The After-Life of the Elegy
The sequence "De Jure Belli ac Pacis" ("of the laws of war and peace": the
title of a work by Hugo Grotius) in this volume is one of the finest things
Hill has written: an elegy which branches between the private and the
public voice, accusing the "high-minded / base-metal forgers of this common
Europe, / community of parody" at the same time as it laments the loss of
what "[w]e might have kept" of the more humble, inhibited high-mindedness
of the poem's dedicatee, Hans-Bernd von Haeften (a member of the Kreisau
circle of conspirators against Hitler).
The poem asks whether the "witness" of those who stood not only against
Hitler but against the politics of Hitlerism ("wild reasons of the state",
as Hill's poem on Bonhoeffer has it) is safe in Europe's keeping, when its
tributes to the murdered conspirators "compound with Cicero's maxims,
Schiller's chant" (Beethoven's Ode to Joy, presumably) the silencing of von
Haeften's "silenced verities". More ominously, it speaks of the "new depths
of invention" to which the Nazis sank in the torture and execution of
members of the Kreisau circle, suggesting that the bestiality of the SS is
another part of the disavowed inheritence of modern Europe. The
interrogators played records of children singing folk music to drown out
the screams of their captives; does not our culture also have recourse
to "children's / songs to mask torture" (cf Benigni's _La Vita e' Bella_)?
Not all of _Canaan_ is as good as this. Hill's "Psalms of Assize", for
instance, read like marginalia on marginalia, simultaneously clenched and
lyrical: the "singable remainder" of a calcinated theology, perhaps, but
too brittle to last in the reader's imagination. But much of the volume is
more than worth sticking with. The poems are more often than not about the
disappearance of their own referents - "the names / and what they have
about them dark to dark" ("Sobieski's Shield") - but this is the very
opposite of a willed obscurity: Hill's language calls after lost things
into the darkness into which they have fallen, and sometimes manages to
recover "lost footage, / achieve too late prescient telegraphy" (another
name for 20/20 hindsight?). Perhaps this marks Hill ineradicably as a
grumpy old modernist: whilst other poets, other poetics, have devoted
themselves to exploring and even celebrating the contingency of language
and meaning, _Canaan_ remains anachronistically committed to an elegiac
mode. But in fact its particular glory is that it shows what the elegy can
be and go on being even amid a society and culture besotted with the
evanescent and continually on the make, yet afflicted with a deep and
inscrutable nostalgia for a loss it has little way of knowing how to
confront.
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