French Connections in Geoffrey Hill's The Orchards of Syon

Abstract

CONTRARY, PERHAPS, to his forbidding reputation, the difficulties presented by foreign allusions in Geoffrey Hill’s poetry give rise to a hollowness that approaches, though never wholly attains to, self-emptying. One might think that Hill’s polyglottery is as assured as that of any modernist master, used as we have become to encomiums like George Steiner’s, who writes that ‘Among our finest poets, Geoffrey Hill is at present the most European – in his Latinity, in his dramatization of the Christian condition, in his political intensity . . . the commanding note is unmistakable’. The commanding note in Hill is, however, eminently mistakable, since it is played against voices closely attuned to potential weaknesses: the self-deprecating, the humble, the confessional, or the indiscreet. So it is in The Orchards of Syon. The volume is selfconfessedly less angry, more forgiving, than its predecessor, Speech! Speech!, not least in its approach to the self. Where the earlier poem was prone to moments of scathing, schoolmasterly self-admonition, noting in one section the presence of a ‘V. poor linguist’ (the arbitrary application of accents being among his foibles), The Orchards of Syon speaks with more selfconfidence, albeit that more in Hill is often in danger of becoming too much: ‘To be an unrivalled / linguist is the deeper hope’ (XXXIII). Yet despite the audacity of ‘unrivalled’, or possibly because of it, it is a fragile confidence, capable of relapsing into despair and superficiality.