In Memoriam Geoffrey Hill, 1932-2016

Geoffrey Hill, who was probably the single greatest living British poet, died yesterday at the age of 84. His death didn't come as a shock like the deaths of Bowie and Prince and Rickman and the rest, each of whom I'd naively assumed would be with us for a good few years yet. But their deaths, like the death of Muhammad Ali last month, were front-page news, whereas in most papers Hill will be lucky to get a paragraph, especially as it comes in the middle of the biggest British constitutional crisis in decades. I feel that if I don't take some note of his passing, barely anyone else will.

I was thinking about his poems just last night. Not that there's anything spooky about that: I think about his poems all the time. I was lying in the dark, holding my two-year-old son, waiting for him to go to sleep, and these words were twisting through my head. Over and over again:

They slew by night

upon the road

Medina's pride

Olmedo's flower

Shadows warned him

not to go

not to go

along that road

weep for your lord

Medina's pride

Olmedo's flower

there in that road

Hill was an old-fashioned poet, and he took old-fashioned things seriously: words, poems, morality, history, God. His poems were difficult, but their difficulty was never gratuitous: they were complex because the things that they were attempting to express were complex, too, and Hill was determined to find words that would do them justice. His works demanded careful attention, but they also rewarded it, In an era when so much Anglophone poetry seems to lean towards either facile populism or willful obscurity, I fear it may be some time before we see his like again.

I know that most people reading this blog probably have no interest in poetry. But anyone who's interested in the power of words - and most gamers are, to some extent - could probably learn something from anyone capable of coming up with a line like 'Tumult recedes as though into the long rain'. Look at it. Say it out loud. Look at how nuanced the thought it's articulating is, and then listen to how it performs its own meanings through its own sonic structure. Writing like that is not easy. There are not a lot of people left who can write like that.

'Not strangeness, but strange likeness. Obstinate, outclassed ancestors, I too concede, I am your staggeringly-gifted child.'

So, murmerous, he withdrew from them. Gran lit the gas, his dice whirred in the ludo-cup, he entered into the last dream of Offa the King.