'You're not crazy.' 'Stay for supper.' 'Oh, no. We couldn't put you to the trouble.' 'It's no trouble. I'd be glad of it.' 'And their mother would worry. She'd think I'd turned us over in a ditch.' 'Oh, well. Yes.' 'We've taken a lot of your time now.' 'Time,' says Nora bitterly. 'Will you come by ever again?' 'I will if I can,' says my father. 'Bring the children. Bring your wife.' 'Yes, I will,' says my father. 'I will if I can.' Whe n she follows us to the car he says, 'You come to see us too, Nora.
We're right on Grove Street, left-hand side going in, that's north, and two doors this side?east?of Baker Street.'
Nora does not repeat these directions. She stands close to the car in her soft, brilliant dress. She touches the fender, making an unintelligible mark in the dust there.
On the way home my father does not buy any ice cream or pop, but he does go into a country store and get a package of licorice, which he shares with us. She digs with the wrong foot, I think, and the words seem sad to me as never before, dark, perverse. My father does not say anything to me about not mentioning things at home, but I know, just from the thoughtfulness, the pause when he passes the licorice, that there are things not to be mentioned. The whisky, maybe the dancing. No worry about my brother, he does not notice enough. At most he might remember the blind lady, the picture of Mary.
'Sing,' my brother commands my father, but my father says gravely, 'I don't know, I seem to be fresh out of songs. You watch the road and let me know if you see any rabbits.'
So my father drives and my brother watches the road for rabbits and I feel my father's life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.
Whe n we get closer to Tuppertown the sky becomes gently overcast, as always, nearly always, on summer evenings by the Lake.
1968
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2725
GEOFFREY HILL
b. 1932 Geoffrey Hill, born in the Worcestershire village of Bromsgrove, educated at its high school and at Keble College, Oxford, has been a professor of English at Leeds University and a lecturer at Cambridge, and is a professor at Boston University. As a boy he was drawn to the Metaphysical poets' 'fusion of intellectual strength with simple, sensuous, and passionate immediacy,' and his own poems offer something of the same fusion. What he has said of 'Annunciations: 2' might have been said of many of his poems: 'But I want the poem to have this dubious end; because I feel dubious; and the whole business is dubious.' He is a religious poet but a poet of religious doubt?a skeptic confronting the extremes of human experience, 'man's inhumanity to man,' on the cross and in the concentration camps?or delight in the abundance of the natural world: pain and pleasure alike rendered with a Keatsian richness and specificity, a modernist allusiveness and syntactic contortion. Distinctively resonant as is the voice of Hill's poems, they are consistently impersonal. Even when the poet's earlier self is conflated with that of Offa, eighth-century king of a large part of Britain, in Mercian Hymns (1971), subjectivity is dissolved in the objective projection of a historical imagination of great range and power. That book had been concerned at one level with what medieval historians called 'the matter of Britain,' but a later collection, Canaan (1996), bleakly attempts to diagnose the matter with Britain (identifying the U.K. with 'Canaan, the land of the Philistines,' excoriated in the Bible). Hill is at once one of the most ambitious, most difficult, and most rewarding poets now writing in English.
In Memory of Jane Fraser
When snow like sheep lay in the fold0 shelter for sheep And winds went begging at each door, And the far hills were blue with cold, And a cold shroud lay on the moor,
5 She kept the siege. And every day
We watched her brooding over death
Like a strong bird above its prey.
The room filled with the kettle's breath.
IODamp curtains glued against the pane Sealed time away. Her body froze As if to freeze us all, and chain Creation to a stunned repose. 15She died before the world could stir. In March the ice unloosed the brook And water ruffled the sun's hair. Dead cones upon the alder shook. 1959
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2726 / GEOFFREY HILL
Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings1 For whom the possessed sea littered, on both shores, Ruinous arms; being fired, and for good, To sound the constitution of just wars, Men, in their eloquent fashion, understood. 510 Relieved of soul, the dropping-back of dust, Their usage, pride, admitted within doors; At home, under caved chantries,2 set in trust, With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs They lie; they lie; secure in the decay Of blood, blood-marks, crowns hacked and coveted, Before the scouring fires of trial-day Alight on men; before sleeked groin, gored head, Budge through the clay and gravel, and the sea Across daubed rock evacuates its dead. 1959 September Song1 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. 5As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries. 10(I have made an elegy for myself it is true) 2
1. Dynastic succession of 12th- to 15th-century English kings, beginning with Henry II, who was followed in turn by Richard I, John, Henry III, Edward I, Edward II, Edward III, and Richard II. They ruled not only over England but also over much of France ('on both shores'). The last Plantagenet king was Richard III, wh o was killed at the Battle of Bosworth on Aug. 22, 1485. 2. Chapels endowed for priests to sing Masses for the souls of those wh o founded them. Man y chantries have cavelike ceilings of vaulted stone and contain effigies?sometimes in alabaster?of their founders. I. The poem is about the gassing of Jews in Germa n extermination camps; Zyklon-B was the gas used. Hill's fellow poet Jon Silkin has drawn attention to the kind of wit involved in the subtitle, 'where the natural event of birth is placed, simply, beside the huma n and murderous 'deported' as if the latter were of the same order and inevitability for the victim'; he discusses, too, 'the irony of conjuncted meanings between 'undesirable' (touching on both sexual desire and racism) and 'untouchable,' which exploits a similar ambiguity but reverses the emphases' and is 'unusually dense and sim
