Most Read... John McAuliffeBill Manhire in Conversation with John McAuliffe
(PN Review 259)
Patricia CraigVal Warner: A Reminiscence
(PN Review 259)
Eavan BolandA Lyric Voice at Bay
(PN Review 121)
Joshua WeinerAn Exchange with Daniel Tiffany/Fall 2020
(PN Review 259)
Vahni CapildeoOn Judging Prizes, & Reading More than Six Really Good Books
(PN Review 237)
Christopher MiddletonNotes on a Viking Prow
(PN Review 10)
Poems Articles Interviews Reports Reviews Contributors
Reader Survey
PN Review Substack

This report is taken from PN Review 232, Volume 43 Number 2, November - December 2016.

Sir Geoffrey Hill Rowan Williams
The following sermon was delivered at the funeral of Sir Geoffrey Hill at the Chapel of Emmanuel College, Cambridge on 25 July 2016.

                                         *

VERY WELL, you shall redirect the pain –
May already have worked this – towards paean.
      Nothing bereaves
      Precisely; yet
      Lost springs of loves
      Turn things about
      Upon the stiff axis
      Geared by bow staves      [Clavics 25, p.    35]


‘A trimmed rod of wood’, says the definition, ‘to be made into a bow.’ Loss is ‘imprecise’, nothing serious, grievous, in our humanity allows us the satisfaction of being exact, wrapping it all up. What we do with bereavement is to find words that ‘turn things about’, labouring at a vehicle where the tension and slowness are in fact building towards an arrow flight.

So today, sitting with our ‘imprecise’ grief, the loss we can’t turn into anything finished and impressive, we listen to Geoffrey’s words, in one context after another, burrowing, shouldering, worrying their way towards some redirection of pain. He had characteristically austere things to say about the self-delusions of poets. In a notable essay on ‘Language, Suffering, Silence’ (Collected Critical Writings, pp. 394–406) he conducts several swordfights simultaneously (it is one of the exhausting and exhilarating features of his best critical writing that you have to remember in pretty well every sentence just how many people he is arguing with) – with Arnold, Auden, Milosz, Yeats, all to do with what poetry is meant to ...


Searching, please wait... animated waiting image