1Two sections from the The Orchards of Syon may serve as a kind of sample text representing the whole poem, which is composed of 72 sections on 72 pages, published in 2002, the year of the poet’s 70th birthday, and dedicated to his children and grandchildren. The words and allusions of sections XXXIV and XXXV on their two facing pages seem to take off in all directions in a kind of ‘hyperactive’ and anachronous memory (‘Memory/hyperactive’ says section XXXVII). An allusion to Noah’s experience of the flood, as viewed by Catherine of Sienna, at the beginning of the 34th section has a kind of echo in section LI with the flood caused by a river’s overflowing. The landscape of ‘dead/Goldengrove alive with mistletoe’ (Hill 2002, 34) contrasts with the snowy gardens and (what I presume to be) New York’s ‘West Fifty-seventh Street’ (Hill 2002, 35), suggesting a unity between childhood and the present through the autobiographical references. ‘Once more music/and memory move . . .’ (35) and the naming of composers throughout the text (Bartok in the previous line) is clarified in section XL, whereas Hill’s past as a chorister is given value: ‘Still, gratitude to music for making/us vocal’ (Hill 2002, 40).
- 1 This notion resurfaces in Hill’s ‘Shakespeare Lecture on Coriolanus: How Not To Be A Hero’ (BBC, Ra (...)
2The reader may feel dismay at the seeming anarchy of meaning throughout the poem. As section XXXIV says, ‘Press the right word, the scenes change’ (34), or ‘Simply recording these tricky/counterpoints declares faith’ (35). Getting the counterpointing right is one of the necessities for the kind of antiphonal writing that Hill undertakes, as one can deduce from his criticism of a passage from George Eliot: ‘George Eliot has denied us the cross-rhythms and counterpointings which ought, for the sake of proper strategy and of good faith, to be part of the structure . . . In short, she has excluded the antiphonal voice of the heckler (Hill 1984, 90).’1
3Hill’s poetry has always been careful to give such a voice, as when, for example, memory is flattened in Speech! Speech! 47 to ‘Been there/done that’ (Hill 2000, 47). Language, the very word itself, is a keeper of memory for Geoffrey Hill, as he has demonstrated in his earlier sonnets through the varying ways he can make a word spin. Often a word will carry several meanings at once, and revive obsolete meanings, as in the title of Hill’s commemorative sonnet for Ivor Gurney, ‘Of Constancy and Measure’ (Hill 1996a, 68).
4Commenting on The Orchards of Syon, Hill emphasized that it ‘is about the depth of memory and broken memory . . . The cultivation of depths of memory I see as a civic duty as well as a private burden and consolation’ (Hill in Brown 117). Like all writing, Hill’s memory work is acted out in a specific context. In a talk given for the Auschwitz foundation in Brussels in 1992, and later published as Les Abus de la Mémoire (1998), Tzvetan Todorov remarked that ‘Totalitarian regimes of the 20th century revealed the existence of a danger that had never been noticed before: the erasure of memory’ (Todorov 9, my translation). For Todorov, memory relies on a selection, since it is impossible to remember everything, but the state should not predetermine the choice: ‘History does not depend on dictates of the Law’ (Todorov 15), and ‘no one should prevent the recovery of memory’ (Todorov 16). Like Todorov, Hill would encourage the recovery of memory’s importance for western culture. Memory was a recurrent theme in The Triumph of Love (1998) in phrases like: ‘a nation/with so many memorials but no memory’ (Hill 1999, 40), ‘Memory/and attention died, comme ça,/which is not reasonable’ (61), ‘I am saying (simply)/what is to become of memory?’ (75). The Orchards of Syon is replete with the word memory, it is used at least 13 times in 72 pages (8, 13, 14, 15, 19, 35, 37, 38, 39, 54, 55, 64, 71), and there are clusters of other resonant words such as: ‘Memoranda’ (17), ‘T’souviens-toi’ (10), ‘recollection’ (38, 71), ‘preservation’ (43), ‘mnemonics’ (43), ‘misremembered,/misremembering’ (55), ‘remembered’ (58), ‘forgotten’ (61, 63), ‘remember’ (68), ‘remembrance’ (71), ancient (12,13).
5The whole poem, like the complete works of Geoffrey Hill, is trying to engage the reader with the need to remember the past. Yet The Orchards of Syon may go yet a step further, by trying to present different attitudes to memory so as to illustrate the need to understand how memory works. Among the ways to apprehend memory, one can distinguish a series of tropes or figures of memory in the text: personal memories, historical memory, the memory of place, folk memory, memory through artistic representation, religious and philosophical approaches to memory.
6The title of the poem, The Orchards of Syon, with its particular spelling, is founded on the memory of a precise manuscript, an English translation of the Dialogues of Catherine of Sienna by Sir Richard Sutton, who was Steward of Syon Abbey from 1513 and founder of Brasenose College, Oxford. One of the extant manuscripts of the text (housed at the British Museum) ends with the words ‘Here endeth the orcherd of Syon’, providing Sutton with a title for Saint Catherine’s text and Hill with the title for his poem. The cover of Hill’s poem features a reproduction of a drawing by D.H. Lawrence of a landscape that must resemble his own Eastwood, commemorating the completion of The Rainbow, at the beginning of the Great War. Section XLVIII says:
When all else fails, the great rainbow, as Bert
Lawrence saw it or summoned it. (Hill 2002, 48)
- 2 Some points in this paragraph were previously made at the ‘Cultures of Memory/Memory of Cultures’, (...)
7Even the typeface commemorates in The Orchards of Syon, as the long note at the end of the book ‘About the Type’ indicates, giving the history of DTL Fell, ‘a digitalized version of an anonymous Dutch typeface cut in the seventeenth century’ and purchased by Bishop John Fell for use of the Oxford University printing office.2
8Youthful memories of getting through the war colour many sections of the poem, in the same vein as the declaration of The Triumph of Love LXXVI: ‘At Seven, even, I knew the much-vaunted/Battle was a dud.’ (Hill 1999, 39). War has not ended, and memories of what occurred during World War II are not intact, since one problem with memory is its fluidity and unreliability, as in (from section XV), ‘Memory proves forgetting’ (Hill 2002, 15), so various images of destruction are named so as to be recalled: ‘Zepplin ashes’ (4), ‘blitzed Académie de St Cyr’ (4),
9The Great War is given importance, alongside World War II in numerous sections of the poem, including section XVII, which recalls the poets of the war:
Tommies’ lore, re crucifixes and the like;
Tennyson’s wild expenditure of bells;
suffering—Gurney’s—his queer
politics; Owen transfixed by eros:
my difficulties are not with their
forever-earnest speech. (17)
Another passage speaks to the sense of place:
Well-tended ground
ripe for laying waste, the Great War.
Lawrence’s Eastwood, Rosenberg
in Stepney and Whitechapel—
I’m ordered to speak plainly, let what is
speak for itself, not to redeem the time
but to get even with it. (18)
10The phrase ‘redeem the time’ recalls T.S. Eliot in Ash Wednesday (1930) and also the opening lines of ‘Burnt Norton’ (1935):
Redeem
The time. Redeem
The unread vision in the higher dream
[. . .]
Redeem the time, redeem the dream
The token of the word unheard, unspoken
(Eliot 90-91)
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable. (Eliot 177)
11Geoffrey Hill would disagree with Eliot in his use of ‘unredeemable’, and in fact is highly critical of the tone adopted in The Four Quartets in ‘Dividing Legacies’ (Hill 1996b, 22). He has often spent time trying to redeem Eliot’s positions. ‘Genesis’ (1952), the first poem in Hill’s first published volume, For The Unfallen (1959), had already given a hint of difference with Eliot:
By blood we live, the hot, the cold
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold. (Hill 1985, 16)
12There may be a possible allusion to the fourth part of ‘East Coker’ in this stanza, due to the juxtaposition of hot and cold within the context of redemption, which is similar to the way the wounded surgeon is presented in ‘East Coker,’ but Hill’s emphasis here is on blood and death.
13Yet, for Hill, Poetry can redeem things, as he demonstrated in the essay ‘Redeeming the Time’ (1972) concerning Wordsworth’s poem ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality’ (1807) where the ‘magical change’ as evaluated by Hopkins (in a letter of 1886), between stanzas eight and nine captures a truth: ‘If Wordsworth has indeed ‘seen something’ he has seen, or foreseen, the developing life-crisis of the ninetenth century. In the Ode the shock to be suffered by Oastler and the Nottingham men, among many others, is redeemed by the silence between stanzas eight and nine and by the immediate, abrupt surge with which the ‘joy’ of nine’s opening lines resists, pulls away from, the gravitational field of the closing lines of stanza eight.’ (Hill 1984, 88)
14T. S. Eliot is never far off in the work of Geoffrey Hill, as Christopher Ricks demonstrated in a recent talk at Christ College, Cambridge entitled ‘Geoffrey Hill v. T. S. Eliot’ (June 30, 2004). But the echoes of Eliot in Hill’s poems and his contentions with Eliot reflect less an ‘anxiety of influence’ or lack of gratitude than a desire to refocus Eliot’s language and thought on the real, or to ‘recurb and recover’ as Hill has said of Hopkins: ‘Possibly the best description of Hopkins’s poetic method would be his own ‘recurb and . . . recovery’ [. . .] . . . Hopkins’s poetry established a dogged resistance. Both ethically and rhythmically, his vocation was to redeem the time.’ (Hill 1984, 103)
15If Hill sees himself as ‘writing into the language’ and combatting decadence of one form or another, one may wish to come to some understanding of what he might take to be decadent. The answer might include ‘greed’ (Hill 2002, 17), ‘stupor’ (18), ‘ingratitude’ (Hill 1999, 40), or ‘the politics of envy’ (Hill 2002, 70) within ‘decadence,/ruin’s festival’ (71). The lack of memory is a key feature within the definition, and that would include how events of the present are not viewed within the context of the past. As Michael Edwards has written about Hill, his poetry is more epic than lyric, and it strives to make memory ‘operative, for the here and now’ (Edwards 24647).
16The urgency of Hill’s recent poetry is apparent, as in this passage from section XLIV:
Blackened as Rouault’s Miserere, a body
splays for the camera, the camera
staying put, except it probes further
the human midden. (Hill 2002, 44)
17The violence of the world situation is a constant preoccupation. Hill may take himself to be a war poet, or at least a poet who writes about war, and he engages with the questions raised by such a term:
Who dares show himself
embusqué in this verdurous new terrain
to be fought through? Did HYMAN go to the wars?
Empson didn’t, nor did I
[. . .] Meanwhile, mes capitaines,
the veterans are dying. And I cannot say
what they care to remember. (44)
18Hill’s weapon is not a gun, but a pen. And so, to present data of the Great War in conjunction with World War II is to take a tack countering victory discourse. It is to situate memory on the side of the wounded, maimed and dead. The leaders assume a background position, and the people come to the fore, so that Hill’s epic strains have no nationalistic agenda. In such a way, time and memory can be redeemed.
19The way landscape evokes memory for Hill might be associated with Pierre Nora’s notion of key places which help keep memory (les lieux de mémoire), but it may also be linked to George Eliot. In ‘Redeeming the Time’ Hill writes about George Eliots’s essay ‘Looking Backward’ (in Theophrastus Such, 1879) in which: ‘George Eliot writes significantly of ‘the speech of the landscape’. It is as though, at the end of her creative span, the author could compress into a phrase of five words the essence of paragraphs and chapters of earlier work...’ (Hill 1984, 89)
20He praises her ‘affectionate joy in our native landscape, which is one deep root of our national life and language’ (qtd. Hill 1984, 89). When Hill alludes to the landscape of his childhood in The Triumph of Love, Speech! Speech! and The Orchards of Syon, one has to wonder if he is aiming at such an ideal. A minimum of words seems compact with meaning.
21The descriptions of ‘goldengrove’, a nickname for Bromsgrove, abound in The Orchards of Syon (sections 3, 17, 19, 21, 22, 24, 25, 27), and are associated with the orchards of Syon, as a place (the location of the abbey) and also seemingly, at times, as a metaphor for heaven. In this way the references to goldengrove would almost take on a nostalgic cast, were it not for section XXXVIII, which evoking ‘The Landscape/of Childhood’, ends (humorously):
And here—and there too—I
wish greatly to believe: that Bromsgrove
was, and is, Goldengrove; that the Orchards
of Syon stand as I once glimpsed them.
But there we are: the heartland remains
heartless—that’s the strange beauty of it. (38)
22If nostalgia is avoided, one still feels a sense of regret at certain kinds of progress that destroy natural landscapes, such as:
Initiative—that
New Age pomerium between Salford
And Manchester . . . (61)
And there could be a smiling poke at Julian Barnes’s England, England (1998) with:
When circling
Heathrow on hold we are entertained
By Windsor’s scaled-down perfect replicas. (71)
23No less than physical places, works of art can preserve memory (or not). Section XXI mentions ‘Late SARGENT’ (21) and commands:
Address the picture; it may tell you
Who you are, but not where
Memory is going. (21)
24Yet artists obviously play a vital role in memory work, whether it be through allusion, as suggested by ‘Petrarch revived by CHAR, though not/in so many words’ (23) or through the willingness of the artist to bear testimony. Both world wars of the Twentieth Century come together through this sentence: ‘Atemwende,/CELAN almost at last gasp, atem-/wende, breath-hitch, say; or HARDY, The Souls of the Slain’ (28). The title Atemwende recurs as a leitmotif throughout The Orchards of Syon (see 32, 32, 36). Celan is a keeper of the memory of horror in the very breath of his wording.
25If the poet Hill is trying to salvage memory from its absence, in this volume there seems to be assistance in the form of other witnesses or keepers of memory. Their presence in the poem is often signalled by the repeated question, ‘where are you from?’ (23, 35). In such passages one is reminded of Eliot’s ‘compound ghost’ in ‘Little Gidding’ (Eliot 204).
Frénaud,
bleakly resplendent. Where are you from?
I said; and he said, Montceau—
Montceau-les-Mines. (23)
26Frénaud may be seen as a great poet-keeper of folk memory and the memory of the working class. From Monceau-les-Mines, his poetry is full of the jargon of the worker. The common man is often his subject, as in this short poem (dated July 28, 1944) from La Sainte Face:
Fin de Vie
Ma fille est culottière
Le fils boit du vin blanc,
Ma femme fine fleur de cimetière
Et ne m’emmerde plus.
Je thésaurise de l’alpaga
Pour m’y draper du ventre
Si le soleil vient vieux.
Je ne crains dieu ni peuple
Quand je pousserai mes boules,
Samedi six heures du soir.
La ville est une belle soupe
Aux cent mille yeux de paon. (58)
27Folk memory, the memory of the common people, is a strong preoccupation of Hill’s as this quotation from section LVIII of The Triumph of Love attests:
not/ ‘rooted’, God help us; they were as he
now is; dispossessed
even in the scant subsistence
of disturbed folk-memory. (Hill 1999, 30–31)
28One series of memory’s roots is to be found in the Judeo-Christian tradition. As Yerushalmi exposed in Zakhor, Jewish history and Jewish Memory (1982), the injunction to remember dates from the oldest Hebrew texts. Judaism is based on active memory. Christianity’s adaptation of Judaïsm linked memory to the crucifixion of Christ, in the Gospel and in the Pauline accounts. Jesus breaking bread offers it to the disciples, in Luke’s Gospel, chapter 22, verse 19: ‘And he toke breed, and gave thankes, and brake itt, and gave it unto them, sayinge: Thys is my body which is geven for you, Thys do in the remembraunce of me.’ (Tyndale 1526 [2000], 183)
29Paul, the presumed author of I Corinthians chapter 11, writes, in his account of the last supper: ‘That which I gave unto you I receaved off the lorde. For the lorde Jesus the same nyght in the which he was betrayed, toke breed: and thanked and brake, and sayde: take ye, and eate ye this is my body which is broken for you. This do ye in the remembraunce of me. After the same manner he toke the cuppe when sopper was done sayinge: This cuppe is the newe testament in my bloud, this do as oft as ye drinke it, in the remembraunce off me. For as often as ye shall eate this breed, and drynke thys cuppe, ye shall shewe the lordes deeth, till he come.’ (Tyndale 367)
30The sacrament of Eucharist in the Anglo-Catholic tradition has always emphasized this. In ‘The Order for the Administration of The Lord’s Supper or Holy Communion’ in the 1662 Version of The Book of Common Prayer, the priest, in the prayer of consecration of the bread and wine said: ‘Almighty God, our heavenly Father, who of thy tender mercy didst give thine only Son Jesus Christ to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption... and did institute, and in his holy Gospel command us to continue, a perpetual memory of that his precious death, until his coming again: Hear us, O merciful Father, we most humbly beseech thee; and grant that we receiving these thy creatures of bread and wine . . . in remembrance of his death and passion, may be partakers of his most blessed Body and Blood . . .’ (The Book of Common Prayer 260)
31In the 1662 Anglican Liturgy, the minister, before giving the bread to the people said: ‘The Body of our Lord Jesus Christ, which was given for thee, preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life: Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ died for thee, and feed on him in thy heart by faith with thanksgiving’ (The Book of Common Prayer 261). In The Alternative Service Book (1980) the same injunction to memory, as given in the Gospel, is present in all four Eucharistic prayers at the moment of the consecration, and is also repeated before administering the bread and the wine.
32This is an essential point for Geoffrey Hill, whose frequency of attendance at Anglican worship as a youth was regular, in part determined by his participation in the liturgy as a choir boy from the age of nine. ‘Genuflect to the gutted/tabernacle’ (Hill 2002, 3), may well be an allusion to bombed-out Coventry, the great Cathedral close to Hill’s hometown of Bromsgrove. In any case, the question of faith is a recurrent one in this poem:
. . . trust
faith so far as it goes, or as far as you
can hold its attention. Cite Emmanuel:
the man of sorrows whose blood burns us.
Le miséricordieux qui nous brûle le sang. (Hill 2002, 6)
33And there are passages where memory appears to be linked to Christian belief, as in this passage from section XIV:
Awe is not peace, not one of the sacred
duties in mediation. Memory
finds substance in itself. Whatever’s brought,
one to the other, masking and unmasking,
by each particular shift of clarity
wrought and obscurely broken-in upon,
of serene witness, neither mine nor yours,
I will ask bristling centaury to translate. (14)
34In another passage, prayer is purified with techniques of memory:
Re-apply
Dies-Irae with its scarifying
Mnemonics to cleanse prayer. (43)
35So for Hill, as for Péguy, memory gets to the very heart of things. Péguy expressed this in a passage from Clio, Dialogue de l’histoire et de l’âme païenne: ‘L’histoire est essentiellement longitudinale, la mémoire est essentiellement verticale. L’histoire consiste essentiellement à passer au long de l’événement. La mémoire consiste essentiellement, étant dedans l’événement, avant tout à n’en pas sortir, à y rester, et à le remonter en dedans’ (Péguy 1177).
36Christian or not, Jewish or not, for Geoffrey Hill, a living memory is essential. Péguy’s opposition between history and memory may be a characterisation, but the living aspect of memory, as he describes it is what is required of both the Christian and Jewish faiths. Hill’s poems demand as much of the reader, as the closing lines suggest: ‘the Orchards/of Syon whatever harvests we bring them’.
37Interpretation, memory, and redemption are linked through words, through the careful word choices made by the author of The Orchards of Syon. Memory is both public and private in the poem, as in a liturgy, and one’s assimilation of it is open- ended, ever in progression, through different tropes (figures, types, embellishments) of memory as the poem presents them.
Redemption
is self-redemption and entails crawling
to the next angle of vision.
Press the right word, the scenes change. (34)
RSS feed
