a washed-out day at Stourport or the Lickey,
improvised rainhats mulch for papier-mache,
and the chips floating.
Leave it now, leave it; give it over
to that all-gathering general English light,
in which each separate bead
of drizzle at its own thorn-tip stands
as revelation.
Geoffrey Hill, from The Triumph of Love
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
Interesting word 'general'. It falls heavy on my ear, as though it doesn't quite fit. The line perhaps reads better without it. However, slowing down the line as it does, it adds a note of lethargy. It looks back to the soggy papier-mache, the chips in rainwater, even the name 'Stourport' which has an ominous feel to it. It's almost 'Sourport'.
ReplyDeleteThe lines are trapping us in a sense of a greying landscape but 'general' is the word around which I think it turns. It's as though I trip up on that word, and when I regain my feet, I'm in a different rhythm. 'English light' pushes up towards a sense of possible illumination: 'Separate', 'bead', 'thorn' and 'tip' run counter to the prevailing sense of morass. There's clarity in the definitions. The movement through the verse was one of gradual slowing down, everything becoming obscured, trapped in the weather, but there is this promise of it opening out again. At the smallest scale of the drops of drizzle, they might work to magnify the world.
Reminds me of fractals, in which the complexity of whole is contained within the smallest detail.
As to what is means... I haven't a clue but it's got my brain working this morning and I need that.
Leave it, leave it, he's not worf it. It's very English.
ReplyDeleteI once spent three hours at Digbeth coach station on a wet Sunday and I thought "This is the bleakest place on earth." But then I remembered the Guernsey Tomato Museum.
Digbeth? Depends. Goin, good. Coming back, shite.
ReplyDeleteditto, Willard! general. but what do I know? I liked it, nevertheless. despite the toe-stubbing general, the second part adequately consoles the first. the first is the material, lost, the second, spiritual, found, but I don't know much about poetry... but I don't mind the rain as long as it's not too horizontal.
ReplyDeleteA bit more of it here. Small world...
ReplyDeleteOh well. Are we wired to see reality as moral? Will the landscape still be moral even when we have turned to one side and are gazing elsewhere? Perhaps this is a lie but one we are obliged to follow, just as we cannot help but see revelation in a raindrop. In one way we know that connection is not true. It is just water and light. We even know that very small things do not appear to follow the same laws as very large ones, and that in a quantum world it is not even possible to speak of a solitary, precise, pinpointed raindrop. But still we say it, this poem; it bubbles up like springwater. The tiny sliver of reality our senses permits us gives us no choice but to say it. As for ghastly-good Englishness, well, that is another story. And it's Monday, babbling day perhaps.
ReplyDeletenice words that fit the view out of my window perfectly! Strange how we hate the grey and the rain but can find something to secretly love in it too
ReplyDeleteOh well. Are we wired to see reality as moral? Will the landscape still be moral even when we have turned to one side and are gazing elsewhere? Perhaps this is a lie but one we are obliged to follow, just as we cannot help but see revelation in a raindrop. In one way we know that connection is not true. It is just water and light. We even know that very small things do not appear to follow the same laws as very large ones, and that in a quantum world it is not even possible to speak of a solitary, precise, pinpointed raindrop. But still we say it, this poem; it bubbles up like springwater. The tiny sliver of reality our senses permits us gives us no choice but to say it. As for ghastly-good Englishness, well, that is another story. And it's Monday, babbling day perhaps.
ReplyDeletejust water & light!!!
"To see the World in a grain of sand ..."
AArghh!! Must - stop - quoting - Blake
Poetic post though. What is it about poetry? Is it a bit like (I believe) music to be - analogous to machine code, goes in at base level & messes wid our brain rhythms/resonances?
Just listening to VW now. I think: "he is the best" then I think: "so what about Debussy, Ravel, Shostakovitch, Bach, Tallis ......??" Suddenly struck with the notion that it is like listening to an old friend - & you can have many old friends, all with different voices, all equally as valuable.
All with different souls, perhaps.
Ramble over.
I wonder what the great agnostic RVW, whose music sounds as though founded on a bedrock of spirituality, would have made of the set in concrete views of P Z Myers and his followers? Perhaps he would have written a tenth symphony 'In Memory of Tolerance'
ReplyDeleteOn the rain . . .
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me of Robert Pinsky's poem Jersey Rain. Here is an excerpt from Pinsky's discussion of the poem in Best American Poetry 2001:
Of "Jersey Rain," Pinsky writes: "The past has certain resemblances to rain. Rain is a source of life, a fundamental replenisher. It makes things grow. It tranforms our vision, making things we look at blurrier or sharper, less visible or more stark. It can be beautiful.
"And it can ruin a weekend. It can be depressing. It can make us feel confimed.
"My poem is a pretty straightforward account of these similaririties between rain and the past. And for me, the rain is in some ways always a New Jersey rain, just as the past is most certainly first of all a New Jersey past."
Just as Gertrude Stein says, "a rose is a rose is a rose," sometimes we need to be able to use rain, just to be rain in the setting of a poem. But Geoffrey Hill hasn't. He has used it symbolically. And it is tricky, because Stein intends for her use of the word "rose" to bring forth not only the imagery, but the emotions it brings with it, to even make the rose redder. So I really enjoyed Willard's reading of Hill in the first response above.
Pinsky is the only US Poet Laureate to have served three one-year terms (technically Stanley Kunitz spent two of his three years as "Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress," but at least Pinsky ties him). I would applaud if poet Kim Addonizio also were to become the "Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress." In her remarkable poem, 'November 11 -- 2004', recently published in The Washington Post, she begins with the line, "O everyone's dead and the rain today is marvelous!" Her other use of the word "rain" in the poem is in her final sentence:
I step off and stretch for a bit, I go back outside
into the rain, it feels chilly and good, it goes on
all day, unending and glorious, falling and filling
the roof-gutters, flooding the low-lying roads.
She says of her use of this word, "The exclamation points are meant to be both sincere and ironic, just as the rain becomes both the beauty of being alive and the continuation of all of our forms of ignorance."
Except for the technicalities of narrative voice (that would change "But leave it now" with "But I leave it now"), we could almost replace Addonizio's last two lines with the above excerpt from Hill's poem.