At a time when the UK has experienced one of its most shameful periods of dishonest collusiveness, Hill’s loss should be felt all the more acutely
‘Nonsense verses set down versus conscience”: a line from one of Geoffrey Hill’s late writings, “Ludo”, this brings into focus quite a lot of what makes his poetry tantalising, sometimes infuriating, important, compelling. At the most obvious level, it illustrates something that characterises Hill’s poetry from first to last – a sheer fluency with sound that can appear in lyrical elegance, grinding puns, carefully calculated shifts of tone or register, multilingual play. He speaks from deep inside his language. The reader sees the ripple on the surface, puzzling, even apparently arbitrary; but not the fathoms-down movement on the seabed. To read with understanding, you have to join him down there, which is an arduous journey and often frustrating, but generates a sense of challenge and vital unsettlement.
Hill triumphantly embraced the accusation of “difficulty”. If difficulty is a problem, that suggests that the point of a poem is to be decoded. What if that isn’t the point? In that case, speech that resists being decoded is simply what you might expect from language under the pressure that produces poetry. Verse that promises rapid intelligibility is a refusal of pressure, which for Hill was a refusal of truthfulness. The polemical inventiveness of much of the late verse, savagely scarifying or dismantling its own performance as well as everyone else’s, reflects his massive and unconsoled anger about the terrible ease of language. “Art is impregnable in what it claims, / Consoles itself while children curl in flames. / I could not say what registers the shock,” he writes in another late poem.
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