Geoffrey Hill: an English critic-poet in the tradition of Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot

• September Song
• born 19.6.32 - deported 24.9.42

• Undesirable you may have been, untouchable
• you were not. Not forgotten
• or passed over at the proper time.

• As estimated, you died. Things marched,
• sufficient, to that end.
• Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented
• terror, so many routine cries.

• (I have made
• an elegy for myself it
• is true)

• September fattens on vines. Roses
• flake from the wall. The smoke
• of harmless fires drifts to my eyes.

• This is plenty. This is more than enough.

• Ovid in the Third Reich
• non peccat, quaecumque potest peccasse negare, 
• solaque famosam culpa professa facit.
• -Amores, III, xiv

• I love my work and my children. God  
• Is distant, difficult. Things happen.  
• Too near the ancient troughs of blood  
• Innocence is no earthly weapon.

• I have learned one thing: not to look down
• So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere,  
• Harmonize strangely with the divine
• Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir.

• Upon Seeing the Wind at Hope Mansell
• Whether or not shadows are of the substance
• such is the expectation I can
• wait to surprise my vision as a wind
• enters the valley: sudden and silent
• in its arrival, drawing to full cry
• the whorled invisibilities, glassen towers
• freighted with sky-chaff; that, as barnstorming
• powers, rammack the small
• orchard; that well-steaded oaks
• ride stolidly, that rake the light-leafed ash,
• that glowing yew trees, cumbrous, heave aside.
• Amidst and abroad tumultuous lumina,
• regents, reagents, cloud-fêted, sun-ordained,
• fly tally over hedgerows, across fields. 

Geoffrey Hill (1932-2016) was an English poet and one of the most important of his generation. He served as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford (2010-2015), and is recognized for carrying on the tradition of the critic-poet in English literature, a tradition that includes Matthew Arnold and T.S. Eliot. And like those two poets, Hill often sought in his work to reconcile transcendental claims with the apparent lack of immanence in contemporary culture — a theme that Hill channeled through his Christian faith.