Tinnitus aurium: Hearing Hill’s Eliot

Abstract

‘Loss and Gain’, the central sonnet of Geoffrey Hill’s ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’ (1978), pays particularly close attention to how the past is heard. In its opening quatrain, England’s belfries have fallen silent: Left only with an ‘inward echoing’, their memory ringing within the inner ear, they mutely sound out ‘Platonic England’ (p. 128): that is, as Coleridge defined his ‘spiritual, Platonic old England’, the perfect, canonical England of ‘Sir Philip Sidney, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Harrington, Swift and Wordsworth’.2 But oddly, the silent evocation of this abstract world is subject to some aural discomfort. The unexpected rhyme between ‘ring’ and ‘echoing’ pushes us towards the awkwardly stressed ‘echoing’, as if the poem were forcing its rhythms upon its language. And in fact, the very word ‘echoing’ helps to resurface the acoustic sense of ‘pitched’: suddenly, these are somehow real echoes, sounded at a certain pitch and thrumming through the air. This creates an unexpected crux within the poem: ‘coil … out of the air that thrums’ can be read as a harmonious patterning of molecular vibrations, coiling them into perfect shape; but also as an attempted reeling-in – or even a thrashing or whipping, in the archaic sense of ‘coil’ – of those vibrations ‘out’ of the air, silencing them to ‘inward’ sound.3 There is a physical struggle here, between the deaf ear of ‘Platonic England’ and its untamed, still-thrumming territory, a struggle which ultimately becomes the subject of the poem. ‘Enduringly’, continues Hill,