what is there to break? You are beyond me, innermost true light, ... ("Lachrimae Coactae" 6-7, 9-11) Self-seeking hunter of forms, there is no end to such pursuits. ("Pavana Dolorosa" 9-10)

In broad strokes, conflict also arises between the passion of Christ, the "Crucified Lord" addressed directly in sonnets I, IV, and VI, and human passions, personified in "The Masque of Blackness" as "the god Amor with his eyes of diamond, / celestial worldliness ..." (4-5). Although "Amor" fails as a transformative force despite its exalted promise, deteriorating into "Self-love, the slavish master" (9), the passion required of Christ's devotees also fails to inspire a satisfying or even accessible vision in Hill's persona.

Playing, then, on the lines from Southwell quoted in the epigraph, "Passions I allow, and loves I approve," in sonnet V "Pavana Dolorosa" the speaker reverses that formulation: "Loves I allow and passions I approve" (1). His endorsement of passion as that state or condition of true religious sentiment, inaugurated by the Passion of Christ as pattern or paradigm for the highest of human aspirations toward the divine, nonetheless remains remote to him.

To return to the first sonnet, "Lachrimae Verae," the speaker stands gazing upon the cross (the icon par excellence): "Crucified Lord, you swim upon your cross / and never move." Commentators have pointed out the echoes of this image of Christ as a swimmer from other poems (Hart 212); others have also suggested that it could be the tears in the eyes of the observer which create this impression (reflective of the title of this section). The disposition of the speaker is not that of a worshiper, however, but of an inquirer, a pilgrim of sorts but also a skeptic. His regard for the body of Christ recalls only the nightmares of human experience--"Sometimes in dreams of hell / the body moves but moves to no avail / and is at one with that eternal loss" (2-3)--then departs from consideration of Christ's sacrifice ("you are the world's atonement on the hill" 6) into what humans have made of it: This is your body twisted by our skill into a patience proper for redress You do not dwell in me nor I in you however much I pander to your name or answer to your lords of revenue. (7-8, 11-13)

The central image of the body--the swimming body of Christ and the immobilized body "in dreams of hell" in the first stanza, the body of Christ "twisted by our skill / into a patience proper for redress" (8)--situates the inquirer's deliberations in a way that resists ethereal treatment or any Manichean "spiritualizing" of the problem of contact with the divine. Rather, the passions of bodies as well as "the Body" constitute the principal site of the spiritual within a Christian understanding, including those forms of spirituality that seek to restrain bodily passions.

At the same time, however, as the speaker in this first sonnet contends, though he recognizes a state of "eternal loss" and confirms that hope is found in Christ "the castaway of drowned remorse" the material representation of Christ crucified presents a further barrier. "This is your body" inverts the invitation of the Eucharist ("This is My body"), making humans the agents of mediation as well as mutilation--"your body twisted by our skill." Christ as artifice now deliverable to a response of "proper patience" encourages only pandering ("however much I pander to your name" 12), a condition that further reinforces the dissonance felt. Disillusionment over the inadequacies of religious practices as governed by Christ's "lords of revenue" (the clergy? officials of the church?) who manage that symbolic universe rings a familiar mystical impulse to seek more.

The mood here is as much one of remorse and longing as of scorn for those practices that seem only to inhibit contact with the divine rather than enable it. (7) The effort to hold Christ in "a patience proper for redress" withholds the contact Hill's speaker requires (echoing the lament of Eliot's similarly plighted pilgrim in Ash Wednesday): "I cannot turn aside from what I do; / you cannot turn away from what I am" (9-10). The act of turning involves surrender of a kind that begs replacement; the skeptical pilgrim's difficulty lies with the prospect of "surrendering the joys that they ['your lords of revenue'] condemn."

Such joys may consist of fleshly pleasures ("the stony hunger of the dispossessed" enslaved to "Self-love" "Masque of Blackness" 7, 9). But they may also include the enthusiasms of the spirit and other such forms of passion and "Clamorous love" ("Martyrium" 9). The arc of the entire sequence follows this drama of desire, and desiring, which holds Christ at the center despite the hindrances of religiosity and misdirected human longings, as well as the inadequacies of our material representations of him. What "Lachrimae" makes available is, indeed, the problem of the spiritual quest in its historical and aesthetic formulations; hut it also insinuates the very premise for its progression, which is the heart attuned to its deepest need.

The cynic is also a seeker in these sonnets, and their gift is to advance the prospects for the latter by sharpening the nature of our desiring through the scrutiny offered by the former. There is a necessary clearing away of spiritual forms and practices that prove inadequate to the need before one discovers where the true nature of the promise lies. Is faith in Christ, this sequence asks, one which "approves" our passions as well as our loves? If so, is their expression as well as their satisfaction possible only within such paradoxes as "Ash-Wednesday feasts, ascetic opulence" and "Self wounding martyrdom" ("Pavana Dolorosa" 2, 5)? "I founder in desire for things unfound. / I stay amid the things that will not stay," Hill's pilgrim announces (ibid. 13-14).

However confusing or difficult the means, in the end the "Lachrimae" meditations indicate that the prospect for spiritual satisfaction must also lie in the source of that satisfaction. So the supplicant prays in the final sonnet: What is there in my heart that you should sue so fiercely for its love? What kind of care brings you as though a stranger to my door through the long night and in the icy dew seeking the heart that will not harbour you, that keeps itself religiously secure? ("Lachrimae Amantis" 1-6)

The poems that began with Christ swimming on his cross conclude with the pilgrim immersed, "bathed in pure tones of promise and remorse" (ibid. 13), no longer the person resolved in his resistance ("I cannot turn aside"), but open to those possibilities brought before him by the one who sues for his devotion: "tomorrow I shall wake to welcome him" (14).

This process of laying open possibilities indicates what the "Lachrimae" sonnets and "The Bidden Guest" hold in common. Under the rubric of "pilgrimage;' each portrays a process of discovery that involves renewed attentiveness as well as the uncovering of resistance--the laying bare of heart conditions, the exposure of motives (including confused ones), the examination of spiritual forms as the occasion for such (self-)scrutiny. The density of Hill's imagery, allusions, and prosody generates dramatic tension that makes vivid the plight of his pilgrims, a tension that is itself characteristic of the religious circumstances of his modern readers.

What issues from these meditations, on one hand, resonates with the history of spiritual thought, upon which Hill draws directly (in "Lachrimae" especially). On the other hand, because the pilgrimages or moments of pilgrimage depicted in these poems do not resolve in clear affirmations of faith, they strike a chord more peculiar to modern journeys of faith. What they refuse by way of resolution, however, they instill by way of conscious reflection on the meaning of spiritual commitment. The present age is one of suspicion toward traditional symbols and forms of religious faith and a time when expectations of spiritual fulfillment from historic religions remain low for many among the audiences for whom Hill writes. His poetry of distress at the very prospect of meaningful Christian faith offers a point of entry for modern pilgrims and would-be pilgrims, which takes seriously such challenges while encouraging reengagement and introspection. For these, as for his "Lachrimae" pilgrim, "At this dark solstice filled with frost and fire / your passion's ancient wounds must bleed anew" ("Lachrimae Amantis" 7-8).

Rivendell Institute, Yale University

WORKS CITED

Hart, Henry. The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1986.

Hill, Geoffrey. "A Matter of Timing." The Guardian 21 September 2002.

--. Collected Critical Writings. Ed. Kenneth Haynes. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008.

--. The Lords of Limit: Essays on Literature and Ideas. New York: Oxford UR 1984.

--. New & Collected Poems 1952-1992. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1994.

--. The Triumph of Love. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998.

Phillips, Carl. "Geoffrey Hill: The Art of Poetry LXXX." The Paris Review Spring 2000. Print.

Vaughan, Henry. The Complete Poetry of Henry Vaughan. Ed. French Fogle. New York: Anchor Books, 1964.

NOTES

(1) Among others, one thinks of Henry Vaughan, whose influence Hill has repeatedly acknowledged. In the 'Author's Emblem (of Himself)" in Silex Scintillans, for example, Vaughan prays, "Often enough have you attempted, I confess, to capture me without wounding me. Your speechless voice has tried unceasingly to bring me to my senses.... I was deaf and dumb: a flint ... you plan to conquer force by force. You launch your attack and shatter that boulder, my stony heart" (Vaughan 237).

(2) It can be as hazardous to draw too much as too little distinction between the poetic voice and the poet. My own stance (informed by a conversation with Professor Hill, July 16, 2004) is that, however the voices of his poetry express his own sensibilities, Hill's method is to dramatize the matter at hand through personae that inhabit the verse as characters. In this respect, he complicates the notion of a lyric "I," eschewing certain confessional practices while holding forth a range of personalities suitable for the multifaceted concerns that he raises. His "pilgrims," I believe, are of this ilk.

(3) It would overstate the point to say that we never find clear affirmations of Christian faith in Hill's verse. Given their rarity, however, the concern raised here in light of the more common portrait of faith, which we justifiably call "troubled," indicates a choice to pursue matters of faith with far greater subtlety than we find in more traditional "poetry of faith."

(4) An important term for Hill, and an important quality in the work he praises, as well as a poetic effect he seeks to produce in his own work. "Pitch" for Hill, involves, among other things, the "sensuous interest" of a work--whether of verse or prose--which he distinguishes from "tone." It is a distinction he charges T. S. Eliot with failing to make in the latter's Clark Lectures, and a quality he believes Eliot lost in his later poetry (see "Dividing Legacies," Collected Critical Writings, 375ff). For further discussions of pitch see also his discussions of Hopkins' notion of pitch in "Our Word is Our Bond" (ibid. 167-8), of Ransom's poetry (ibid. 135-6), and his treatment of "intrinsic value" (ibid. 384-5, 391).

(5) "Everybody has to find his or her own way of witnessing," he tells interviewer Carl Phillips, "and the only way I can effectively witness is by writing and by trying to write as well as I can. There are things one has to witness to" (Phillips, Paris Review 285).

(6) Hill, Geoffrey, "A Matter of Timing," The Guardian (Saturday, September 21, 2002).

(7) Henry Hart's assessment that the speaker expresses ridicule and feels scorn toward Christ exaggerates the force of his disillusioned condition, and Hart's contention that in this sequence Hill "comments on and dramatizes religious experience without ever affirming belief"--concerned more for "poetic technique than with dogmatic exegesis" (Hart 214)--makes too much of one mood at the expense of a more subtle meaning. Neither the speaker's disaffection nor his skepticism requires us to conclude that the agony over the prospect of "eternal loss" is insincere or that his reference to religious pandering, for example, amounts to derision of the cross itself.