Word and image in the later work of Geoffrey Hill

Abstract

Paintings have occasionally figured in the work of Geoffrey Hill, often as the implied subject of given poems: ‘Terribilis est Locus Iste’ in Tenebrae (1978) is about the work of Gauguin and the Pont-Aven school, and ‘F1orentines’, in the same collection, refers obliquely to Benozzo Gozzoli's fresco ‘Cavalcade of the Magi’. Two poems in Canaan (1996) — ‘To John Constable — In Absentia’ and ‘Dark-Land’ — take as their subject the late work of Constable. In two of Hill's later collections, The Triumph of Love: A Poem (1998) and Speech! Speech! (2000), allusions to visual culture are both more profuse and more enigmatic, ranging as they do from Bruegel, Rouault, Rembrandt, Klee, Kokoshka, Picasso, Callot and Goya in the former to Durer, Daumier, Caravaggio, Bomberg, Holbein and Moore in the latter. Hill's interest in images is moral rather than painterly: images illustrate or exemplify the poet's own theologically inflected polemics. One might expect, then, that images would serve the interests of the word. And yet, curiously, this turns out not to be the case. The impersonal voice, the innovative verse forms and the oblique references that comprise Hill's rhetorical strategy have the unexpected effect of allowing images to speak for themselves, and even to speak of the poetry.