Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 The nineteenth century: pastoral versions of England
- 2 Edward Thomas: An England of ‘holes and corners’
- 3 Forster and Lawrence: exiles in the homeland
- 4 Late witness: George Sturt and village England
- 5 Contending Englands: F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot
- 6 Englands within England: Waugh and Orwell
- 7 Larkin, Betjeman and the aftermath of ‘England’
- 8 Geoffrey Hill and the ‘floating of nostalgia’
- Afterword: A homemade past
- Index
8 - Geoffrey Hill and the ‘floating of nostalgia’
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- 1 The nineteenth century: pastoral versions of England
- 2 Edward Thomas: An England of ‘holes and corners’
- 3 Forster and Lawrence: exiles in the homeland
- 4 Late witness: George Sturt and village England
- 5 Contending Englands: F. R. Leavis and T. S. Eliot
- 6 Englands within England: Waugh and Orwell
- 7 Larkin, Betjeman and the aftermath of ‘England’
- 8 Geoffrey Hill and the ‘floating of nostalgia’
- Afterword: A homemade past
- Index
Summary
Although Hill gives the impression of feeling England in his bones he also thinks of it as lying outside himself, at a remove. Writing about his own part of England he begins with a pondered deliberateness, as if it were only imaginable through meditation:
So to celebrate the kingdom: it grows
greener in winter, essence of the year;
the apple-branches musty with green fur.
In the viridian darkness of its yews
it is an enclave of perpetual vows
broken in time.
The ‘kingdom’ is disclosed gradually, as if one's eyes were slowly becoming accustomed to the dark and beginning to make things out in it. Hill is not from the same part of England as A. E. Housman for nothing but the many-layered, unfathomed quality of his ‘kingdom’ makes Housman's look rather simple. His music is richer, with more pith and sinew, like a dark baritone to Housman's tenor:
Oh tarnish late on Wenlock Edge,
Gold that I never see;
Lie long, high snowdrifts in the hedge
That will not shower on me.
The poignancy of these lines attaches more to the poet's feelings than to their object: Wenlock Edge seems precious because it is so little known. It is Housman's distance from his image of England that gives A Shropshire Lad its lyric simplicity.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Literary EnglandsVersions of 'Englishness' in Modern Writing, pp. 220 - 269Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993