THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE

Poems by Geoffrey Hill, 1998

The Triumph of Love (1998) is Geoffrey Hill's eighth volume of poetry. It is an erudite and brooding poem composed of 150 parts that range from the beautiful single line "Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp," which begins the poem, to a 57-line address to Vergina bella, the Virgin Mary. The title and content refer variously to Petrarch's Trionfi (triumphs), Shelley's "Triumph of Life," and the Jacobean masque. As is true of Hill's earlier poetry, The Triumph of Love is driven by his criticism of a culture "with so many memorials but no memory" (LXXVI), criticism complicated by his sense of futility in using poetry to convey history's truths. Although he would take the role of prophets such as Abdiel or Isaiah, there is no guarantee that his message will be heard. Hill uses the rhetorical mode of laus et vituperatio (praise and blame) to address a host of historical and contemporary figures ("vassal-lord-puppet strutters"). He takes up his perennial subjects: the corruption of the Church, the violence of wars, and the atrocity of the Holocaust. Hill also returns to his childhood self at numerous points in the poem, thinking back, for instance, to 1939, when he first encountered photos of the Warsaw Ghetto burning, photo negatives forever imprinted on his memory.

The Triumph of Love differs from Hill's earlier work in the bitterness of its humor, a good bit of it self-directed. As Stephen Burt has observed, Hill calls up a series of "antimasquers," voices that take on the roles of a devil's advocate to challenge the poet's angry prophesy. In XXXVII, one of these antimasquers denounces the poet as a

Shameless old man, bent on committing
more public nuisance. Incontinent
fury wetting the air. Impotently
bereft satire. Charged with erudition,
put up by the defence
to be his own accuser.

Another of the detractors is a mischievous and sometimes malicious "editor" who asserts his presence in parenthetical inserts. Various comic errata punctuate the text. For example, in response to the question "What else can I now sell myself, filched/from Lenten Hebrews ?" the "correction" reads, "Delete: sell myself; filched from. Inert:/Tell myself; fetched from. For inert read insect" (LXIII-LXIV). With typographical errors even in the errata ("inert" instead of "insert"), Hill underscores the slipperiness and impurity of language, which has been a recurring theme in his work.

Much of the tension in the poem derives from Hill's religious beliefs in conflict with the Church's corruption past and present. He wonders "what strange guild is this/that practises daily/synchronized genuflection and takes pride/in hazing my Jewish wife?" (LXVI). Continuing later, he engages in self-irony by employing one of the devil's advocates to refer the reader to "this man's creepy … wit—/ he fancies himself a token Jew by marriage,/a Jew by token marriage—has buzzed, droned,/round a half-dozen topics (fewer, surely?)/for almost fifty years" (XCVII). One recalls Hill's identification with a concentration camp victim in his early poem "September Song," an identification that entailed risks. Here the tone is sardonic as the speaker declares that "he fancies himself a token Jew by marriage." The line clearly echoes Sylvia Plath's controversial "I think I may well be a Jew." In a poem that ends by defining poetry as "a sad and angry consolation," Hill's increasingly bitter tone seems not only appropriate but also necessary.

The point of recalling the crimes of history, what for Hill have become well-worn topoi, is not simply the recall but the more pressing question of how we might transform historical memory into a moral force that gets beyond guilt: "I am saying (simply)/what is to become of memory? Yes—I know—/ I have asked that before" (CXXXVIII). We must remember what we would most forget if we hope to begin to address the injustices of the present. During a moment of self-doubt Hill asks, "Why do I/take as my gift a wounded and wounding/introspection?" (LXVII). It is precisely this painful yet salvific remembering that is the measure of the poem's triumph: "We shall rise again, clutching our wounds" (XVII).

—Molly Abel Travis