The Redemption of History: A Reading of Geoffrey Hill's A Treatise of Civil Power

Abstract

Geoffrey Hill practices a kind of esthetic austerity of style in A Treatise of Civil Power (2005/2007) that in the end must be reckoned a part of its meaning, its vision of the body politic, power, and culture.1 Three elements combine in this respect: difficulty (so called), the constraining or tamping down of the lyric voice, and subject matter. In relation to Hill, “difficulty” is a hoary trope, and should not be exaggerated. A good number of the thirty-one poems present only a modest level of difficulty to the patient reader; others, however, such as “On Reading Milton and the English Revolution” and “A Précis or Memorandum of Civil Power,” are challenging, and their challenge, a deliberate recalcitrance to easy-going assimilation, is one element of what the volume as a whole is telling us. In a fallen world—and we will see how much Hill has to say about the Fall later—false communication rides easily on subtle and not so subtle lies, distortions, evasions, self-interests, and self-deceptions. The torque of a complex style, elision, sometimes contorted nuance and exactness, are ways of trying to take language back in the direction of an original honesty—which is not to say that there isn’t a lot of esthetic joy, fun even, buried deep down. There is, we might say, a kind of negotiation between this austerity and this joy, so that occasionally an exquisite lyric fullness breaks out even though much of the time Hill is writing what he has called elsewhere “treatise-poems.”2 In a self-reflexive manner, within the volume, he speaks of writing “recitatives” rather than “arias,” of his desire to “unmake / all wrought finalities, become a babbler / in the crowd’s face,” or, as he expresses it in another poem, to write “spare strophes that yield almost nothing / to the knowledge /outside them raw with late wisdom.”3 As a philosophically learned poet, he is writing something like a treatise of politics and poetics which is prepared to live in the reader’s mind not as some wholesome affirmation, but in a self-conscious brokenness, a symbolic enactment of the ever-recurring nature of human failure. His theological positions—putting a lot in a short space—are overwhelmingly orthodox, so that the self-emptying of God in Christ lies at the heart of his religious understandings.4 Moving forward into the esthetic realm from these kinds of depth, we could say that what he is doing here is practicing a deliberate ascesis of thought and word in relation to often tragic subject matter.