The Orchards of Syon

[Urizen]

I'm almost certain that among all the poetry anthologies I own there is a grand total of one Geoffrey Hill poem, and it's a formal, stately piece of cross-rhymed IP, an elegy, I think, though I could be wrong.

The poem is included in a very slender anthology intended for young readers put out in the seventees by two editors whose names elude me at present. I remember the book because I've had it since I was a teenager and I still think it's one of the best anthologies ever put together. It's called "The Crystal Image". I also remember the Hill poem because at that time I hated free verse and Hill's poem struck me as being one of the most "traditional" pieces in that book.

Obviously Hill's suffered a sea-change since the writing of that poem.

My local book store carried one of Hill's books recently and while I really, really, really wanted to buy it, it was just too damned expensive. But it sure looked sexy. It was a major tease, and yeah, the work looked difficult.

As for the poem, Rob, I don't get much of it, but that's never stopped me before. It sort of reminds me of Ashbery, especially things like:

"Ripe vastage of estate"

or this doozy:

"Unwise or wise choices do make
gymnasts of anchorites, if that
means what I mean..."


The poem looks ugly to me. Like a bowl of spaghetti with six or eight noodles dangling over the side. Still, I'd rather read a poem like this than a joke-turned-into-a-sonnet or a pantoum about somebody's herb garden or a villanelle about dead movie stars.

[Heather O'Neill]

2. What’s Hill on about (go on, have a shot!)?


The title makes me think of Syon Monastery in Middlesex, England. It had quite a history. It was subject to dissolution during the reign of Henry VIII, restored under Mary I, the community then being disbanded once more under Elizabeth I.

About the orchard:

The Isleworth monastery was granted by James I to the ninth Earl of Northumberland, whose descendants still hold it. The present mansion is mostly the work of Inigo Jones, the ancient mulberry-trees in the garden being, it is said, the sole relic of the conventual domain

Here’s the link to the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syon_Abbey

Keeping this in mind, I read the poem.

La vida es sueño as shadow-play.

I haven’t read Pedro Calderon de la Barca’s play, Life is a Dream.
The associations immediately called up in my mind were:

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing

Macbeth- act V scene V

And

Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Dream Within A Dream

At this point, I decided to take a quick look at one of the monologues of Prince Siegsmund in Life is a Dream.

How dream-wise human glories come and go;
Whose momentary tenure not to break,
Walking as one who knows he soon may wake
So fairly carry the full cup, so well
Disorder'd insolence and passion quell,
That there be nothing after to upbraid
Dreamer or doer in the part he play'd,
Whether To-morrow's dawn shall break the spell,
Or the Last Trumpet of the eternal Day,
When Dreaming with the Night shall pass away

Here’s the link for those interested:
http://www.monologuearchive.com/c/calderon_018.html

This
takes me back. Genuflect to the gutted
tabernacle, no one will wonder in what sense
words are consequential to the cartoon.

I think about the history with the monastery, and think that this imagery of the gutted tabernacle is fitting. Right away we get pictures of pelf and decay. Genuflect to an empty tabernacle. My thoughts as I’m reading: It does seem a ‘cartoon’ when the tabernacle has been gutted and there’s no Christ inside. A horror, certainly. But, Christ is everywhere regardless of what man has done to the church.

How is this life adjudged
derelict, a stress-bearer since Eden?

Now, he comes to the question: How is life deemed/considered run-down and deserted, fallen in to negligence (By God? By us?), a burden, since man and woman were barred from Eden?

At least, that’s how I read it. Is he saying man thinks this is the case, or that this is the case in the absolute sense?

We’ve got the theme of ruin again.

Think ahead: your name
finally out of alignment, its
dates crammed in; they might be self-inflicted
wounds of morose delectation
borne lightly out of primal throes, a last
remittance from doomed childhood.

The N was taken back in time, and now he says ‘think ahead’. We have a scene shift. But, he wants us to keep his previous thoughts in mind. I have a harder time with these lines. I keep picturing what happened with the community at Syon, their purpose and establishment, exile, re-establishment, and final exile, and wonder if this is the concept he wants to relate here. How does this relate to the N and to me? I get the idea that I’m supposed to be feeling displaced, and misplaced. I also feel I’m supposed to relate this to the concept of birth and Original Sin. We can have heaven, but must work for it all of our lives. There is a sort of dull pleasure, rather than ecstatic joy from the toil we must endure. The orchard still remains, despite the fact that there has been much ruin.

Unwise or wise choices do make
gymnasts of anchorites, if that
means what I mean.

I love this sentence. The phrase after the comma reminded me a little bit of Eliot’s words in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock:

To say: “I am Lazarus come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”--
If one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say: “That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all.”

But, I don’t think the sentiment is the same.

I have to reflect on how these choices, wise or unwise, make hermit/religious types (or perhaps in a more broad sense, people who try to better themselves) gymnasts. I’m wondering why he chooses that word instead of athlete, or perhaps Olympian.

But, I do get the sense that there is sweat and hard work involved.

If that means what I mean intrigues me. There seems to be some dichotomy of thought, or unsurety on the N’s part, between what he knows he means and what others may mean. I can’t tell if it’s that, or if he’s unsure about his statement. I tend to think it’s the first. The next lines to the poem sway me in that direction.

You say you have me there
which is all we have here, in the Orchards
of Syon that are like Goldengrove
season beyond season. Neither day nor hour
to determine the tinder
chemistry of exchange. If I were you, would
you believe?

Now he introduces a ‘you’, and I wonder whom this ‘you’ is. Is it God? These lines seem to be saying that perhaps there’s a place in the Orchards of Syon for N. Does that phrase which is all we have here mean we are basically holding on to the hope that there is a heaven to go, or that there is something more to life to after we die? Is this all there is? Is it all for naught?

I didn’t know what Goldengrove was, but am taking a shot in the dark that it’s from Spring and Fall by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

Margaret, are you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie.
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

The poem seems to fit the tone of what the N. is saying.

I loved tinder chemistry of exchange. There is so much going on with that single phrase. It sets the poem up for the final line. It also seems to be playing on tender, and on the flame, which is death, and exchange fits nicely with the next sentence. If I were you, would you believe? There’s no way to know when we’re going to die. There’s no surety to any of what we’re doing here. If the N. was you you, or God, would he have any more surety to what this thing called living and dying is all about?

Ripe vastage of estate,
the Fall revived with death-songs. Set this down
as anatomy’s coherence, and the full-
blooded scrub maples torch themselves in the swamp.

I wasn’t sure about the word vastage. It seems to imply wealth or greatness. Perhaps it is because of the orchard, or because it is an estate. It seems like N. is playing on the word Fall, with the season nearest to death, because of the word ripe, and man’s fall. The scrub maples, which I take to be us, work well with the setting and theme of the orchard.

Set this down as anatomy's coherence is the not knowing, the uncertainty, that is hard-wired into us, as something set forth as a law as to how we are governed. Because of this, the scrub maples torch themselves.

[HowardM2]

T. S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi," ll. 32-43 (my italics):

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

[Dunc]

A quick look gives me no citation of 'vastage' so I guess it's a coinage.

When reading I assumed it's based on Latin 'uastus' which means both 'empty' (as in 'devastate' and 'The Waste Land') and 'vast', and so is intended to play on both. Regards / Dunc

[romac1]

La vida es sueño as shadow-play.

The first poem in the Orchards of Syon (although maybe it's best thought of as single poem split into 72 sections, 24 lines in each) talks about shadow-play. The relevant lines:

Now there is no due season. Do not
mourn unduly. You have sometimes said
that I project a show more
stressful than delightful. Watch my hands
confubulate their shadowed rhetoric,
gestures of benediction; maledictions
by arrangement...

...this shutter
play among words, befitting
a pact with light, the contra-Faustian heist
from judgment to mercy.
I shall promote our going and coming,
as shadows, in expressive light;

Heather - that's a fantastic reading you did there. Yet you've only been critting in General! If you can read a poem as well as that, you should be in Gen C and C. At the very least!
You are right about Hopkins Spring and Fall. One comment I read in the PBS bulletin was that "Hill's place of birth, Bromsgrove, has become Hopkins' Goldengrove."

Still, I'd rather read a poem like this than a joke-turned-into-a-sonnet or a pantoum about somebody's herb garden or a villanelle about dead movie stars.

Can't disagree with that!

[Heather O'Neill]

T. S. Eliot, "Journey of the Magi," ll. 32-43 (my italics):

All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt. I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death,
We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their gods.
I should be glad of another death.

Interesting! Thank you.

Journey of the Magi seems to parallel much of the question Hill puts to us in the poem that Rob posted. It seems that the Magi come away with a realization that they want more. They want more than what is waiting for them at their Kingdoms. They have been seen something that reassures them even though they don't have all the answers. The tone doesn't seem as somber and disquieted as in Hill's. (Now I have to get ahold of Orchards of Syon to see how it ends and if the tone changes, or if there are different tones throughout.)

I also think it interesting that Hill uses small phrases of other poems, or at least I think he does, and threads them in to his work. (I need to read more of his work, though, for comparison) I mean this beyond the more obvious allusions to other sources.

[Heather O'Neill]

A quick look gives me no citation of 'vastage' so I guess it's a coinage.

When reading I assumed it's based on Latin 'uastus' which means both 'empty' (as in 'devastate' and 'The Waste Land') and 'vast', and so is intended to play on both. Regards / Dunc

Thanks, Dunc!
That makes sense, and it also makes the read richer when you have both meanings. Both seem to come to play with the orchard, and the toil.

[Heather O'Neill]

Heather - that's a fantastic reading you did there. Yet you've only been critting in General! If you can read a poem as well as that, you should be in Gen C and C. At the very least!
You are right about Hopkins Spring and Fall. One comment I read in the PBS bulletin was that "Hill's place of birth, Bromsgrove, has become Hopkins' Goldengrove."

Thanks, Rob.

When commenting on the poem, I forgot that there were 71 others. Did most of them relate in some way to the symbolism of the orchard or the monastery?

Has Bromsgrove become Hopkins' Goldengrove because of the association with Hill's poems, and Hill's use of Hopkins' Goldengrove? (tongue-tied yet?) I feel lacking in the grokking.

I have to thank you again for posting one of Hill's poems. I think I'm going to track down his tetralogy, at the very least! Amazon.com has Orchards of Syon for 41 cents. Unbelievable!

Heather
Yay! Yay! Yay!
Shhh. You never heard my joyous exclamations at the find of such wonderous stuff.

[romac1]

I must admit – this discussion has made me think hard about Hill and has drawn me back to his stuff again. The attempt to read all 72 poems and make sense of them was always going to be almost fruitless. The best way must be to choose a poem and really work on it, and then do the same with other poems every now and then. It probably is worth the effort after all.

I also think it interesting that Hill uses small phrases of other poems, or at least I think he does, and threads them in to his work. (I need to read more of his work, though, for comparison) I mean this beyond the more obvious allusions to other sources.

Sometimes he slips in things like that T.S. Eliot quote that Howard spotted. The whole idea of birth and death is clearly important in Hill’s poem, so the allusion is sickeningly clever. No doubt there’s a lot of that.

Other times, he actually gives his source as part of the poem, which is weird. For example:

Myth, politics, landscape; with language
seeding and binding them; marram grass or
MILTON’s broadcast parable springing up
armed men.

and:

I wish I could say more. Even
this much praise is hard going. Physical
psyche, LAWRENCE, also hard going.

When commenting on the poem, I forgot that there were 71 others. Did most of them relate in some way to the symbolism of the orchard or the monastery?

A lot of them do. I suppose all of them do, but not always directly.

Has Bromsgrove become Hopkins' Goldengrove because of the association with Hill's poems, and Hill's use of Hopkins' Goldengrove? (tongue-tied yet?).

The blurb on the book’s back-cover says – “The Orchards of Syon is Hill’s Paradiso, a Dantean eclogue in which the natural world (our ‘chequered’ England) and the dream-state of one’s earthly existence offer glimpses into Paradise.”

It’s as though Goldengrove is a kind of dream-state of Bromsgrove for Hill – but it’s not quite so simple, because Goldengrove, and the Orchards of Syon (there is, I suppose, a play on “Zion” in the name), don’t appear to represent an ideal world where everything is wonderful. In fact, it’s probably impossible to say that anything directly represents anything else in Hill’s poems. The concepts are slippery, and blur over whenever you think you’ve got them in focus. Three quotes to illustrate:

Syon! Syon! that which sustains us and is
not the politics of envy, nor solidarnosc,
a hard-won knowledge of what wears us down.

(fantastic line, that third one) and:

…Goldengrove
might have been Silvertown, could be Golders Green.

And the ending of the final poem:

Here are the Orchards of Syon, neither wisdom
nor illusion of wisdom, not
compensation, nor recompense: the Orchards
of Syon whatever harvests we bring them.

Rob

[romac1]

This review of The Orchards of Syon contains some very useful and easily comprehensible information.

[Heather O'Neill]

Thanks for posting a link to the Henry Hart review. It was very insightful.

Now I'll have to go take a look at St. Catherine of Siena's Dialogue of the Divine Providence/The Orcherds of Syon, and Henry V, and see how everything relates.

I think you mentioned that each poem was twenty four lines. If so, there must be a reason. Curiouser and curiouser!

I must admit – this discussion has made me think hard about Hill and has drawn me back to his stuff again. The attempt to read all 72 poems and make sense of them was always going to be almost fruitless. The best way must be to choose a poem and really work on it, and then do the same with other poems every now and then. It probably is worth the effort after all.

I think so. I read somewhere that Hill wants it to all be read as a single poem. Ack! I don't have the quote to prove it. Winding the yarn into a ball might not be so difficult. But, who can say? From what he is trying to get across, at least from the poem I 've read, I'd say it is worth the effort to stick with him.

Sometimes he slips in things like that T.S. Eliot quote that Howard spotted. The whole idea of birth and death is clearly important in Hill’s poem, so the allusion is sickeningly clever. No doubt there’s a lot of that.

Other times, he actually gives his source as part of the poem, which is weird. For example:

Myth, politics, landscape; with language
seeding and binding them; marram grass or
MILTON’s broadcast parable springing up
armed men.

and:

I wish I could say more. Even
this much praise is hard going. Physical
psyche, LAWRENCE, also hard going.

It seems like Hill has come to understand a concept when he uses those allusions, and so they become a symbol. If so, I can understand that. It's like he's squeezing the allusions for the central meaning they contain. Still, I need to read his works.

Ahh! So many teasers for Hill's works. I feel like a Trekkie waiting to happen.

[QUOTE] It’s as though Goldengrove is a kind of dream-state of Bromsgrove for Hill – but it’s not quite so simple, because Goldengrove, and the Orchards of Syon (there is, I suppose, a play on “Zion” in the name), don’t appear to represent an ideal world where everything is wonderful. In fact, it’s probably impossible to say that anything directly represents anything else in Hill’s poems. The concepts are slippery, and blur over whenever you think you’ve got them in focus. Three quotes to illustrate:

Syon! Syon! that which sustains us and is
not the politics of envy, nor solidarnosc,
a hard-won knowledge of what wears us down.

(fantastic line, that third one) and:

…Goldengrove
might have been Silvertown, could be Golders Green.[/QUOTE]

Thank you for the explanation of Goldengrove

and

Ooh! I hadn't thought of the word play on Zion. Makes sense, it does. Reminds me of the second Matrix movie where Zion also wasn't this perfect world. Sure, they had been unplugged from what they thought was real, but they still had to fight to be completely free.

I'm curious about Silvertown and Golders Green.

And the ending of the final poem:

Here are the Orchards of Syon, neither wisdom
nor illusion of wisdom, not
compensation, nor recompense: the Orchards
of Syon whatever harvests we bring them.

Rob

Then ending makes me want to read what lead him to the conclusion. I want to know what these "harvests" are. On first glance, it reads as if our actions, becoming our yeild, go into making our individual Orchards of Syon.

Thanks again, Rob. I'm in hog heaven.

[Robtm]

Howard’s signature line is:

"Poetry is not a code to be broken but a way of seeing with the eyes shut"--Linda Pastan

I’ve always liked to believe that this implies that poetry should be in some fairly significant measure visceral. Art that anyone can hear (and I mean “hear”) and immediately (and I mean “immediately”) take away something, “get” something, be moved, changed, emotified even, to coin a Bushism.

Much of Hill’s poetry is about as far away from doing that for me as the Times crossword clues or that quiz on Radio 4 (Round Britain) where pompous intellectuals sit round and try to piece together answers to pretentious riddles.

Having said that, had I not read this thread I would have probably fired off an ill thought out salvo (not strophe) of invective along the lines of: anyone approved of by Potts and Bloom is clearly someone to be avoided. As it is I read a fascinating discussion which, if it’s done nothing else has at least provided a clear insight into why some people are drawn to, and even apparently enjoy, “difficult poetry”.

Mind you the “academic fraternity” don’t help their own cause with their incredibly disparaging attitude towards “normal” poetry.

“Strong poetry is always difficult" says Harold Bloom, and you can hear the loudly echoed corollary: “difficult poetry is always strong”, reverberating around the austere and refuned vaulted ceilings of castle academia. I’m not sure which is more insulting or less acurate.

And this from Hill himself either proves him idiosyncratic or tiresomely patronising, I rather think the latter: "In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools. And that particular aspect, and the aspect of the forgetting of a tradition, go together…”

What I know Hill knows perfectly well is that although many of his poems are syntactically challenging (for those of you who haven’t seen it Steve Kowit's essay on Difficult Poetry is interesting in this area) it is not therein that the principal difficulties lie but, as Langdon Hammer in The New York Times Book Review so accurately puts it, in the fact of his writing being “a resistantly private art weighted with literary allusion.” The operative word here is “weighted”; my complaint is that the adjective is not sufficiently strong, “burdened” would be better so far as the “normal” reader (as opposed to the academic) is concerned. And while Hill knows that most intelligent readers with a basic grasp of the language and grammar could take away something immediate and possibly rewarding from a linguistically complex poem, he also knows that to interpret much of his work a very substantial literary and, yes, even academic, background is necessary. To that extent his quote above rings hollow and even dishonest.

I think Heather in this thread has made this point well. Investing probably a considerable amount of time she has picked up much of the allusive material - whether accurately or not I have no idea - and, more important, she has clearly enjoyed doing so. All I can conclude from this is that obviously some people derive enjoyment from finding solutions to puzzles, be they set in wood, plastic or words, and that Hill is able to present the kind of puzzle which fascinates and challenges some readers of his “poetry”. The fact that a piece may be sonically sterile and lyrically lame seems not to matter, the “strength and difficulty”(all important apparently) lie in what is said and not how.

Perhaps the majority of “normal” readers are unwilling to Google overtime or spent 5 years on an Oxbridge Eng Lit course simply to unwind Hill’s allusive tangles. Perhaps, like me, the majority of readers enjoy most an instant “connection” to a poem with no pince-nezed academic breathing down our collective necks judging the rightness or wrongness of our interpretation (if we even have one). If this is the case, and excepting those who treat such “poems” as puzzles, one can only conclude that Hill writes mostly for the select coterie who have had time enough to breathe in the Western Canon most of their lives.

I could equally well write poems exclusively for my fellow Chartered Surveyors in surveying language with surveying allusions and technical detail. None of the rest of you would understand a word of what I was talking about and moreover the constraints imposed by the need to confine myself to a strict code of surveying references would promote an arid and lyrically disabled piece of writing, but no matter, the whole would be hard to penetrate, so very “difficult” to understand and according extremely strong.

Apparently.

Some years ago. More years in fact than I care to remember. Probably a decade. I started out reading poetry in a little known newsgroup frequented by a certain Garyg avec acolytes. Back then I was even more of a literary ignoramus than I am now and because of also being a prig and an incompetent poet I found most of Gary’s antics infuriating and incomprehensibly vicious by turns. So by the time he actually posted a poem of his own it was quite certain that I would hate it. Sure enough it was full of allusion which went right over my airy head principally because I was labouring under the handicap of not having read Conrad while reading a poem about Mr Kurtz. Nevertheless, to my not inconsiderable astonishment, I found myself admiring the language and even the over modified phrases (typical Gary) and in fact the whole tone and sound of the poem. Sure, it was for me, near incomprehensible, and certainly “difficult” but poetry it certainly was, and I remember it to this day.

Hill doesn’t usually do this. Sometimes but not usually.

Dylan Thomas is another example of beautiful sounds creating poetry even where meaning is sometimes elusive.

Hill certainty doesn’t do this.

Finally, perhaps one of my favourite poets, but also, for me, one of the most enigmatic, is Ted Hughes. He seems to combine in one almost schizophrenic poet someone who writes with lyrical beauty and with an almost magical power of image creation with someone who frankly occasionally rivals Hill for sheer blocky opaque ugliness.

Perhaps there is hope for the guy yet. The second poem Rob posted certainly suggests so; one of his “weaker” ones is it not Messrs Bloom and Potts?

Rob


PS Heather wrote “Amazon.com has Orchards of Syon for 41 cents. Unbelievable!”

Says it all really. Heh!

PPS Sorry that was catty.

[Heather O'Neill]

"PS Heather wrote “Amazon.com has Orchards of Syon for 41 cents. Unbelievable!”
Says it all really. Heh!"

Interesting, with great points. (about your take on Hill)

I really do have more to comment on than this quote. But, for right now, "Heh!" just about says it. Who cares if the remark was "catty". I came to the same conclusion when I saw how cheap the book was going for. The images of how the books ended up at Amazon were pretty entertaining though. Still, it's a steal. Gonna get me a copy.

Thanks.

[Robtm]

I just checked our (UK) Amazon, it’s £6.99, and I know I paid more than that for it, so price reductions apparently abound. Having said that, less popular books and first collections with smaller print runs are often more expensive so I’m probably entirely off beam.

Rob

[Arun]

Hope nobody minds my bumping up this old thread.
I found it fascinating reading such contrasting responses to a poet whom I think is incredible. I don't get all, heck not even half, of his references, but the language itself is so incredibly powerful, both visually and aurally, that it has a huge impact on me. But after browsing through that site that Howard posted a link to, as well as this thread, I have a feeling that most of the criticism is specificaly aimed at his newer work, which I unfortunately haven't read apart from the tiny excerpts posted here. My impression of his earlier work, was that while I often didn't have a complete understanding of what the poem was ' about' , that didn't get in the way of my enjoying the beauty and power of the language. I hope this is true for all the new work as well.
Oh, and my answers to the questions posted at the beginning of the thread:
1. Yes
2. Don't know exactly, but don't really need to.
3. Yes