He thought that the overthrow of superstition and barbarous customs would inaugurate a new era for humanity. The biblical promises of a new world would be fulfilled by human effort alone, with no supernatural intervention needed. In this hoped-for transformation, poets, the “unacknowledged legislators of mankind,” would play a key role.

Hill treats Shelley’s hopes with sympathy, yet rejects them. The sequence makes evident Hill’s belief that twentieth century events make millenarian optimism impossible. In particular, Hitler’s murder of several million Jews, as well as other horrors of the twentieth century, compel Hill to reject a belief in progress. Even a society run by artists cannot blot out the historical record of world wars.

King Log

Hill’s next major collection, King Log, appeared nearly a decade later, in 1968. It included the contents of a beautifully printed pamphlet, Preghiere, issued four years previously, as well as other poems.

Since Preghiere is an Italian word for “prayers,” the poems in this sequence suggest that the artist as priest can overcome political oppression through ascetic devotion to art. For example, “Men Are a Mockery of Angels” is spoken in the voice of the sixteenth century poet and philosopher Tommaso Campanella, a Platonist who believed in the rule of an intellectual and artistic elite. He devised an elaborate utopia, described in La città del sole (1623; City of the Sun, 1880). Hill depicts Campanella as a joyous person in spite of his imprisonment during the Spanish Inquisition. While jailed, he contemplates his philosophy and thus gains a certain detachment, so that his grim physical surroundings do not drag him into despair.

Hill’s endorsement of this view of the artist is at best equivocal, as becomes clear in a later poem in the sequence, “Domaine Publique,” which commemorates the death of Robert Desnos, a French poet who perished at the Nazi death camp of Terezin. Hill imagines Desnos mocking the Christian practice of asceticism. The charnel house the Nazis created was not a means of spiritual purgation. When millions are murdered, asceticism loses its significance. At any rate, so Desnos contends in the poem; although Hill seems largely in agreement, his undertone of detachment hints that perhaps the case for asceticism has not been altogether overcome.

The poems in King Log not included in the 1964 pamphlet center on two sequences: “Funeral Music” and “The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz.” The first consists of eight sonnets in blank verse about the English Wars of the Roses. The initial sonnet describes the execution of John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, at Pomfret Castle in 1470. Tiptoft, a Christian, welcomed death as the means of attaining a higher spiritual state. (Christian doctrine forbade suicide, so the initiative had to come from others.) Tiptoft arranged the details of his own execution: three blows of the executioner’s ax to symbolize the three figures in the Trinity.

Hill finds the ascetic ideal appealing, even in the extreme form Tiptoft practiced. The flesh-and-blood world, in this view, conceals reality: like the cave in Plato’s Politeia (fourth century b.c.e.; Republic, 1701), from which one must escape to gain genuine knowledge. However, the poet suggests that an attitude like Tiptoft’s may conceal a strong will to power, so that far from seeking to exit the world, Tiptoft might instead seek fame for his discipline through the acclaim others accord him.

Hill does not claim that this reduction of spirit to power is true; he merely suggests the possibilities, leaving the reader caught amid ambiguity. Hill’s main assertion is that human beings are incapable of penetrating the world.

The two positions sketched in the initial sonnet remain locked in struggle throughout “Funeral Music.” Several of the poems show strong interest in Averroës, an Arab philosopher whose work influenced Thomas Aquinas and other Christian philosophers of the Middle Ages. Averroës, following the teaching of Aristotle, emphasized contemplation as the highest aim of life, a doctrine taught in book 10 of Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea (n.d.; Nicomachean Ethics, 1797). More controversially, Averroës came down firmly on one side of a famous Aristotelian dispute. According to Averroës, Aristotle thought that human minds are not really distinct. The “active intellect”—that is, the power of thought—is a single entity. Only will, emotion, and perception belong to individuals.

Hill finds this view congenial. The aim of ascetic discipline is to sink the person into the Universal Mind: One’s individual personality does not count and is sloughed off. What prevents Hill from full commitment to this position, besides his liking for ambiguity? The answer lies in the subject matter of the sequence dealing with the Wars of the Roses. The violence and destruction of the wars, among the bloodiest in English history, prevent him from affirming humanity’s goodness. Human beings are rapacious animals, according to Hill’s sonnet on the Battle of Towton, the most destructive engagement of the wars. Much of the poem consists of diary entries by a soldier who believes that the real world lies elsewhere and that death in battle is a means to enter a higher realm. Hill’s ironic language suggests that the soldier has not grasped the reality of the battle. Far from a spiritual exercise, the struggle is an evil display of lust for power and plunder. The soldier has used philosophy and asceticism to conceal what is taking place, both in the world and in his own soul.

Death and the destruction of war form the principal subject of another poem in King Log, “Ovid in the Third Reich.” An artist living in Hitler’s Germany claims that the pursuit of spiritual values will keep him immune from the horrors of the Third Reich and its führer. The speaker’s clichés make apparent Hill’s firm stand here and his repudiation of the standpoint of the artist. The artist’s alleged withdrawal is in fact complicity with the Nazis, since it turns a blind eye to crime and disguises the pursuit of physical safety under the mantle of ascetic withdrawal from the world. Hill’s poem does not deal with a “made-up” attitude. Many writers and artists responded to the Third Reich by practicing “inner emigration.” Although Hill strongly sympathizes with asceticism, he thinks that the position just sketched is an untenable dualism. “Ovid in the Third Reich” is probably Hill’s most unequivocal political statement.

The reader will by now have the impression that Hill paints a grim, sour picture of the human race. While this is to a large extent true, Hill yet again cannot be easily captured by formula. The second major sequence of King Log, “The Songbook of Sebastian Arrurruz,” manifests a different mood.

Arrurruz is an imaginary Spanish poet who lived at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The years of his maturity coincide with a period of foment among Spanish intellectuals, resulting from Spain’s disastrous defeat by the United States in 1898. Although Arrurruz does not directly concern himself with Spanish politics, he faces a sadness of his own. His wife has recently died, and he mourns her death. What should he do? He considers asceticism: Perhaps he ought now to abandon sexual desire as a vain thing. This solution appeals to Arrurruz, but cheerfulness keeps breaking in, and the Spanish poet finds that he cannot abandon women. He remembers his wife not only with sorrow but also with delight, and the poem ends in a witty rather than an elegiac stance. Poetry itself has erotic force, and indulgence in wordplay is a form of sexual pleasure. The sequence differs in style as well as content from Hill’s usual practice. It is direct and easy to read, rather than complicated and historically allusive. It won high praise from critics like Martin Dodsworth who are normally inclined to criticize Hill’s obscurity.

Mercian Hymns

The poet had not abandoned his difficult style, as his next book, Mercian Hymns, made evident. The thirty poems in this book are written in a ritualistic language meant to be chanted as much as read. The “versets” of which the work is composed manifest Hill’s knowledge of Anglo-Saxon bardic rhythms. The entire work constitutes an epic describing the reign of King Offa, an eighth century ruler from Mercia and the first Anglo-Saxon monarch to bring most of England under unified control. Not coincidentally, Hill is himself from Mercia, and the epic is also an account of his childhood.

Although the verse forms imitate a typical Anglo-Saxon song of praise for a king, Mercian Hymns is by no means a celebration of King Offa. Quite the contrary, Hill satirizes the king’s vanity and lust for power. The name “Offa” suggests “offal,” a parallel Hill is not slow to exploit.

Naturally, a poet of Hill’s depth has much more in mind than pricking the boasts of a fatuous monarch. Hill intends the poem to be an analysis of a certain type of power. As a boy, the king dreamed of being in command, and his attitude when he gains the throne reflects his youthful preoccupations. His subjects are like a child’s toys, to be played with and manipulated as he wishes. He lacks a genuine sense of the reality of others.

The indictment extends beyond King Offa. The poet himself views words as his creation: He too seeks power, though of a less immediately destructive kind than that of the king. A leitmotif of Hill’s work is that rejection of the real world for a spiritual or aesthetic quest cannot entirely succeed; one cannot respond to the dangers of political power by aesthetic retreat. All human beings bear the burden of original sin, and escape from this dire condition cannot come from human effort.

One of the poems in Mercian Hymns, “Crowning of Offa,” reveals more fully Hill’s attitude toward the past. Hill notes the splendor of the coronation and the church; he does not view these altogether ironically and in fact genuinely admires them. He points out, however, that eighth century Anglo-Saxon society rested on wergild. If someone was killed, his family or retainers were expected to avenge him. If the killer paid wergild, he could save himself and end the feud. The amount paid depended on whether the killing was accidental or deliberate and on the rank of the victim.

Hill’s point is that this practice shows the degree to which Anglo-Saxon society was based on money. The worth of individuals varied, with a peasant having almost no value compared with a noble. Thus, he considers contrasting the modern capitalistic world with an idealized medieval past in which money was kept in its place inaccurate since medieval society was as mercenary as modern society.

Hill’s jaundiced view of the Anglo-Saxon world is in part directed at an unlikely target. In Notes Toward the Definition of Culture (1948), T. S. Eliot called for a return to an organic society. In Eliot’s view, twentieth century society encouraged unlimited pluralism and toleration, and society needed to share a common way of life founded on religion. Hill does not altogether reject this view but suggests that Eliot has oversimplified the relation between present and past. By accenting the commercial elements of King Offa’s realm, Hill indicates that salvation cannot be found in a return to a premodern utopia.

“Hymn XXV,” the last of the “Opus Anglicanum” series, takes aim at another critic and artist, John Ruskin, a leading Victorian social critic and authority on painting, who denounced the nineteenth century for abandoning craftsmanship. Ruskin argued that workers who lived before the Industrial Revolution took pride in their work, as for example, did nail makers. He noted in a famous letter in Fors Clavigera (1871-1884) that nails are not a purely utilitarian product but instead the product of immense skill.

While not denying Ruskin’s point that this craft requires great skill, Hill indicts Ruskin for romanticizing it, recalling his own grandmother, who spent her life as a nail maker, practicing her trade in appalling poverty, her life a struggle to survive, not the pursuit of a skill undertaken for its own sake. Just as in the poems about King Offa, Hill lays bare the dark side of precapitalist society.

Another of the poems of Mercian Hymns sums up Hill’s attitude to the state. In an imaginary meeting between King Offa and Charlemagne, Charlemagne gives Offa a sword as a present. (Although the two kings never actually met, Charlemagne did send Offa presents, including several swords, in 786.) The gift, an instrument of slaughter, epitomizes the nature of kingship.

Hill makes himself a character in the poem, imagining himself driving his car in an area where Offa and Charlemagne might have met, and mingling World War I battles in his mind with those Charlemagne fought in the same area. This fantasy self also thinks of Emperor Theodoric torturing and executing the philosopher Boethius. However dubious Hill may be about the merits of asceticism, clearly he believes political power to be much worse.

Tenebrae

After Mercian Hymns was published, Hill spent several years translating Ibsen’s Brand. As a result, he did not publish his next volume of poetry, Tenebrae, until 1978. As the title suggests, this volume offers no respite from Hill’s customary dark brooding. Here he takes over certain forms used in Spanish Baroque poetry and uses a principal subject of that era as the work’s theme. Spanish mystics such as Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila often used sexual imagery to depict their religious struggles and visions; Hill does so as well, extending his portrayal of the struggle between flesh and spirit to other historical periods. Among the persons depicted in Tenebrae are William Butler Yeats, the French religious thinker Simone Weil, and the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

Tenebrae is a Roman Catholic ceremony that commemorates the “harrowing of Hell,” Christ’s descent into the underworld after his burial and prior to the resurrection. The rite is rarely performed, but attraction to the obscure is Hill’s hallmark. He composed the poems in Tenebrae in a ritualized language intended to evoke Catholic ceremony.

The first series in the book, “The Pentecost Castle,” consists of fifteen short poems modeled on Spanish Baroque lyrics. One, based on a lyric by the poet Juan del Encina, pictures a heron pierced by the blade of physical love. The bird uses the experience to rise to a higher spiritual level.

Although Hill imitates the forms and themes of the Spanish Baroque, his attitude differs from the views of his Spanish exemplars. Though strongly attracted to mysticism, he is doubtful about the reality behind visions. He believes it very difficult to distinguish between true and false mysticism, and he thinks of God not as a savior but as a power that has withdrawn from the world, leaving humankind to its own devices. In “The Pentecost Castle,” Hill’s attitude toward the mystics about whom he writes is detached. He believes in a principle of compensation: A loss in sexual interest becomes a gain in spiritual insight, and vice versa. What spiritual insight means, however, is not a matter on which he feels able to pronounce.

Another section of Tenebrae, called “Lachrimae: Or, Seven Tears Figured in Seven Passionate Pavans,” takes a more negative attitude toward mysticism than does the Pentecost sequence. Hill describes techniques of contemplation in detail, claiming that they have been deliberately designed to inflict pain and offer no compensatory rewards. One of his poems imitates an anonymous Spanish lyric; in contrast to the original writer, however, Hill denies that he has ever had contact with Christ. The final poem in “Lachrimae” is a translation of a verse by Lope de Vega Carpio, a sixteenth century playwright strongly inclined to skepticism. Hill’s version closely parallels his model without altering its meaning: He finds Lope de Vega’s doubt more congenial than the affirmations of mystics.

Hill’s challenge to conventional piety goes further. He does not think Christ himself immune from hostile questioning. One poem pictures Christ on the cross; rather than gaze at him with wonder and praise, Hill would like to question Jesus, perhaps with the horrors of the world wars on his mind.

Hill’s jaundiced view of Christ does not indicate conversion to atheism. Instead, he explores a perspective to which he is attracted but not fully committed. “Christmas Trees,” a tribute to the German pastor and theologian Bonhoeffer, adopts a quite different point of view. Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor from a well-connected German family with ties to the aristocracy, had achieved fame at a young age for a brilliant doctoral dissertation and had the potential to be a leading academic theologian. The rise of Hitler to power in 1933, however, changed Bonhoeffer’s plans, for he strongly opposed the Nazis and led the faction of the Protestant church that refused to recognize the leadership hand-picked by Hitler’s minions. Involved in the failed July, 1944, plot to assassinate Hitler, Bonhoeffer was arrested, imprisoned, and eventually executed.

Hill treats Bonhoeffer with unreserved admiration, likening his willingness to risk his life to overthrow Hitler to Christ’s sacrifice, a comparison herein inherently favorable. Though in the other poems he is uncommitted, Hill here displays no doubts about the meaning of Christ’s redeeming death. Bonhoeffer, a true Christian, had imitated the life and works of his Master. However, perhaps the idea that Bonhoeffer’s participation in the plot and his resulting death were a sacrifice for the secular community, not for the church, carries an undertone of religious skepticism. Bonhoeffer believed that if Hitler survived, Germany would face ruin; it is his attempt to act on this belief that earns Hill’s praise. Further, while in prison, Bonhoeffer wrote a number of letters that teach “religionless Christianity,” in which God no longer intervenes in the world but requires people to act for themselves. His assertions echo Hill’s own belief.

The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy

Hill’s next major work, the last to appear in the 1980’s, moves more in the direction of orthodox religion, although his characteristic ambiguity is fully present. The work in question is The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy, a poem of one hundred quatrains.

Péguy, a Frenchman of unusually forceful personality, was both an ardent Catholic and a socialist. During the Dreyfus Affair, the controversy involving a Jewish army officer falsely convicted of treason in 1894, Péguy championed Captain Alfred Dreyfus and allied himself with the socialist leader Jean Juarès. He broke with the position of Juarès, however, after France entered World War I in August, 1914, for Juarès had sought a peaceful resolution, while Péguy was firmly anti-German. Too old for the draft, Péguy enlisted in the French army and was killed in the first months of the war.

Through most of the poem, Hill expresses unfeigned admiration for Péguy, even though many of Péguy’s views differ sharply from ones Hill has supported elsewhere. As Hill shows, Péguy created a myth of the French peasant before the depredations of capitalism as devoted to the soil and part of an ideal rural community. Although this view seems quite like the one Hill excoriated when professed by Ruskin, he presents it in straightforward fashion, without his usual ambiguity or irony.

Péguy’s devotion to the French nation went hand in hand with religion. For him, church and state were not separate entities but a united amalgam deserving his allegiance. The foremost expression of this union of throne and altar was his cult of Joan of Arc, whom he portrayed as the heroine of the nascent French nation, and it was largely Péguy’s efforts, and those of other French nationalists, that caused Pope Benedict XV to elevate Joan to sainthood in 1920. Hill views saints with much less enthusiasm than does Péguy, but he presents Péguy’s activities on Joan’s behalf fully and fairly, possibly admiring not his particular religious stance but his selfless devotion to what he considered right, the “charity” of Hill’s title.

Hill wholeheartedly endorses Péguy’s criticism of the power of the machine. In doing so, Hill does not reverse the position of his earlier work, disagreeing with Eliot, Ruskin, and Péguy that an ideal world existed before the rise of capitalism. However, it does not follow from Hill’s rejection of premodern nostalgia that he disagrees with these writers’ criticism of the modern world. Like Péguy, Hill believes that machines endlessly repeat motion without purpose. People are forced to adjust themselves to a fixed routine and sooner or later fall victim to the implacable rhythm of industrialism. The philosopher Henri Bergson strongly influenced Hill’s views, and Bergson’s doctrine of time receives considerable attention in the poem.

The Triumph of Love

Like The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy, The Triumph of Love is one long “poem” comprising a large number (150) of smaller items, a structure echoing the 150 psalms of the Psalter. Like Mercian Hymns, the poem’s locale is Hill’s West Midland childhood home, and its focus is the events of World War II. However, where Mercian Hymns uses the figure of King Offa, a secular ruler, as a focal point, The Triumph of Love focuses on the figure of Saint Kenelm, also a member of ancient Mercia’s royal family renowned not for his rule but for his martyrdom, and underneath, a repeated return to the figure of the Virgin Mary, to whom the poem is dedicated. Perhaps the most significant departure from Hill’s previous work, however, is the extent and degree of satire, even of farce, in The Triumph of Love.

Hill’s poetic voice switches tone and mood often and abruptly throughout the poem, at one point commenting of another poet, “Rancorous, narcissistic old sod what/ makes him go on? We thought, hoped rather,/ he might be dead,” and elsewhere characterizing the poetic form Laus et vituperativo (“praise and opposition”) as

. . . public, forensic,yet with a vehementprivate ambition for the people’sgreater good—JoannisMiltoni, Angli, pro Populo Angli-cano Defensio: this and other tracts,day-laboured-at, under great impositionLaus et vituperatio, lost, rediscovered,renewed on few occasions this century.

Veering from the colloquial to the Latinate, Hill also puns, excoriates, and inserts editorial comments and mock “errata” into his verse. This chorus—or cacopohony—of voices echoes a new tolerance of disorder in Hill’s poetry, a millennial embrace of postmodernism that nonetheless continues to express Hill’s ongoing concerns with the aftermath of World War II’s destruction of landscapes and peoples: “What is he saying;/ why is he still so angry?”

The Orchards of Syon

The Orchards of Syon is the fourth and final collection in a series that began with Canaan and includes Speech! Speech! and The Triumph of Love. When read as a unit, the four collections are reminiscent of Dante’s La divina commedia (c. 1320; The Divine Comedy, 1802). The Orchards of Syon consists of seventy-two blank-verse soliloquies structured in the autumnal tradition of the classical eclogue. The work thematically intertwines the idea of La vida es sueño (pr. 1635; Life Is a Dream, 1830) from Pedro Calderón de la Barca and the dark forest of the mind from Dante, as well as Dante’s La vita nuova (c. 1292; Vita Nuova, 1861; better known as The New Life). These dark forests may at times also be golden orchards, with a Frostean progression from green to gold to candescent red; at other times they may also be a “Wood of the Suicides” and “murderous fantasy.” The progression is biographical as well; an old man looks back at his golden youth in the Goldengrove of his Worcestershire childhood and traces his memories through the historical events of his life (the world wars, the burned Zeppelin, the Holocaust, gutted tabernacles, the Blitz, and people fleeing through the Warsaw sewers) to create a chaotic, meandering spiritual biography in which Nebuchadnezzar gnaws grass and Cain’s brood are busy at Heorot.

The poems range from verbose, self-indulgent, and clearly unrealized stanzas (the poet as “Vox clamans in deserto” telling us “I believe this has been done. . . ./ . . . I may be mistaken./ Don’t look it up this time. . . .”) to the dense and cryptic, full of Eliot-like allusions and Pound-like compression. There are truly elegiac images of birds and countryside and references to Petrarch, Vergil, Cassandra, King Lear, Tom Wyatt, Gustave Flaubert, Guy de Maupassant, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Wilfred Owen, Søren Kierkegaard, and Melchizedek.

Hill’s theme may well be the reconciliation of the romantic love of nature with the violence of war and of modern life with the otherworldliness of Christianity. Hill has always been interested in the Romantics’ question of the relationship of poetry to truth, hence his repeated references to Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Hill takes readers down blind alleys and leaves them there. At times the poet’s prosaic voice dominates; at other times, he engages in wonderful lyricism. In “. . . Beam/ us up, Asrael . . . ,” popular culture, in the form of a popular phrase from the television program Star Trek, mingles with the religiously esoteric in his use of the dark angel Asrael instead of Star Trek’s Scottie. Los Angeles is a holy place and Glastonbury is “mislodged on its mud lake.”

There are images of staging, acting, and shutter play, including a shadow-play, wind machines off camera, handheld or swivel cameras, Shakespearean voices, Spanish drama from the Golden Age, the light fantastic, a production of Jean Cocteau’s Orphée (pr. 1926; Orpheus, 1933) that Hill saw six times in one week, and the camera taking low-level shots of a reduced city and gutted towers. Much as Samuel Beckett mocked language, Hill plays with words: “. . . Oh my sole/ sister, you, little sister-my-soul”; “. . . no due season. Do not/ mourn unduly . . .”; “. . . Strophe after strophe/ ever more catastrophic. Did I say/ strophe? I meant salvo, sorry.” The references to William Shakespeare’s The Tempest (pr. 1611) and “Prospero’s Farewell” suggest Hill’s self-vision. An old man, reviewing his past and envisioning the end of his career, tries to remind himself of action to take with commands: “. . . Cite EMMANUEL:/ the man of sorrows whose blood burns us./ Le misericordieux qui nous brûle le sang.”

A Treatise of Civil Power

A Treatise of Civil Power echoes the title of English poet John Milton’s 1659 polemic, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes, and thereby prepares readers to consider the question of poets’ involvement in issues of civic justice through the ages. In keeping with its stark title is the volume’s direct style, illustrated in Hill’s praise of George Frideric Handel’s tightly organized music as “a treatise of civil power,” deliberate and harmonious (“G. F. Handel, Opus 6”). The opening poem, “The Minor Prophets,” describes the prophecies—including “scorched earth” and a “scorpion king”—of Joel and the other minor prophets of ancient Israel. Another poem, “Citations I,” describes poetry as “a means of survival” that helps one regain one’s self amid war and therefore is “a mode of moral life.” It urges readers to preserve democracy and respect the intelligence of citizens—in effect, to get back to basics.

The poems in this collection reflect Hill’s obsession with aging, with the assertion that his “. . . lyric mojo/ atrophied at around ninety . . . ” (“Citations II”), his self-description as “. . . an old body// its mouth working” (“On Reading Blake: Prophet Against Empire”) and as “. . . a babbler/ in the crowd’s face—” (“Nachwort”), and poem titles (“Before Senility”), but, in “Citations II,” he also asserts that “. . . invention reinvents itself/ every so often in the line of death” and that he might even stroll through “a city of emerald” as promised in Revelations or at least a city of “zircon.”

As usual, in poems such as “On Reading Milton and the English Revolution,” Hill echoes the phrasing of his sources, switches disconcertingly from the serious to the comic (“Fix your own tail to the Jerusalem donkey”), plays word games (“. . . Idiolect/ that could be idiot dialect . . .”), and tosses out modern allusions and personal commentaries (“H. Mirren’s super”). At times, as in “On Reading Blake: Prophet Against Empire,” he admits his borrowings: “. . . (I’ve/ cribbed Whitman, you stickler—short of a phrase).” His topics range from poets (Sir Thomas Wyatt; Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey; William Blake), dramatists (Ben Jonson), and politicians (Oliver Cromwell, Edmund Burke) to representations of classical music in poetry (Handel and Johannes Brahms) and famous works of literary criticism to memorials for Gillian Rose, Ernest Barlach, and Aleksander Wat. Titles reflect their bookish topics: “On Reading Crowds and Power,” “On Reading The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall,” “On Reading Burke on Empire, Liberty, and Reform.” In “On Reading The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall,” Hill commingles the personal and modern (“my parents never owned a house”) with the historical (seventeenth century issues), the sentimental with the realistic, and morality with quests for power.

“Masques” toys with Jonson’s visions expressed through Inigo Jones’s “great arches,” then wallows in the “dung and detritus” of the streets, deflating the sublime with reminders of ordinary people on ordinary streets (as Hill does in other poems with reminders of his own resentments). In “Coda,” Hill writes of his own great-grandfather who was a “Welsh iron-puddler,” with his “penny a week insurance cum burial fund,/ cashing in pain itself . . . ,” a common man suffering from the rules and regulations of civil power. At different points, Hill speaks with different voices, sometimes as Blake, sometimes as Milton or even the English Puritan conqueror Cromwell, who might well have “an unfinished psalm” echoing in his skull (“To the Lord Protector Cromwell”). He calls Burke a “realist” (“On Reading Burke on Empire, Liberty, and Reform”); rejects the Turing machine (“A Cloud in Aquila”); contemplates an “unsatisfactory tomb” in Framlingham Church, with its unfinished Hans Holbein sketch and “inaccurate pietas” (“In Framlingham Church”); and finds that, in fifty years of the Federal Republic of Germany and Willy Brandt kneeling at the Ghetto memorial in Warsaw, words fail and “Justice is in another world” (“On Looking Through 50 Jahre im Bild: Bundesrepublik Deutschland”).

Throughout the collection, Hill purposely creates obtuseness, even in his most exciting verses. For example, the title “Holbein” would seem to indicate a verse on the famous portrait artist, but instead it is about “the other Cromwell, the strange muse of Wyatt,” and even for people versed in history, it takes a moment to connect the Renaissance poet Wyatt with Thomas Cromwell (not Oliver), who lost his head to a sharp axe for encouraging what proved to be Henry VIII’s failed marriage with Anne of Cleves. Cromwell’s “trim wit on the scaffold” refers to the Renaissance tradition of a final speech before execution; Hill’s verse imitates Wyatt’s meter. Similarly, the poem “Parallel Lives” becomes more meaningful if readers know that Plutarch’s Ethika (after c. 100; Moralia, 1603) was translated into English by Wyatt as Plutarckes Boke of the Quyete of Mynde (1528).