Poetic Omissions in Geoffrey Hill's Most Recent Sequences

Abstract

Breaks, gaps, disjunctures have been important in Geoffrey Hill's poetry almost from the start, but they are most striking in three recent sequences, Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz (which concludes King Log, 1968), Mercian Hymns (1971), and Lachrimae (Agenda, Winter-Spring, 1975). The texts of these sequences are themselves so simple as to make one question momentarily whether the finest poet in England is not trying to imitate its most popular, Philip Larkin. But no, the difference is as extreme as ever. Hill achieves the simpleness of his text in a way that charges one's sense of it with concentrated depth and intensity; what he omits, that which goes unsaid, is evoked as part of one's experience of the text with as much precision as is given to what one sees and hears; the two are interdependent and each grows as if the other were its necessary soil. The power of these sequences increases as one's awareness of exactly what Hill has omitted increases. They are a hoard of destructions. Larkin's simpleness is very different. He excludes complications before he begins. If a reader is at all aware of what is missing from the poems, it is with an awareness he himself brings to them. Larkin's simplicity is much the same as that which leads Richard Kuhns to treat Wittgenstein's Tractatus as a work of art that he likens to the poetry of Val6ry. Wittgenstein decides from the start to leave out everything except what is the case, the facts, the world. God, self, the mystical are on principle out of bounds. So, Kuhns says,