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Speech! Speech by English Poet Geoffrey Hill

Speech! Speech! 

By Geoffrey Hill

 


1

Erudition. Pain. Light. Imagine it great

unavoidable work; although: heroic

verse a non-starter, says P E O P L E. Some believe

we over-employ our gifts. Given identical

street parties, confusion, rapid exposure,

practice self-emulation; music for crossed

hands; for two fingers; music

for taxiing to take-off; for cremation.

Archaic means piles pillaged and erased

in one generation. Judge the distance.

Innocent bystanders on stand-by. Painful

scenes mar final auto-de-fe.


                                                 ***

Published in 2000

Stanza, 12 lines, unrhyming

(2 stanzas per page, left justified)

Cinematic take – scene 1 – Lights, camera, action. Poem is a performance directed by the poet

Erudition – criticism of Hill – ‘difficult poet’. Intellect, feeling, focus – setting the scene. Unavoidable – creative impulse. Heroic verse preferred by Hill, not popular with PEOPLE or ‘some’, vox publica.

Exposure – camera, light

Self-imitation, also heard as self-immolation (self-harm). Music (poetry) for virtuosity, playing simply with 2 fingers, music (Muzak) in airplane and at funeral

History pillaged and erased in 1 generation. Judge the distance – poet’s point of view, artistic decision, starting point for the stanza. By-standers - extras for the performance, also chiasmus – concepts repeated in reverse order

Painful scenes mar act of faith (auto-de-fe) – burning heretics, persecution of Hill for saying something other (out of time)


                                              ***


Hill preferences speech over writing – but he does it with writing. In speaking, there are ambiguities in diction, sounding, mis-hearing – from Eliot in ‘East Coker’, Four Quartets -

              the intolerable wrestle

With words and meaning

This stanza establishes the starting point for the poem. Key themes – the poet as director, the poem as a performance, music as poetry, types of music, the contraction (shortening) of history (into 1 generation)

Erudition – refers to earlier poem The Triumph Of Love – Hill defends himself against the charge of ‘erudition’ –


    Shameless old man, bent on committing

    more public nuisance. Incontinent

    fury wetting the air. Impotently

    bereft satire. Charged with erudition, put up by defence to be

    his own accuser


unavoidable work – epigraph to The Triumph Of Love


“AND I SENT MESSENGERS UNTO THEM, SAYING, I AM DOING A GREAT WORKE, SO THAT I CAN NOT COME DOWN: WHY SHOULD THE WORKE CEASE, WHILEST I LEAVE IT, AND COME DOWN TO YOU.”  -- Nehemiah 6:3

Also, for the artist, the compelling impulse of creativity

 

Heroic / verse – English tradition of the outmoded ‘heroic couplet’ – 2 lines of rhymed iambic pentameter (lines of 5 ‘feet’) – unstressed syllable followed by stressed syllable – da-DUM of the human heartbeat -back to Shakespeare


… piles pillaged and erased

 

Self-emulation – imitating oneself, following on from oneself, repeating one self. Sounds like ‘self-immolation’ (no distinction in what is heard), self-deprecation, self-dislike – the act of killing oneself for political or religious reasons, usually with fire. Connects with final line of poem – ‘auto-da-fe’ – during the  Spanish inquisition, before heretics were burnt in public they were asked to make a final act of faith to redeem their souls




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