Just before Xmas I bought the Clutag CD recording of the reading that Hill gave in February 2006 to launch ‘Without Title’. As well as being an absolute delight, (apart from the destruction of one poem by the great Eugenio Montale) the way that Hill introduces some of his publications has caused me to think more about the sequence/collection and section/poem terminology. Before we go any further I need to observe that this disturbance is of a different order to that caused by Prynne’s omission of the penultimate poem in the ‘To Pollen’ sequence in his recentish Paris reading.
The problem is caused here by the fact that I thought I understood the nouns used to describe these things. I thought that I knew that:
- a number of poems published in a single book but without a unifying theme is called a collection as in John Matthias’ ‘Kedging’ or Hill’s ‘Without Title’;
- a number of things published with a unifying themes is called a sequence and the things are called poems or prose poems;
- sequences and collections may be divided into sub-groups of poems, these groups are known as sections;
- parts of sequences or collections are never called bits because the term is too general to be helpful.
It turns out that this is not the view of our latest poetic knight and current Professor of Poetry at Oxford so I may well be wrong on all counts but nevertheless the questions remain. In the reading (referred to by Hill as a ‘recital’) he refers to the poems in ‘Mercian Hymns’, ‘The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy’, ‘The Triumph of Love’ and ‘Speech! Speech!’ as ‘sections’. In the introduction to ‘The Orchards of Syon’ he refers to the poems as ‘poems’ and then rapidly corrects himself to ‘sections’. The poems in ‘Comus’ are referred to as ‘bits’.
Let’s start with ‘Mercian Hymns’ which is a sequence of prose paragraphs or prose poems about Offa, one of our first kings. It’s brilliance lies in the fact that the past and the present are blurred and merged to create an account of England and a study in power. It is one of the very best things produced since 1945 and the argument about the poem / section terminology is less relevant because the each page carries a sequential Roman numeral and contains two or more paragraphs which would need to be called ‘prose poems’ which would be clumsy / inept / naff etc.
The ‘Charles Peguy’ is a sequence and is defined by Hill as “my homage to the triumph of his ‘defeat'”, it consists of ten poems each made up of a varying number of quatrains. I was going to make a case for each of these as autonomous pieces that can stand in their own right until I recalled that part 4 runs on to part 5 as in:
So you spoke to the blood. so you have risen
above all of that and fallen flat on your face 5 among the beetroots, where we are constrained
to leave you sleeping and to step aside
So, parts 4 and 5 may be sections of one autonomous poem whereas the rest are all ‘stand alone’ poems within the homage (sequence).
Moving on to ‘The Triumph of Love’, I can make a case for all of the numbered ‘sections’ as autonomous poems but I do have a problem with CXIII which in its entirety is “Boerenverdriet? You eat it – it’s Dutch liverwurst” which is a footnote to the use of the word in CXI. Admittedly some of the very short ‘sections’ are a couple of lines of snatched monologue but they can still stand as poems. The other puzzle with CXIII is that the rest of the gloss to the sequence is provided by a fictional editor whose interjections are placed in brackets within the poem. This may be due to the fact that another gloss is provided for the next word – “Lothian [Macsickker – Ed]” and Hill didn’t want things to get too cluttered.
As well as being as good as but very different from ‘Mercian Hymns’ this is obviously a sequence built around a number themes but which presents an oddly optimistic and/or redemptive take on the atrocity-laden twentieth century. It is true that occasional reference is made to stand up comedy and Gracie Fields the singer is deliberately confused with Gracie Fields the boat but I’ve just re-read the sequence again and am now more convinced of its brilliance and its audacity.
The poem / section slip of the tongue when introducing ‘The Orchards of Syon’ is perhaps indicative of Hill’s uncertainty with these terms but the use of ‘bits’ for ‘Scenes from Comus’ is odd because there may be degree of disdain or self deprecation going on – it is the least represented book in the Selected and Hill does quote A N Wilson’s abusive reaction to one of the poems but he does read 4 ‘Comus’ which is as many as ‘The Triumph of Love’ and two more than ‘Mercian Hymns’.
The significant difference with ‘Comus is that it is divided into three sections and each section contains poems in the same format, section one has all ten line poems consisting of three three-line verses followed by one line on its own, each poem in the second section is a single nine-line stanza and each poem in the third consists of four three-line verses. Each section has a title and each of these relates to the masque, a type of performance popular in the 17th century.
‘Scenes from Comus’ has received large amounts of critical flak on both sides of the Atlantic but I think it’s wonderful and written by a poet who is confident of his skill and legacy and (this is important) is beginning to be comfortable in his skin. So, why ‘bits’? It’s not as if Hill is unfamiliar with all the other terms that he could have and the term does suggest something trivial and expendable but this is at odds with putting so many of the poems into the reading.
I will continue thinking of poems that happen to be components of a sequence as poems, I’ll also carry on using sections as the term for groups of poems within a sequence and I don’t think I’ll ever use the term ‘bit’ because it doesn’t seem either useful or appropriate.
Writing this has made me realise that the sequence word contains a degree of complexities and blurrings that I’ll try and write about in the next few weeks.
The attentive among you will have noticed that I’ve missed out ‘Speech! Speech!’ but that’s because they’re poems- all of them.
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