(in memory of Miguel Hernandez)

      (1)
    Darkness
above all things
    the Sun
     makes
     rise

                      (2)
                    Vultures
                salute their meat
                    at noon
                   (Hell is
                    silent)

                                         (3)
                                      Blind Sun
                                     our ravager
                                      bless us
                                       so that
                                      we sleep.

Like Adrian Mitchell, Geoffrey Hill has never been afraid to voice very definite political concerns through his poetry. And the fact that he isn’t as consistently (and vocally) anti-establishment as Mitchell means that when he does make a statement, it tends to be heard very clearly and unequivocally.

Today’s poem is all the more striking for its visual weight - the stanzas are like crosses rooted in the graveyard of the blank page; at the same time, we are reminded of the silhouettes of the black Junkers bombers that divebombed Hernandez’s Spain during the Civil War…

— Thomas

[Bios and stuff]

A goatherd in his youth, Hernandez joined the Spanish Communist Party in 1936 and fought in the Civil War (1936-39). Condemned to death by the Nationalists after the war, his sentence was commuted to life imprisonment after international protests. He died in prison soon afterward, at the age of 31. Hernandez’s predominant themes are love – particularly of a sorrowful nature – war, death, and social injustice.

– EB

A biography and assessment of Geoffrey Hill can be found accompanying the text of his most famous poem, the brilliant ‘Mercian Hymns’, at
poem #37

George Macbeth comments on Hill’s ability to fuse ancient history with the recent past and personal experience to create a unified poetic whole. Both ‘A Prayer to the Sun’ and ‘Mercian Hymns’ exhibit this quality.

It’s been some time since we had an instalment of Poetry 101. (For those of you who came in late, P101 is an occasional column wherein Martin and I hold forth on various aspects of poetry in general. Actually, it’s a very occasional column… ). So here goes.

[Poetry 101]

In my previous essay¹, I talked about the difference between connotation and denotation, and how that difference was vital to the creation and interpretation of poetry. In a sense, the essay was about the ‘how’ of poetry (at a very basic level, of course) - how poetry uses connotation (by which I mean association, inference and implication) to suggest meanings beyond the merely ‘dictionary’ interpretation of the poet’s words.

Today I’ll expand on the same theme, but laying special emphasis on the ‘why’ - why poetry has to use its own special devices to say what it has to say.

First, a generalization²: the purpose of all writing - poetry and prose, billboards and tech specs, Babylonian cuneiform and Martian squiglets - is communication, the transmission of facts, ideas and emotion. Now, obviously the choice of the method of transmission is dictated by the matter being transmitted; thus, technical documents should be written in clear, precise language³; while writers of advertising copy should aim for instant recognition and high retention value and surrealist critics should cabbage Frink marsupial :-).

You may have realized what I’m getting at here - this, in its most basic avatar, is the doctrine of form versus content that I’m always making such a big fuss about⁴. Form follows content; content is meaningless without form.

In the case of a technical document, (to use my example of a few sentences ago), simplicity is king³. Hence such documents tend to be written in dry, descriptive prose, stripped clean of ambiguities and inconsistencies - “just the facts, madam, just the facts”.

Unfortunately, Real Life (tm) cannot be similarly stripped of ambiguities and inconsistencies; human nature is a Complicated Beastie. How, then, are writers to communicate the essence of their all-too-human experience?

Writers of prose approach this problem in different ways. James, Zola and Proust (for example) examine reality in minutely descriptive prose; through cataloguing everything about an event, they attempt to capture its ineffable ‘eventness’⁵. Steinbeck and Tolstoy use the strength of simplicity to create powerful, moving tales of humanity at its best and worst; although I love their books, I still think they fail to capture the sheer complexity of all life. Baroque novelists like Pynchon, Eco and Rushdie dazzle the mind with their ornate intellectual games and wild inventiveness; their work is dense and complex and immensely stimulating, but somehow it seems to lack ‘heart’, sometimes.

The central paradox is this: life is complex; yet any depiction of it has to be simple in order to be emotionally effective⁶.

Which brings us to the idea of poetry. Poetry functions through a process of simultaneous compression and expansion. On the one hand, poetic syntax is highly concentrated - there’s usually more ‘action’ in six lines of taut verse than in 6 pages of flabby prose. There’s no dross, no fluff; every word is ‘chosen smooth and well-fitting’, every phrase is ‘just so’. Truly great poems often fit Exupery’s famous quote about elegance in engineering: ‘A designer knows he has reached perfection, not when there is nothing to add, but when there is nothing to take away’. And it’s this wonderful economy of expression that gives poetry its power - the concentration of meaning and emotion that make a great poem leave the reader a changed person.

At the same time, words in a work of poetry never have but one meaning, only one ‘correct’ interpretation. They link with each other and with the poem as a whole, creating complex resonances of sound, structure and sense; they talk to each other, crafting parallels and paradox side by side; they talk to the reader, offering new ways of looking at the world and at themselves, new insights and empathies…

… until what was originally just a pattern of black marks on a page or a linear sequence of sounds expands into a multidimensional tangle of sight and smell and sound and sense, an approximation to that marvellous complexity which we call Life.

— Thomas

[Footnotes]

Endnote

Yes, all the points I raised in my essay are touched upon by today’s poem. Read it a few times and you’ll see what I mean - it’s only 27 words long, but there’s a bushel of meaning in it, just waiting to be discovered.