THE POETICS OF OLD AGE: GEOFFREY HILL’S POSTHUMOUS COLLECTION, THE BOOK OF BARUCH BY THE GNOSTIC JUSTIN

Geoffrey Hill died, as the title of his massive collected poems so aptly states, at a time of broken hierarchies. Indeed, though one could point to irruptions and upheavals in any number of aspects of society around the globe, Hill passed on June 30th of 2016, just seven days after his nation voted to leave the European Union. Politicians and pundits have now spent countless hours reckoning what it did, and meant, for Britain. Poets, too, one imagines. And, despite spending a lifetime contemplating Britain, its place in the history of Europe, and perhaps even anticipating the fragility of the postwar consensus, I daresay even Hill was caught off guard as he sat with the news in his last days. No matter the public quarrel, however, it seems even at the end Hill kept up his longstanding quarrel with himself, and now his last lines have been published posthumously as The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin by Oxford University Press, edited by Kenneth Haynes. It is a handsome volume. 

The collection is an absolute torrent of speech, and in the initial reading, the book utterly defeats the reader as a dream might defeat the dreamer. It runs for a sequence of 271 sections that bear no resemblance to any kind of regular stanza, but for readers who know Hill’s third collection, Mercian Hymns, the form will feel familiar. The lines vary in length, but they are generally so long they usually spill over the right-hand margin, and must be indented to run three, five, even seven or more lines below their head. One might be tempted to call the sections paragraphs of prose poetry, but, while some parts do read closer to an elevated prose, Hill drops an insistent internal rhyme throughout, which, on any given line, he also combines with an abundance of alliteration, assonance, and off rhyme. When read quickly, some sections even recall aspects of hip hop or spoken word poetry. For longtime readers of Hill, the sound of the language alone may be surprising enough, but, when combined with his relentless passage potluck of literature, history, theology, philosophy, music, and even painting he often becomes so dense as to be nearly impenetrable. For instance: 

The curious technologies of the Logos, now thought mere curiosities rather than curios, long since laid awkwardly to rest at Weeping Cross: 

Rest. Return the eyes to what they appraise best. Do not mourn. 

Discommode all too human nature with the goad. Jedermann to feature as a not entirely travestied creature. 

Or, for another example:  

I would not encourage others of my late age to be always handling a proximity fuse of indignant rage to demonstrate the art of self-harming. Keep counsel, stay charming, I now advise. 

Politics and law back then—Age of Milton, I mean—were visceral; poetry not; though republicans read the Pharsalia, inter alia, and imitated it a lot. To Lucan, indeed, ‘viscera’ was a word forty and more times taken up, buzzing the era. 

Coriolanus worked best be being intravenous; no great effusions of plaudits, then, for that particular manifest. It could entertain, sustain, its meaning by means subterrane. It came to the surface, for instance, in Paris in the nineteen thirties rendering each clangorous scene timely and dangerous. 

Again and again, we have what feels like a hodgepodge of unrelated elements. The speaker is always of many minds, mercurial, and seems unable to focus the reader’s attention or, perhaps, even his own for more than a handful of lines before he skips away to other prophetic pronouncements. In that way, the collection feels exactly like what it is: the personal diary of an old man written in the ethereal and cryptic manner of one who is no longer deeply footed in the horizon of the living. As Haynes states in his concluding note to the reader, “Geoffrey Hill planned [the book] as a posthumous work to consist of as many poems as he would live to complete,” and so, unlike his earlier work, we cannot presume we are reading a complete and considered whole. “At his death,” Haynes continues, “Hill had revised and corrected sections 1 – 226 of the typescript,” but Haynes also notes there were other revisions they did not discuss. Nevertheless, regardless of the limitations of the manuscript, I deeply commend Haynes, and doubtless many other unnamed friends and family, for collecting these last lines so that we might see Hill’s mind at work. But one does wonder. Who, exactly, are these lines for? 

Before I attempt an answer, however, let me note that poetry more generally has been a hard sell for some time, and deliberately difficult poetry all the more so. As Hill himself notes near the end of Baruch, “No-one speaks of the ‘future of poetry’ any more.” At this point, the conversation, or, more probably, the discourse, has become primarily an academic exercise of a small subsection of readers who wish to pinpoint when poets stopped speaking to and for the broader culture and turned to speaking to themselves or those most like themselves. Among any number of examples, one could point to Bob Dylan and specifically to “Desolation Row,” which appeared on Highway 61 Revisited in 1965. In the penultimate stanza “calypso singers” laugh at “Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot / Fighting in the captain’s tower” while “fishermen hold flowers,” and “nobody has to think too much / About Desolation Row.” The question of poetry’s audience is all the more complicated by one of the most unanticipated developments in the literary world, namely, the Swedish Academy awarding Bob Dylan the Nobel Prize in Literature just a few months after Hill had passed. More than a few voices in the literary establishment were not pleased by the decision, and they more or less cited Dylan back to the Academy: “everybody’s shouting / ‘Which Side Are You On?’” But whether we understand the award as a straightforward, or even, perhaps, a backhanded compliment, the decision is nonetheless a clear departure from the rarefied, ambitious, and, yes, difficult style that has been the preeminent hallmark of modern poetry. 

In stark contradiction to this populist turn by the Swedish Academy stands the work of Geoffrey Hill. Indeed, of all poets working in English, Hill was, until his death, the definitive heir to the modernist mode of Pound and Eliot. Even in his early poems, which show some deference to the longstanding lyrical rhythm and rhyme of the quatrains and couplets of English prosody, he never overly relied on traditional forms. His many personae were hermetic and demanding, especially after midcareer, and despite his relentless use of allusion, these signposts from the past frequently did more to obscure the reader’s understanding than to clarify it. He was foreboding, confrontational. In a word, difficult. 

The Book of Baruch by the Gnostic Justin is no different. It opens with an oblique invocation of the “Brythonic goddess of panic still on the margins” and proceeds with fragmented memories of his childhood intermixed with meditations on the architecture of London in an austere and discordant tone that recalls aspects of his previous work, but then there also are sudden moments of tenderness as he reflects on his age. For instance, this is the only line of Section 32: 

As, with the draining of summer, shadows bleed and spread, at first scarcely heeded (and to add ‘I am now eighty-two’ sounds a shade twee) you decide for the house, drawing with you the shadow of a muse; and must re-acclimatize to indoors, everything in slow spin, the cold obstructive stove with nothing in; and maybe tweak from oblivion that indispensable throwaway phrase which is a revelation and no surprise. 

After this point the focus shifts, and Hill begins to make quixotic assays into the central concern of the collection, namely, poetics as a kind of gnosis.  

Now, finally, we come to see the significance of the title, for the original Book of Baruch Hill alludes to is not the deuterocanonical book of the Bible, but a collection of gnostic wisdom written by a 2nd century figure called Justin. The original text is lost to antiquity, and little is known about the author, but the outlines of his system were preserved because the theologian Hippolytus of Rome catalogued it in his Refutation of All Heresies in the early 3rd century. As Roelof Van Den Broek writes, Justin, unlike most Gnostic writers, “retained the basic Jewish and Christian idea that the Creator and the creation are good and he stuck to the Jewish-Christian belief that Jesus, the prophet from Nazareth, had brought the final revelation, but his Gnostic inclinations apparently compelled him to a radical reinterpretation of Jewish religious history.” Hippolytus, of course, roundly condemns Justin for his innovations and alternate readings, but Hill is intrigued. In Section 40, he states “it is amazing how much my late reasonable style appears to derive from the Gnostic Bible, which I wish I knew better.” This confession is the heart of the book, and a key to why, for all its difficulties, the collection is most certainly worth the reader’s time and attention. 

For Hill, books are made out of books. “You’ve always been a name dropper,” he says to himself. But here, as he approaches the end of life, I argue he invokes and wrestles with his predecessors not to hold the reader at arm’s length as he might have in his earlier work, but to invite the reader in: “My diction having metastasized into the cheerily odd, I doodle with a tattooist’s needle several things I would once not have said, let alone addressed on parade.” As he wrestles with the past poets, playwrights, and painters, Hill shows the reader the poetic tradition is not fixed, that it demands interpretation, and, more, that all interpretation is reinterpretation. “By gnosis I mean both what it ought to have been and what it is, to tell the truth,” he says. Some readers will certainly raise a skeptical eyebrow at such a redefinition, especially given the dominant trend in Gnosticism is the claim that both the world and the body are evil, and that the soul must transcend this evil through esoteric teaching. But by invoking this particular gnostic, this Justin, who even according to polemic from Hippolytus affirms the goodness of creation, Hill demonstrates that language is not ideologically fixed, but fluid, and it is only in delving into the flexibility of language that we can properly discover who we are.  

And so, to return to the opening observation, this is the record of a bookish man writing bookish poems coming late to the humbling realization that bookish men (for, of course, they are still mostly men) no longer control the cultural conversation. Given Hill’s lifelong apology for high culture, some readers who would have thought this sensibility would map onto a reactionary politics may be surprised to hear Hill confess that “Corbyn must win,” that he “will vote Remain come June.” In these verses we see one of the central themes of the book laid bare: how do our private stories intersect with public narratives? We take certain metaphors, ideas, and ideologies as authoritative, but, as Hill asks, “To suppose hegemony hierarchy: is not that the root of our woes?” In a separate section he elaborates: “We do well on the whole to unscramble continuity from tradition. Continuity may be more important; the poem must affirm portent to make gravity tremble.” Thus, Baruch is simultaneously a chaotic carnival celebrating the immeasurable possibility of poetry to hold us, to shape us, to give us equipment for living, but also a sober acknowledgement that, like the gnosis of antiquity, the wisdom is often secret, hidden, heterodox if not heretical, and, finally, that the form of the thing is not the thing itself. And so I find this final book a fitting capstone to a brilliant career, for here, in all his wrestling with long dead authorities, Hill shows the horizon of meaning is not closed, but open. As he wrote earlier in The Triumph of Love: “The hierarchies are here to be questioned. Lead on / Angelus Novus.”