Geoffrey Hill- 'September Song'

Hill’s ‘September Song’ is full of paradoxes. Hill's elegiac tone, simple syntax, short, almost unimpressive/common words evoke infinite layers of meaning. The simplicity is, in my opinion, deceiving. The poem is full of ambiguities and complexities such as the “this” in "This is plenty. This is more than enough". Hill highlights the purpose of poetry and history as being similarly deceiving, ambiguous and simultaneously complex. Furthermore Hill’s parenthesis in “(I have made an elegy for myself it is true)” again depicts ambiguities. Hill’s self-reflexiveness questions ideas of who this elegy is in dedication to. Is it the holocaust victim? The poet? The living or the dead? Such questions are infinite, Hill implicitly questions the elegiac form, are elegies for the dead or the living, or both? Thus Hill questions the purpose of poetry/ literature in history.

Also implicit in Hill’s poem is this kind of Modernistic revisionism. However instead of trying to 'revise' history, to re-write it, to subvert meta-narratives (such as the Biblical allusion shown here) as Modernist writers tend to do, Hill focuses on the Holocaust, the binary of victim/victimisers and displays the pointlessness/ meaninglessness of the poem as an account of historical events. Thus ‘September Song’ becomes reminiscent of Auden's 'In Memory of W.B.Yeats' . Both Auden and Hill address the point of literature- the conceit of the pointlessness of poetry is expressed, it literally does nothing. In Hill’s case it won't bring back the holocaust victims or even release them from oppression. Thus Hill’s poem verges on to post-modern territory, in Hill’s attempt to express the limited boundaries of poetry as spectator/ antidote to historical forgetting. Poetry can comment upon, witness and depict history but it is merely a literary artefact, fixed in history. Hill may be criticising Modernist writers, to some extent, who casually/ignorantly allude to historical events or prestigious literary works and reduce them to nothing, distancing us from them, reducing them to almost cocktail chatter which is also expressed in T.S.Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ where in “the room the women come and go/Talking of Michelangelo”.