In his essay “Poetry as ‘Menace’ and ‘Atonement’”, Hill mentions the provocative image of “mighty figures straining to free themselves from the imprisoning marble”, referring to Michelangelo’s “unfinished statues” (Hill 466). This image, for Hill, embodies “the nature and condition of those arts which are composed of words”, as he asserts that “the arts which use language are the most impure of arts” (Hill 466). Much as this image emphasises the inherent limitations and confinements of language over the expression of thought, the analogy of the statue also necessitates a recognition that language is largely inseparable from expression, just as marble essentially forms the sculpture. In fact, just as one may ponder if the sculpture comes before the marble or vice versa, one may also question whether language or thought and expression came first. Relating to this arguable inseparability of form and content for the sculpture is perhaps the famous maxim of Walter Pater, “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (Pater, “The School of Giorgione”), in which a similar conflation of form and content is enacted. Indeed, Hill seems to advocate this unification of form and content in poetry – at least as much as is possible within poetry – in his essay, stating: “the technical perfecting of a poem is an act of atonement, in the radical etymological sense – an act of at-one-ment, a setting at one, a bringing into concord, a reconciling, a uniting in harmony” (Hill 466). Hill’s advocated ‘at-one-ment’ between language and form in poetry can perhaps also feature into the striving towards ‘at-one-ment’ between language and meaning, the ultimate atonement for the inherent lacunae of language. This essay argues that within the conception of poetry as menace and atonement is that of form and language, too, as menace and atonement. Michelangelo’s incomplete sculptures therefore may perform the necessary presence of both form and language as a medium of expression. Simultaneously, there exists the potential for at-one-ment between the medium and meaning, as well as the menace of the mediums of form and language in their inherent, imprisoning inadequacies. For the purposes of the argument, this essay will consider both the use of poetic form and of more general formal elements in a range of Hill’s poems.
Form in poetry can function as atonement in its potential to narrow the gap between language and meaning, by performing linguistic meaning in more immediate and universal abstraction. Returning to Pater’s quote, one can perhaps consider poetry to be already closer to “the condition of music” than prose, given its inherent musicality, and perhaps the same effect can be construed with the visual element of poetry too. With regard to the audial aspect of form, much of Hill’s poetry enacts its content through the manipulation of its effects upon being spoken or heard. In “The Turtle Dove” (12), the very first line – “Love that drained her drained him she’d loved” – “run[s] aground in the hard alveolar stops” and “the voicing of the lines allows their point to emerge even more sharply; the effort that is expended in voicing the sequence of hard sounds… is draining” (Ang, “Bedrock” 6). The second line of the poem however, “For the other’s sake forged passion upon speech” introduces a more slippery and light sibilance than the harsher “she’d”, suggesting perhaps an evasive duplicity that both performs and informs (or challenges) the narrative by being still contained within the words “for the other’s sake” and thus perhaps undermining their stated selfless intentions. The subsequent words “forged passion”, in contrast, revert to the heavier and harsher sounds of the first line. The double voiced consonants in “forged” followed immediately by a ‘p’, as well as the spondaic nature of the two consecutive words, slows down the pace of the line and introduces a jarring break in flow. This overcrowdedness of consonants surfaces also in the phrases “at length grasped sleep” and “flinched in half-sleep”, the forced effort of reading these words performing the fitfulness of this fragile rest. Again, the spondaic nature of “at length grasped sleep” slows the rhythm of the line, evident also in “her caught face flinched” and “her rough grief work”, the repetition of similar consonant sounds and the monosyllabic curtness of the words further distorting the flow. The overarching sense of burdened heaviness and effort in the poem is therefore worked into the audial effect of its rhythmic flow, in a sense unifying the form with its content.
Similarly, “The Guardians” (28) also accentuates its narrative with the collaboration of form in performing content. This ‘at-one-ment’ of form and content is reflected when the portrayal of the natural environment in the first stanza is framed mostly by softer and more gentle consonants, such as in the ‘f’, ‘l’ or ‘s’ sounds in “lakes” and “fragile, reflected sun”. However, a suggestion of danger is already foreshadowed in the fourth line, with the ominous image of “thunder-heads” mirrored by the clunkier and more abrupt consonants of “drift” and “awkwardly”. This culminates in much harder and coarser sounds in depicting the destruction of man-made equipment: “Packed harbours topple under sudden gales, / Great tides irrupt, yachts burn at the wharf”, the short vowel sounds and the sharp ‘t’ and ‘p’ consonants in “packed”, “topple” and “irrupt” paralleling the chaos and devastation portrayed within the lines’ content. The spondaic stress of “safe / Packed” within the enjambed line creates a short pause after “safe”, accentuating the word along with the half-rhyme of “safe” / “wharf” in the otherwise fully rhyming stanza, thus emphasising the irony of the word in the context of the rest of the poem. Furthermore, the relatively smooth and lilting iambic flow of the first three lines is also slightly interrupted by the spondaic “drift, awkwardly” and the extra syllables between the stresses “Thunder-heads drift, awkwardly, from the south”, and this is later exacerbated by the caesurae in “The old watch them.” And “There are silences.” Especially with this second caesura, the pause induced by the full stop performs (and forces the reader to perform) the silence of the very sentence, heightening the poignancy of this mournful mutedness. The following harsh sounds of “These, too, they endure” and later “Gather the dead as the first dead scrape home” are contrasted with the middle line “Soft comings-on; soft after-shocks of calm”, a sort of subdued gentleness underlying the ‘s’, ‘f’ and ‘c’ consonants again a re-enactment of the “soft”ness described.
One also notices an abundance of caesurae and enjambment in “September Song” (55), and this resulting irregularity of rhythm contrasts with and rebels against the steady, mechanical persistence portrayed in the death of the 10-year old Jewish child. There is a cutting unemotionality of “As estimated, you died. Things marched, / sufficient, to that end”: “‘things marched’ has the tread of pompous authority, immediately, in the next line qualified by the painfully accurate recognition that just so much energy was needed, and released, for the extermination. ‘Sufficient’ implies economy, but it also implies a conscious qualification of the heavy, pompous tread of authority” (Silkin 110). This “quiet function of unpretentious machinery” (Silkin 110) is further subverted by rhythmic irregularity with the repetition of “not. Not forgotten”, accentuating the pause of the caesura in breaking the flow of the line. The short sentences and multiple pauses from full stops not only reflect perhaps the abruptness of death but also adds to the tone of latent emotionality and emptiness within the poem. Furthermore, the odd break in the enjambed line “I have made / an elegy for myself it / is true” foregrounds the deliberate equivocation of the line, with “it is true” affirming both that the elegy is at least somewhat for himself, “since in mourning another one is also commiserating with one’s own condition” (Silkin 111), and that the elegy is a true one. This break in the line also “forces the reading speed down to a word-by-word pace, in itself an approximation to the pain of the confession” (Silkin 111). One can also consider the poem “Of Coming-into-Being and Passing-Away”, in which the ending consonant of every line is a fricative – such that it can continue in sound as long as one has breath – except for the first and last line. The prolonged ending sounds of each line, and even the exception of the final stop consonant, as it is within the apt word “sustained”, again could perform the idea of “diuturnity” so central to the poem. The arrangement of lines on the page not only guides one’s focus to each word, and to the equivocal syntax of the poem (which this essay will demonstrate later) but imposes pauses and silence between line breaks, whether intentional or an intuitive accommodation of the poem’s several blank spaces. These pockets of audial silence and visual emptiness scattered throughout the poem perhaps suggest a more fragmented conception of this hopeful “wondrously sustained” “diuturnity”, contributing to the poem’s overall ambiguity.
In “Canaan” (188), form and content also exist in mutually constitutive ‘at-one-ment’. Here, one may discern a more regular rhythm in the relentless beats of the lines’ dimeter, its mechanical persistence accentuated in the first stanza by the repetition of similar sounds within lines such as the vowels in “pleasure through Flanders” and the ‘c’s in “chorales, cannon”. This solid regularity, however, progressively breaks down with the introduction of the spondaic “obese bronze” and the caesura in “to topple Baal. At”, perhaps performing the mockery and undermining of the noble confidence of the military in following “God’s / pleasure”. In fact, one can consider the “short, enjambed” lines of the poem as a whole, or indeed in many of the poems in Canaan, to be “for unease of reading – reinforcing the strain of speech” (Pritchard). The abrupt enjambment of “they hoist / corpses and soiled / banners of the Lamb” not only slows down the sentence, enhancing the gravity of “hoist corpses”, but brings into focus the word “soiled”, as both adjective and verb. “They” are thus not merely “hoisting” the “banners of the Lamb” soiled by violence and death, but have themselves actively “soiled” the principles of Christianity as represented by these banners. The creeping irregularity of rhythm culminates perhaps in the lines “Aloof the blades / of oblation / rise, fall, as though they”, with the dropping of one foot to the next line – at least in the most intuitive reading of “Aloof the blades / of oblation / rise, fall, as though they”, possibly further encouraged by the similar sound and emphasis of “blades” and “oblation”. The cutting short of the line “of oblation” highlights the almost paradoxical poignancy of the phrase “blades of oblation”, implying the idea that violence is our gift to God.
These careful arrangements of sound and musicality in the poems perform the poem’s content or intended effect within the form itself, allowing this content and effect driven at by its words to transcend to perhaps a more visceral and immediate level of understanding, one closer to “the condition of music” (Pater). However, Christopher Ricks also mentions a preoccupation of Hill with “the claim of the eye as against that of the ear, not only as the claim of poetry meeting that of music, but the claims within poetry itself, what is seen on the page as against what is heard either in the auditorium of the head or at a reading-aloud” (20). Besides the effects of the arrangement upon sound therefore, one can also return to the image of Michelangelo’s unfinished sculptures in a more literal sense, and consider the visual presentation of the poem itself and its goal of ‘at-one-ment’ with the poem’s language and content.
As aforementioned, the scattered silence in “Of Coming-into-Being and Passing-Away” is also reflected in the blank spaces between lines, the poem “peppered with holes in its lyric fabric” (McDonald 5). Indeed, the visual spread of the words upon the page evokes immediately an image of fracturedness and incompleteness, the latter furthered too by the significant lack of full stops. The visual image of the poem thus provides an intuitive and unshakeable antithesis to the seemingly optimistic ending, perhaps implying that this state of lasting, the state of infinity, is inevitably fractured and always incomplete, not safe from “prodigal ever returning / darkness” and still “yield[ing] nothing / finally”. Indeed, here the placement of the words, enhanced by the lack of punctuation and capitalisation (besides the first word), allows the deliberate equivocation of the lines. The placement of the word “finally” separately from the rest of the poem surfaces the reading of “yielding nothing” in the end, but also “yielding nothing” conclusively or definitively, the second but less intuitive reading also perhaps supported by the inconclusive dash after “finally”. As Peter McDonald writes, “the gaps in a poem’s disposition over a page… may—and may not—indicate deliberative pauses, points of silence, or changes in voice or direction” (McDonald 5) . This effect of visual arrangement is similarly manifest in “Cycle” (211), extending also to protracted space between words within lines themselves, such as in “what do you mean praise and lament” and “So there there it is past / reason and measure”, the spaces almost as if standing in for undecided punctuation. In the latter example, the lack of punctuation enables several different readings: a filling of a comma with “So there, there it is” evokes the emphasis or defiance associated with the phrase “so there”, but a filling of a dash with “So there – there it is” would suggest uncertainty and hesitation. The isolation of “past” with the spaces and line breaks too makes one consider the two meanings of past, both in “past / reason and measure”, and “there it is past”. Even within the second permutation of the line comes both “there it is, past”, an image of almost visualising the past before you, or “there it is past”, evoking instead perhaps a visualisation of a future, a “there” where “it” truly and finally becomes “past”. Even if not noticeably reflected in reading aloud, therefore, the visual arrangement of the poem’s words may still enact or reflect its content.
The attempted ‘at-one-ment’ of form and content is also enacted in “The White Ship”. The odd break in the line “the drowned wander / Easily: seaman / And king’s son also” foregrounds the word “easily” not merely as an image of the limp effortlessness and sedateness in death, but also the straightforward, uncomplicated equality achieved in death, where the “seaman” and the “king’s son” are the same. This is visually emphasised also with the placement of “seaman” on the line above “king’s son”, perhaps a subtle subversion of class hierarchies to expose their arbitrariness. Furthermore, the caesura and enjambment in “They are put down as dead. Water / Silences all who would interfere” positions “water” literally after their death – or the record of their death – and suggests a pause or break after “water”, visually performing the silencing of the drowned. However, the semicolon following the definite, absolute statement “Water / Silences all who would interfere” perhaps undercuts this fatal finality, suggesting a hope of recuperating their voices or identities and setting up the possiblity of redemption in the following line “Retains, still, what it might give”. The performance of silence in a poem’s formal elements can also be construed in the aforementioned lines “(I have made / an elegy for myself it / is true)” in “September Song”, where the shortness of the lines and their confinement within parentheses isolates them from the rest of the poem, as well as implies a sense of timidity or embarrassment in its admission of the inherent selfishness of mourning lamentation.
Perhaps one of the most prominent uses of visual shape in Hill’s poems is that in ‘A Prayer to the Sun’ as part of “Four Poems Regarding the Endurance of Poets”. The placement of the word “Darkness” not just at the start of the poem, but at the top of a clear decline of the stanzas – emphasised by their positioning on the page, almost as steps – visually portrays the image of “Darkness / above all things”. This is contrasted then by the cascading lines “the Sun / makes / rise”, a counter-intuitive presentation that in a sense defamiliarises the lines and evokes different possiblities of interpretations. The lack of punctuation again accommodates both the reading that “darkness [is] above all things the Sun makes rise” and also “darkness, above all things, the Sun makes rise”: the first seems to suggest that darkness may be beyond all things, beyond the Sun’s control, whereas the second suggests darkness to be what the Sun makes rise above all else. The cascading of the lines also foregrounds the intriguing subversiveness and paradox of the image that “the Sun makes [darkness] rise”, perhaps elevating darkness (literally and metaphorically) as an omen of danger or evil. Furthermore, the structure of the poem as a whole could evoke a cyclicality that perhaps conflates the “darkness” at the beginning with the “sleep” that the poem ends with: the words “at noon” are placed in the centre of the poem, reflecting the position of noon and the noon sun, and continuing the image of the sun “ris[ing]” in the first stanza. With this parallel of the poem’s progression with that of the day, the ending of “so that / we sleep” suggests a more peaceful and natural image of nightfall which hearkens back to the rising “darkness” the poem begins with, possibly casting it in more positive light (also literally and metaphorically).
However, the form of the poem may also present a more sinister reading, where this natural cyclicality of day no longer holds. The aforementioned image of sunrise in the first stanza is pointedly not a sunrise, and in fact it is darkness that rises, as emphasised by its placement on the page, implying night. The sudden shift to noon therefore seems more a fracturing of natural time and chronology, one also reflected in the descending movement of the poem despite what should be the associated image of the rising sun, and this is heightened by the image of being “ravage[d]” by the Sun as “we sleep”. Perhaps with this more ominous reading, one can consider the stanza in which “sleep” is mentioned to resemble a coffin in shape, and this “sleep” thus takes a more threatening turn from the peacefulness of before.
With this meticulous arrangement of formal elements to manipulate both the sound and image of his poems, where “every choice of image and form engages the overall theme, and each other” (Pritchard), Hill strives towards an ‘at-one-ment’ between the form of his poetry and their content, a “technical perfecting” (Hill 466) to atone for the inherent inadequacy of language as expression. Hill’s emphasis on precision in form, however, does not preclude an alteration of already-established poetic forms from their ‘proper’ or conventional structures and usages. The “Lachrimae” sonnets, for example, subvert the conceptual structure of a traditional Petrarchan sonnet, as well as its strict rhyme scheme either in half-rhymes or variants of the sestet rhyme scheme. In “Lachrimae Verae”, Hill’s subversion of the sonnet form simultaneously performs the sense of stasis or paralysis in the poem found in the lines “you swim upon your cross / and never move” and “the body moves but moves to no avail”. The first quatrain already perhaps alters the feel of a traditional sonnet somewhat, with the enjambment and caesura in the first two lines creating a sort of irregularity in its lilting iambic pentameter, one exacerbated too by the abrupt repetition in “the body moves but moves to no avail”. In contrast to the more confusing, struggling rhythm of the first quatrain, the following quatrain does regain the consistent rhythm of a conventional sonnet, paralleling the battle lost to immobility in “the body moves but moves to no avail”. This second quatrain could still be construed as a subversion of the sonnet form however, as this consistency of rhythm juxtaposed by the more fluid first quatrain is now associated, as aforementioned, with immobility and rigidity. Even its obedient adherence to the sonnet’s lyricism thus destabilises the romantic connotations of sonnets by subverting the iambic pentameter’s gentle, lilting effect.
Moreover, the volta (turn) of the sonnet is also subverted by the lines “I cannot turn aside from what I do; / You cannot turn away from what I am”, placed where this volta should occur. “The sonnet, unable to ‘turn’, is wrenched out of true by its own stiffness and immobility; its body, like that of Christ, is “twisted by [the poet’s] skill” into a “patience proper for redress”” (Ang, “Untenable Belonging” 249). This disappointment of the ‘turn’ of the sonnet returns in “Lachrimae Coactae”, where the “first quatrain ends with the phrase “not knowing where to turn”, the sonnet has lost a sense of its own properties, its own form, and hence cannot proceed to proper conclusions” (Ang, “Untenable Belonging” 249). This inconclusiveness imposed upon the sonnet form is also prominent in the half-rhymes or inconstancy of the poems’ final sestets, denying the conventional closure that a sonnet ends on. Even in the adherence to the form of a Petrarchan sonnet in “Lachrimae Verae”, it is with a later and less common variant of the rhyme scheme, the sestet being in cdc dcd instead of cde cde, and the final rhyming word “condemn” is a half-rhyme with its previous rhyme “name”. This unexpected and less ‘neat’ sound of the word concludes the poem with a sense of incompleteness or dissatisfaction, mirroring the unresolved predicament in the poem. Furthermore, the third sonnet “Martyrium” introduces a different rhyme scheme from the first two, ending in cdd cdd, and this fluctuation of form continues in the sestet rhyme of cde dce in “Lachrimae Coactae” and cdc ddc in “Lachrimae Antiquae Novae”. The inconclusiveness both within and across the poems in “Lachrimae”, as well as the prevalence of half-rhymes and caesurae, thus subvert the sense of romantic lyricism and closure in the conventional usage of sonnets.
However, as one refers to this conventional usage of the sonnet form, one must also necessarily consider the mutability of this tradition of any poetic form, and this essay argues that it is this mutability that contributes to the possible role of form as menace rather than atonement. Firstly, this instability of poetic form can be argued to render the form as no more free from inadequacy than language is, as form still has the ability to accrue meaning over time, and be similarly ‘tainted’ by historical association. Combining the use of language and form therefore perhaps is not a progress towards at-one-ment but may equally be seen as a regress: the amalgamation of two imperfect entities can just as easily complement each other as jeopardise one another in achieving a sort of unification. Furthermore, in a more practical consideration of this, the variable nature of the conventions of poetic form – as it is dependent upon the sum of its uses – entails that these conventions can be altered or ‘tainted’ by a poem’s (or poet’s) subversions or adaptations of it. Hill’s incorporation of caesurae and half-rhymes, or his variations upon the sestet rhyme scheme, within his sonnets, can eventually affect the understood conventions of the sonnet, and in turn nullify its own subversive and innovative effects. Historically, for example, the ‘Miltonic sonnet’ form was a “variant form” of the Petrarchan sonnet that “delayed [the volta] to a later position around the tenth line”, and similarly, the Spenserian sonnet is a variant of the Shakespearean sonnet that changes the rhyme scheme from ababcdcdefefgg to ababbabccdcdee (Baldick). These variants of the original sonnet form have since been accepted as their own type of sonnet, and what subversion or originality they may have initially intended is thus dulled by this acceptance.
In addition, even if this historical mutability of form may be refuted or ignored, perhaps the use of form to perform content and thus more closely unify language and its meaning is still a problematic undertaking. As form is yet necessarily bound by the properties of language, the balance between using and choosing words for their linguistic accuracy or for their formal applicability in a poem is a precarious one. In achieving a certain rhythm or rhyme to perform a poem’s theme or overall meaning, one can conceivably compromise on the careful and precise diction that Hill simultaneously demands. Thus, the prioritising of form to compensate for the inadequacy of language can perhaps counterproductively widen the gap between word and meaning. This perilous equilibrium and collaboration between form and language can also give way to much ambiguity in what has been compromised between the two, and what is intentional, within a poem. Moreover, the earlier assumed abstraction of form in allowing an immediacy and universal viscerality of response can also be that in which ambiguity can thrive, possibly jeopardising the at-one-ment between form and content. With both the issues of ambiguous abstraction and the inevitable compromise in the collaboration of form and language, this at-one-ment between form and meaning as well as language and meaning will thus always be imperfect, incomplete, and unattainable. As suggested earlier, this imperfection and compromise can give rise to the question of author’s intention, in terms of what was deliberate and what was necessarily jeopardised in the name of unity.
In conclusion, as much as Hill’s attempt at an “at-one-ment between the ‘local vividness’ and the ‘overall shape’” – “the ‘com[ing] right with a click of a closing box’” (Hill 472) – in his poetry seems remarkably generative, and the role of form as atonement for linguistic inadequacy can be thus justified, one can return once again to Michelangelo’s half-formed figurines in “imprisoning marble”. Just as the usage of a form or formal element can taint or be tainted by its historical accrual of meaning, any use of the statue entails an irreversible alteration – a chipping away of the marble, which thereby limits its future utility and versatility. Similarly, just as the inherent imperfection and unattainability of at-one-ment can lead to misinterpretations and ambiguity of meaning when attempted, the incompleteness of Michelangelo’s sculptures may well have rendered them completely different from their original purpose – it is their half-formed and unfinished nature that gives them the appearance of “straining to free themselves” (Hill 466) as one strains to free oneself from the fragmentary, unsatisfactory nature of language.
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