THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

From the Life and Songs of the Crow (1970, amplified 1972). Crow is a survivor, a blackly comic speculator about the
inadequacy of the old definitions of the relationship of the Creator to his Creation, and a weaver of new myths about a
God who sometimes sleeps and who occasionally perversely co-operates in the negatives of his adversaries. Crow
himself plays pranks, refuses to learn the word ‘love’, and re-enacts aspects of the stories of Adam, Oedipus, Ulysses,
and Hamlet. The poems intertwine and redefine established ideas by means of brash assertions and intense, even
brutal stabs at meaning. None of Hughes’s subsequent volumes has had quite the same abrupt intensity.
Hughes’s verse grew out of the distinctive dialect of his native West Yorkshire, a dialect which the poet himself
saw as connecting him ‘directly and in my most intimate self to Middle English poetry’. A quite distinct alertness to
place and to the ramifications of local and historical speech is evident in the work of Geoffrey Hill (born in
Bromsgrove in the West Midlands in 1932). Although it can be equally bloody, Hill’s England is far less demonic,
lonely, and wild than Hughes’s. Where Hughes uses instinct and myth to feel himself into a poetic space beyond
recorded history, Hill has consistently sifted through archaeological strata and explored human landmarks and human
residues. His particular fascination with English medieval history was evident in his first volume For the Unfallen
(1959), though the sonnet ‘Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings’, with its overarching concept of ‘caved chantries, set
in trust | With well-dressed alabaster and proved spurs’, is juxtaposed with two ‘Formal Elegies’ (again sonnets) for
the Jews of Europe slaughtered in the 1940s by those who believed that they had superseded dynasties and elegies
alike. All three poems are about the propriety of requiems and elegies and about how human memories are formed
and conditioned. King Log (1968), which opens with a poem about poetic choices and evasions (‘Ovid in the Third
Reich’), also contains ‘Funeral Music’, a sequence of eight unrhymed, fourteen-line poems written in commemoration
of three noblemen beheaded during the Wars of the Roses. Hill’s ‘essay’ on the sequence, published as an appendix to
the volume, describes it as an attempt to suggest ‘a florid grim music broken by grunts and shrieks’. The first poem,
which recalls the command of John Tiptoft that he should be decapitated in three strokes ‘in honour of the Trinity’,
plays
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decorative vanity against ritual decorum, judicial murder against echoes of heavenly order:
Processionals in the exemplary cave,
Benediction of shadows. Pomfret. London.
The voice fragrant with mannered humility,
With an equable contempt for this world,
‘In honorem Trinitatis’. Crash. The head
Struck down into a meaty conduit of blood.
So these dispose themselves to receive each
Pentecostal blow from axe or seraph,
Spattering block-straw with mortal residue.
Psalteries whine through the empyrean ...
This is the violent, sticky, unstable political world of Shakespeare’s histories, but the fierce polyphony that Hill
evolves from the ‘grunts and shrieks’ of the fifteenth century is decidedly his own. The thirty Mercian Hymns (1971)
eschew the tortured lyricism of ‘Funeral Music’ in favour of a prosy, Modernist play with anachronism and
incongruity. The hymns are a tribute to the great Anglo-Saxon king, Offa, who ruled over the Midlands Kingdom of
Mercia in the late eighth century, and a celebration of Hill’s own history. His Offa is a king of then and now, at once
the ‘King of the perennial holly-groves’ and the ‘overlord of the M5’; a man who is proud to be the friend of
Charlemagne and one who rules a land of gasholders, car parks, and charabancs. Past and present co-exist and fluidly
inform one another, easily so in the ninth poem (the account of a family funeral) and somewhat more restlessly in the
twenty-fifth (which interlocks John Ruskin’s complaints about the miserable conditions in which women nail-makers
worked in the nineteenth century with the experience of his own grandmother ‘whose childhood and prime
womanhood were spent in the nailer’s darg’). In the twentieth hymn the fanciful names of modern suburban villas are
also, far less innocently, the names of the battles which determined the destinies of early England. Clashes of colour
replace clashes of culture:
Primeval heathland spattered with the bones of mice
and birds; where adders basked and bees made
provision, mantling the inner walls of their burh:
Coiled entrenched England: brickwork and paintwork