The End of the Word in Geoffrey Hill's Poetry
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CONSUMMATUM EST: THE END OF THE WORD IN GEOFFREY HILL’S POETRY THOMAS MICHAEL DOCHERTY PEMBROKE COLLEGE DECEMBER 2017 This dissertation is submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. CONSUMMATUM EST: THE END OF THE WORD IN GEOFFREY HILL’S POETRY THOMAS MICHAEL DOCHERTY This thesis intends to demonstrate that the idea of the end is a crucial motive of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry. It analyses the verbal and formal means by which Hill attempts to have his poems arrive at ends. The ends are, chiefly, the reconciliation of antagonists in word or thought; and the perfect articulation of the poem. The acknowledgement of failure to achieve such ends provides its own impetus to Hill’s work. The thesis examines in detail Hill’s puns, word-games, rhymes, syntaxes, and genres — their local reconciliations and entrenched contrarieties — and claims for them a significant place in the study of Hill’s poetry, particularly with regard to its sustained concern with ends and endings. Little has been written to date about Hill’s entire poetic corpus as represented in Broken Hierarchies (2013), due to the recentness of the work. This thesis draws from the earliest to the latest of Hill’s poetic writings; and makes extensive use of archival material. It steps beyond the ‘historical drama’ of language depicted in Matthew Sperling’s Visionary Philology (2014) and Alex Pestell’s Geoffrey Hill: The Drama of Reason (2016) and asserts that the drama in Hill’s poetry, seeking to transcend history, is constantly related to its end: not only its termination in time but its consummating purpose. PREFACE This dissertation is the result of my own work and includes nothing which is the outcome of work done in collaboration except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. It is not substantially the same as any that I have submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for a degree or diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. I further state that no substantial part of my dissertation has already been submitted, or, is being concurrently submitted for any such degree, diploma or other qualification at the University of Cambridge or any other University or similar institution except as declared in the Preface and specified in the text. The thesis does not exceed the regulation length, including footnotes, references and appendices but excluding the bibliography. The style-sheet used is the MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors and Editors, 3rd edn (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2013). Thomas Michael Docherty CONTENTS Abbreviations 6 Acknowledgements 8 Introduction 13 Puns 26 Dead Ends 54 Rhymes 89 Syntaxes 125 Genres 173 Bibliography 241 ABBREVIATIONS Geoffrey Hill’s poetry: BH Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952–2012, ed. by Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) U For the Unfallen KL King Log MH Mercian Hymns T Tenebrae MCCP The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy HOLC Hymns to Our Lady of Chartres C Canaan TL The Triumph of Love SS Speech! Speech! OS The Orchards of Syon SC Scenes from Comus WT Without Title P Pindarics TCP A Treatise of Civil Power L Ludo EV Expostulations on the Volcano LIV Liber Illustrium Virorum O Oraclau | Oracles Cl. Clavics OB Odi Barbare TT Al Tempo de’ Tremuoti These abbreviations for the individual collections refer always to Broken Hierarchies. The abbreviation BH is used for paratextual references. "6 Geoffrey Hill’s poetry (not in Broken Hierarchies): CP (1985) Collected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) TCP (2005) A Treatise of Civil Power (Thame: Clutag Press, 2005) Geoffrey Hill’s prose: CCW Collected Critical Writings, ed. by Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Other works: EW Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work, ed. by Peter Robinson (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985) ELW Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Later Work, ed. by John Lyon and Peter McDonald (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) GHC Geoffrey Hill and his Contexts, ed. by Piers Pennington and Matthew Sperling (Bern: Peter Lang, 2011) ODNB The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. by H. C. G. Matthew and B. Harrison, <http://www.oxforddnb.com/> OED The Oxford English Dictionary, ed. by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner, 3rd edn, rev. by J. A. Simpson and others, OED Online, <http://www.oed.com/> All quotations from the Oxford English Dictionary are cited by lemma, part of speech (where necessary), and sense number (e.g., ‘instinct, adj.’, sense 3). All quotations from the Bible, following Hill’s own practice, are from The Authorised Version of the English Bible 1611, ed. by William Aldis Wright, 5 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), and are cited by book, chapter, and verse (e.g., Revelation 22. 21). "7 A C K N O W L E D G E M E N T S Michael Hurley has been a more acute, generous, and encouraging supervisor than I could have hoped for. No fault in the thesis could be fairly imputed to him. I could not have conducted this research without the financial support of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and its benefactors. I will remain extremely grateful. Ruth Abbott, Robert Macfarlane, and Marcus Waithe provided very valuable direction and advice during the writing of the thesis. Those who work at the Special Collections in the University of Leeds’s Brotherton Library were helpful and attentive during my two periods of research there. This thesis owes great debts to the edifying influences of Robert Grant, Michael Schmidt, Anna Spencer, and Andrew Zurcher. The friendship of Alex Assaly, in Cambridge, and Mark Fletcher, in Hamilton, has been richly sustaining over the last three years (and far beyond, in Mark’s case). I am thankful to Roger Kojecký and the CLSG committee for accepting my submission of a paper for the ‘Shaping Ends: Aspects of Apocalypse’ conference at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, in November 2016. Mick Gower and Mark Wormald have graciously assisted my writing and teaching. The Faculty of English at the University of Cambridge contributed to a travel grant in the final year of my studies. My father, Thomas, and my mother, Edwina, have been themselves: entirely loving and supportive, instinctively selfless, and constant in all things. My wife, Molly, on whose intelligence, wit, tenacity, diligent work, and unwavering love I have relied and been borne up, and ‘without whom am to no end’, has read and thought about every word in these pages. Anything to their credit is to hers. "8 In memoriam ALICE MCMULLIN (1925–2016) I haue seene an end of all perfection PSALM 119. 96 At once a Sonne is promis’d her, and gone, Gabriell gives Christ to her, He her to John; Not fully a mother, Shee’s in Orbitie, At once receiver and the legacie. All this, and all betweene, this day hath showne, Th’Abridgement of Christs story, which makes one (As in plaine Maps, the furthest West is East) Of the’Angels Ave, ’and Consummatum est. DONNE I N T R O D U C T I O N Mots, êtes-vous des mythes, et pareils aux myrtes des morts? ‘Words, are you myths, and similar to the myrtle-leaves of the dead?’1 The question belongs to the French poet Robert Desnos, who died in the concentration camp at Terezín in 1945. Geoffrey Hill, as well as citing these words in an early notebook, translates them in the second poem of Expostulations on the Volcano: ‘Words, are you myths and like | Unto the myrtles of the shades?’ (p. 630).2 The quotation in the notebook comes from a larger quoted passage, handwritten by Hill, from Wallace Fowlie’s Age of Surrealism (1950). Here is Fowlie’s commentary on Desnos’s words, with some succeeding thoughts: The line is curiously composed of four key-words, each beginning with m: mots, mythes, myrthes, morts, the last three of which — myths, myrtle-leaves, dead — serve as elliptical and provocative explanations for the first term, words. Perhaps the best starting-point in this problem of language would be to remember the sacred importance of words in all the major religions of the world. Words, and very often related words, are the masters and disciplinarians of religious systems. According to Genesis, the universe itself came into existence by an utterance or a word of God: “And God said, Let there be light.” […] Words are myths, because they are not understandable in any ordinary sense. They are similar to the myrtle-leaves of the dead, because they do not describe or reveal or resurrect the dead, but because they symbolize the glory and achievement of the dead.3 1 Both the French original and the English translation are found in Wallace Fowlie, Age of Surrealism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972), p. 51. The second epigraph of the thesis is from ‘The Annuntiation and Passion’, The Poems of John Donne, ed. by Herbert J. C. Grierson, 2 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), I, 335. 2 The poem continues: ‘So to misspeak my friend Desnos, so there | To float equity for all that it’s now worth | On the exchanges’ (EV 2, p. 630). See also ‘‘Domaine Public’’, the third of ‘Four Poems Regarding the Endurance of Poets’, KL, pp. 55–58 (p. 57), the subtitle of which is: ‘i.m. Robert Desnos, died Terezin Camp, 1945’; and SS 21, p. 299: ‘See if Í care | any less than did Desnos, but he cannot | now be recovered’. 3 Fowlie, pp. 51–53. The notebook in which this quotation is found is in the Geoffrey Hill Archive at the Special Collections, Brotherton Library, University of Leeds.