The Orchards of Syon

[romac1]

“The greatest living poet in the English Language” – Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian.

“I think Geoffrey Hill is probably the best writer alive, in prose or rhyme, in the English language” – A. N. Wilson.

“The finest British poet of our time” – John Hollander

These guys aren’t alone in rating Geoffrey Hill as one of the greatest 20th (and now 21st) century poets.

I read his 2002 volume, The Orchards of Syon from cover to cover. It’s the fourth and last instalment in a series of books, a “kind of high-modernist Divine Comedy”, as one reviewer put it, although there’s little in it that reminded me of Dante.

It’s difficult poetry and reading through the 72 poems was an exhausting task. Part of the problem was that I wasn’t up on the allusions. Hill alludes frequently (so I read) to the 17th Century Spanish work by Calderon, Le Vida es Sueno, and also to Hopkins (OK, I caught an occasional Hopkins allusion), D.H. Lawrence, Shakespeare, and Dante.

Plenty of critic-fuel then, enough to keep people going on post-doctoral research for the next century at least. One reviewer said, “While it might take us a long time to uncover the full wealth of the poems, their overall power is irrefutable. The Orchards of Syon is a huge achievement.”

But what about normal readers of poetry, readers who don’t mind a bit of difficulty if the effort seems worthwhile? What is there in the Orchards of Syon for them?

I’ll leave you to judge. Below is a representative poem from the collection. I have three questions:
1. Do you like it?
2. What’s Hill on about (go on, have a shot!)?
3. Would you like to read more?

La vida es sueño as shadow-play. This
takes me back. Genuflect to the gutted
tabernacle, no one will wonder in what sense
words are consequential to the cartoon.
How is this life adjudged
derelict, a stress-bearer since Eden?
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.
Unwise or wise choices do make
gymnasts of anchorites, if that
means what I mean. 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? 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]Geoffrey Hill, The Orchards of Syon, Penguin 2002)

[cookala]

a quick answer as I'm pressed for time -

1-I'm not sure
2-general impression and a wild guess - N's comparing his life's wrondgoings to those of others (and judging himself and them?). I also think the subject, N, is very old and reflecting on and weighing his sins - something we'll all do as we grow closer to death. The last 5 lines seem to be the meat.
3-again, I'm not sure. maybe a little more, until I make up my mind one way or another about whether I like it or not.

[Rachel Lindley]

1. No.
2. I really don't care. It's not worth the effort to figure out.
3. Uh, no.

[Dunc]

1. Not really - a couple of okay moments, nothing sensational. Meanwhile lines like Genuflect to the gutted / tabernacle (shades of Eliot's broken columns) and a last / remittance from doomed childhood and How is this life adjudged / derelict make it plain that this is just dressed-up angst-stuff. You say you have me there // which is all we have here, in the Orchards / of Syon that are like Goldengrove is too smarty, as is If I were you, would // you believe? - close to Pseuds' Corner.

2. [1] Life is illusion. [2] Acknowledge that the things you were taught to believe will disappoint - words don’t matter, the image is enough. [5] What are the values in life [6] esp if you believe in original sin? [7] Think of your gravestone / fame. [9] and, romancing your childhood, perhaps you welcome the end. [13] Perhaps you did things that got you into weird situations. [15] You say no, think of life as the dreamt-of, constant, heaven [18] yet no time to relate to others. [20] How are you different from me? [21] Emptiness, your own guilt. [22] Everything goes.

He doesn't have answers for his own angst, nor does he capture anything essential or leave us with fine images - he's just having a wallow.

3. Not if it’s all like that.

[HowardM2]

Hill is at least one of the, if not the, most difficult and complex of poets of the past 50 years. That doesn't mean he's bad or uninteresting; it does mean he is far more challenging than most. All poetry is an acquired taste; Hill requires more effort to acquire than most.

Here are some quotations about him, all by important critics, and several identifying him as the greatest living English poet -- a claim not to be made nor disregarded lightly-- from various reviews, which, along with a good deal of other information about him, can be found here:

* "Not least among Geoffrey Hill's curious virtues as a poet is that in reading him we have no sense of an art other than his own: also that in re-reading him our sight goes more and more through the glass into the kingdom beyond, taking in further movements and features, in ever greater detail." - John Bayley, Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his Work (1985)

* "Strong poetry is always difficult, and Geoffrey Hill is the strongest British poet now active, though his reputation in the English-speaking world is somewhat less advanced than that of several of his contemporaries." - Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hill (1986)

* "Geoffrey Hill may be the strongest and most original English poet of the second half of our fading century, although his work is by no means either easy or very popular. Dense, intricate, exceedingly compact, his poetry has always had great visionary force." - John Hollander, The Los Angeles Times (20.9.1998)

* "Hill's work has always been difficult, a resistantly private art weighted with literary allusion." - Langdon Hammer, The New York Times Book Review (17.1.1999)

* "Hill is a moralist, and a severe one. He is not much given to metaphysics, or interrogations of Nature. He deals with the world on the understanding that it has already taken certain social and cultural forms, good and more often bad. Laus et vituperatio are civic acts, moral and political: they take the world otherwise for granted, it is what it appears to be, given, primary, objective. The question now is: How to live, what to do ? What is a writer's obligation ?" - Denis Donoghue, The New York Review of Books (20.5.1999)

* "Hill's poetry for nearly half a century has defined the limit of modernist allusiveness. Can he take the benefits of opacity and then complain when misunderstood ?" - William Logan, Parnassus (2000)

* "Let us make one thing clear: Geoffrey Hill is the greatest living poet in the English language." - Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian (17.11.2001)

* "But no reader of Hill could have predicted, in 1994, that in the next eight years he would publish almost as much work as in the previous forty, that his style would be brutally re-made and the whole shape of his achievement transformed. (...) (I)t is not the case that Hill has become a tamer or more ingratiating poet. But now one can come to grips, as never before, with the kind of poet he really is." - Adam Kirsch, The New Republic (27.5.2002)

* "If in his racy, eclectic language and in his wide range of reference he is plainly postmodern, in his themes he evokes comparison with the great modernists W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens. (...) As a philosophical poet, Hill may not be at the level of Yeats, Eliot, and Stevens (not to mention Goethe or Dante), and not just because he lacks their degree of systematic clarity. But he is perhaps the best our "mean unpropitious time" affords, and that is saying a lot." - Thomas L. Jeffers, Commentary (6/2002)

* "Hill would be delusional not to realize his poetry is beyond the reach of the common reader, or even most uncommon ones." - William Logan, The New Criterion (6/2002)

* "Hill's work will never be fashionable but it is a corpus of such passionate seriousness and ethical thought, its every phrase written with a consciousness of the weight of history and language, that it is hard to imagine it ever being ignored." - Robert Potts, The Guardian (10.8.2002)

* "It is impossible in a short space to convey not merely how good, but how important Geoffrey Hill’s writing is. (...) There is no one alive writing in our language about deeper or more important matters, no one saying such interesting things. (...) The work of Hill is a phoenix rising from European ashes." - A.N.Wilson, The Spectator (7/9/2002)

* "Hill’s lines are the contours of an ancestral landscape. They sculpt the culture in which his work is so deeply embedded. This is what makes him England’s most important living poet." - Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times (25/9/2002)

* "Hill is one of those poets, along with Jeremy Prynne and Mark Ford, whose poems are most often about how difficult it is to read them. In Hill's work, this takes on a moral charge. The thing that upsets him most is inattention, and a failure to honour the dead. (...) Maybe this is why so many readers approach his work with awe and feel humbled by him. Critics queue up to say, unequivocally, that he is the best poet working in English." - Tom Payne, Daily Telegraph (28/9/2002)

* "In reading his last collection The Orchards of Syon I was startled to realize that Hill has been writing his incomparable poetry for over fifty years now and that each new book of his has been a fresh, and sometimes unexpected, triumph. The combination of immaculate poetic skill with intense originality is always rare, and never more so than in our diminished age. Perhaps this explains why Hill has been so largely ignored by the purveyors of accolades and fat cash awards; while bevies of mediocrities stagger under their unmerited laurels, Hill continues to compose his grave, raucous, piercing, and marmoreal lyrics, drawing on a huge range of reference to many cultures and languages from antiquity to the present." - Eric Ormsby, The New Criterion (4/2003)

[larryrap]

When I first started reading Eliot there was a lot I couldn't understand, but I had a sense of excitement and meaning that made me stick with it. Eventually I could understand more of it.

In the Hill poem that you posted I can make out nothing at all and I must say that about halfway through I gave up on it and marked him as unreadable.

The only things that make me doubt myself are the critics you quote--they make it feel like I am missing something wonderful.

Larry

[Rachel Lindley]

The only things that make me doubt myself are the critics you quote--they make it feel like I am missing something wonderful.

Yeah, well, many of the same critics glow about Billy Collins too.

I'm not saying he's a crappy writer, is Geoffrey Hill. If that sort of thing turns a person's crank, go for it. But I feel the same way about Geoffrey Hill that I do about the later work of Ezra Pound - there's simply not enough payoff for the sheer amount of work needed to penetrate the poetry. I read poetry for enjoyment. I don't enjoy getting a headache. I also have to wonder how much Hill really wants to communicate to people other than himself when he pays so little mind to clarity.

Rachel

[jsdealy]

1. Yes.

2. I feel certain I'm drawing things out which are probably crude simplifications or misinterpretations of exactly what he's getting at, but I find most of the sentiment suspiciously lucid, and his phrasing quick, clear, and various (in other words, interesting).

Specific inferences: "no one will wonder ... cartoon" is a stab at the nominalist/realist polemic, "how is this life ... Eden?" probably contains direct allusion but I take it on simpler terms as a moral question concerned with original sin ("how" puts an interesting spin on an otherwise cheesy rhetorical cliche, I think), "self-inflicted wounds ... throes" is a bit too glib to be taken as an honest suggestion so I take it as either wholly or partly ironic (though I like the prosody very much, glib or otherwise). The interpositions of a sort of "straight" voice in lines like "if that / means what I mean" and "if I were you / would you believe?" seem like attempts to qualify or disorient the mostly academic & even "poetical" diction that predominates with disparate, more overt insertions of irony.

3. Sure. Thanks for posting.

[TonyWilliams]

I have The Orchards of Syon on my bookshelf but have never attempted it - flicking through it, it seems so much more daunting than Mercian Hymns (all that nice white space); and I keep excusing myself by saying I haven't read the earlier parts of the series. And that's the problem with Hill, isn't it? - Poetry as a chore, art for the sake of passing a test. Still, all those critics seem to think it's worth the effort...

1) A qualified yes. I was continually put off, then soothed by a gesture towards meaning, then put off when it didn't resolve itself, then soothed, then...

2) Nothing really. Gravestones (Hill seems to spend so much of his time hanging round churches; it's a wonder he doesn't bump into the ghosts of Betjeman and Larkin, rubbing their bald spots and laughing down their sleeves at his earnest manner). Pastoral, myth, allusions to hermetic cultural baggage. High rhetoric as the ultimate cultural attainment, and its impossibility. Death, etc. More rhetoric.

3) mm, ye-es . Yes, I would, but I also dread the prospect slightly. It might help if his books were interspersed with Benny Hill sketches every few pages, just to keep the reader fed and watered.

Tony

[amaranthus]

1. Do you like it? - No. Though I can recognize some craft.
2. What’s Hill on about (go on, have a shot!)? - I get nihilism and apocalypse, but I really don't know.
3. Would you like to read more? - Not for a few years (and likely not then). Right now if feels like trying to do a crossword puzzle in a language I don't speak.

But thanks for posting and asking the questions.
Carol

[romac1]

Some very interesting comments here. Thanks.

I’ll come back to this, but for now, for those who want more, here’s another poem from The Orchards of Syon, one of the most accessible ones in the collection this time. It can also be found at The Guardian.

(Saturday August 10, 2002
The Guardian )

Two nights' and three days' rain, with the Hodder
well up, over its alder roots; tumblings
of shaly late storm light; the despised
ragwort, luminous, standing out,
stereoscopically, across twenty yards,
on the farther bank. The congregants
of air and water, of swift reflection,
vanish between the brightness and shadow.
Mortal beauty is alienation; or not,
as I see it. The rest passagework,
settled beforehand, variable, to be lived through
as far as one can, with uncertain
tenure. Downstream from this Quaker outcrop
Stonyhurst's ample terraces confer
with the violent, comely
nature of Loyola and English weather;
stone, pelouse, untouched by carbon droppings,
now, from the spent mills. Indescribable,
a word accustomed through its halting
promptness, comes to be inscribed. The old
artifice so immediate, the delight
comprehends our measure: knowledge granted
at the final withholding, the image that is
to die, the creature, the rock of transience.

[Heather O'Neill]

1. Do you like it?

Yes! Thanks for introducing Geoffrey Hill to me. He's one of those poets that you have to take your time with. I've found that Charles Wright is another one. I'm still going through his Black Zodiac. It's been about a month since I started it.

There are other poets that are thought provoking in a different way. I eat their words up in a single sitting or few, and then go back to them later.

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

I've taken a shot at what he's on about, and am almost finished with it. I'll edit it in a little later today.

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.

3. Would you like to read more?

Yes.

[sefton]

La vida es sueño as shadow-play. This
takes me back...

Don't understand, but I want to look it up. Like the sounds, I get the gist of the jump, I want to believe he's onto something, and I'm ready to Google away to find out what it is. But then

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

I don't know, officer. I started reading this interesting poem, and all of a sudden I woke up at a local slam. It was horrible...

but then

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

One hell of a question. And he attempts to answer it. So the poem is after something beyond a stylized pile-up of images and sounds. I'm back on board.

Until

Unwise or wise choices do make
gymnasts of anchorites, if that
means what I mean. You say you have me there
which is all we have here,

which reminds me of

Mortal beauty is alienation; or not,
as I see it...

Another Huh?, but then

...Indescribable,
a word accustomed through its halting
promptness, comes to be inscribed...

Oh. Wow.

So I'm aggravated and enticed in turns. But not bored.

[Dunc]

Thanks for the crit quotes, Howard. It’s doubtless an error for me to relate them to just the one poem by Hill, but I will anyway, noticing the extent to which they don’t mention the poetry.

To Bayley’s ‘ever greater detail’, Bloom’s ‘Strong poetry is always difficult’, Logan’s ‘limit of modernist allusiveness’, poetically I’d reply, So?

To Holland’s ‘great visionary force’, Jeffers’ ‘the best [philosophical poet] our ... time affords’, Potts’ ‘passionate seriousness and ethical thought’, Wilson’s ‘not merely how good, but how important ... no one alive writing in our language about deeper or more important matters’ and Campbell-Johnston’s ‘lines ... sculpt the culture in which his work is so deeply embedded’, on the basis of the one sample I’d reply, Really? What philosophy? Ethical thought? Deep and important matters? Other than angst, that is?

Not till I get to Tom Payne do I get some illumination -

“Hill is one of those poets, along with Jeremy Prynne and Mark Ford, whose poems are most often about how difficult it is to read them. In Hill's work, this takes on a moral charge. The thing that upsets him most is inattention, and a failure to honour the dead. (...) Maybe this is why so many readers approach his work with awe and feel humbled by him. Critics queue up to say, unequivocally, that he is the best poet working in English."

That being difficult to read is a self-justifying ‘moral charge’ - that makes sense.

Thanks too for the quotes from Hill, rob.

An achieved poem is always beautiful in its own way, though such a way will many times strike people as harsh and repellent…

Love it! Next time I earn a bad crit I’ll have it ready!

I think that legitimate difficulty ... is essentially democratic.

‘Democratic’ is a rather silly claim, especially since his style is people-repellent and his subject matter non-political. Stalin would complain about wasting paper, not about subversion.

When is obscurity / difficulty ‘legitimate’? When you get a satisfactory poetic pay-off, surely? Blake’s The Sick Rose, for example.

So what’s the pay-off for the reader here? Not memorable images. Not novel insights. A crossword-puzzler’s sense of cleverness, perhaps?

difficulty of course can be faked

And considering what I don’t find by way of profundity or substance in the example, that’s a good point, and brings me back to what Tom Payne said above.

Regards / Dunc

[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.