As I have posted this review to amazon.com, they now think it's their
property. Well, they can fight me for it. Anyway:
* * *
"Bug'rit! Millenium hand and shrimp!"
"Speech! Speech!" continues much in the mode of "The Triumph of Love":
praise and lament "in different voices", a polyphonous essay into the
stresses and strengths of the English language, its potential for wrought
honesty as well as casual deception.
The poem's ethical obsession is with pitch, as opposed to tone: the making
and upholding, in language, of difficult distinctions as opposed to - so far
as it can be held distinct from - the equitable imperative smoothing-over of
disputes and differends (the "healing" snake-oil of much contemporary
political rhetoric). In illustration of this, as in obedience to it,
"Speech! Speech!" bristles with split hairs. The defamatory satirical genius
of the poem lies in its outrageous conflations, a wit that works
insidiously, like guilt, by association. But its moral animus ("animus is
what I home on, even as to pitch" - section 90) is focussed on those parts
of speech where one is surprised to see distinctions being made, or remade -
surprised that they should (still) be thought or seen to matter.
There are many places in the poem where it becomes difficult, important, to
ascertain what is being driven at, from what angle (or angles) and with what
force. So, in section 57, the speaker beckons:
Show you something. Shakespeare's elliptical
late syntax renders clear the occlusions, calls us
to account...
The reader of "Speech! Speech!" is similarly drawn to the places where
Hill's elliptical verse indicates, but does not show, unaccounted-for
ommissions, exclusions, losses. We are ordered to "[j]udge the distance"
between generations, to take the measure of what Hill sees as the abrupt -
overnight - pillage and erasure of a common heritage - "common" in a sense
to be distinguished from, but not opposed to, that of "demotic". This is
arguable, of course, and the poem argues with itself about it, about the
meaning of "democracy" and the condescension of "the egalitarian
anti-elitist SUN" (a widely-circulated British newspaper, whose language
Hill parodies passim). Nevertheless, Hill seems genuinely shocked by the way
that English culture has changed over the past fifty years, and is clearly
contemptuous of the ability of electronic databases and the "world-surfing
quote research / unquote of your average junk maestro" (cheers!) to replace
the "forms of understanding, far from despicable, / and furthest now, as
they are most despised" he celebrated in "The Triumph of Love" (section
CXIX). His argument may be judged reactionary, but it is passionately made.
I have found it difficult to receive the verses of "Speech! Speech!" as Hill
says they were intended - as praise-songs. What is being praised is
presumably the faculty the poem itself aspires to, that of fashioning a
language fit for human use out of the "acoustic din" of an indifferent mass
culture. Or, rather, what is both praised and petitioned by "Speech!
Speech!" is that part of ourselves that might find a use for such a
language, that is too proud and attentive to be satisfied with less - that
is healthy enough to curse. But sheer celebratory delight (not, for once,
miscalled) is achieved only in brief epiphanic flushes, as if by concession:
for the most part the dominant, almost ineluctable mood of the poem is one
of sadness and anger.
"Speech! Speech!" is a poem to spend time with - more time than I have spent
so far. Notice is given on the inside sleeve that it is a "tour de force",
and I would not dissent from that; however, there is much about it that will
not come immediately, and may not come at all until the last measures of
one's own reading (such is the messianic hope of interpretation). Off you
go, then...
* * *
Note: review title is a reference to a Terry Pratchett character, the beggar
Foul 'Ole Ron, who is known for muttering incomprehensibly and getting into
fights with himself.
