Publication of the week: Professor Stefan Hawlin

29 September 2014

Hawlin, S., “Wales and the Spirit: Reading Geoffrey Hill’s Oraclau | Oracles, Literature and Theology (August 2014). doi: 10.1093/litthe/fru053

Geoffrey Hill

Geoffrey Hill receives Honorary Doctorate at Oxford University, photo courtesy of Darrell Godliman

Complaints of the ‘difficulty’ of Hill’s late poetry have been doing the rounds through the reviews, but there has been relatively little close exploration of its sheer richness of effect, or indeed its sometimes extraordinary beauty. This essay looks at the overall shape and purpose of one of the more remarkable late works, Oraclau | Oracles (2010), and provides a heuristic by which to read its individual sections. The work’s title signals its focus on the often marginalised matter of Welsh biculturalism, as the poet pays homage to his family line, and in particular to his Welsh great-grandfather, who (a Welsh speaker and an iron-puddler) moved from a small town in central Wales to near Birmingham in the nineteenth century. From this simple root springs a whole critique of our times and ways. The poem emerges in this account as a rich meditation on the culture and spirit of Wales, with the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins (lover of north Wales) at its core. Hill is himself a religious poet in the mode of Blake and Hopkins, the apparent complexity or eccentricity of his style being one of the ways in which he seeks to rearrange our vision of the world. The poem’s densely textured and highly formalistic manner is part of its attack on contemporary materialism: Wales, symbolically speaking, becomes a locus of resistance to the predominant secularist values of England. In the words of Pennar Davies, the great Welsh language poet, cited in the original Welsh in Oraclau | Oracles (here translated):

Rid us of gold and gems and lavish outfits.
Rid us of art for the sake of art
And lasciviousness for the sake of lasciviousness.
Rid us of the lords of death.

Literature-&-TheologyLiterature and Theology is published by OUP, and provides a forum for interdisciplinary dialogue, inviting both close textual analysis and broader theoretical speculation as ways of exploring how religion is embedded within culture. It encompasses biblical criticism, literary criticism, philosophy, politics, history, cultural studies, and contemporary critical theory or practice. Subscribers can access the article on the OUP journals website, under ‘Advanced Access’, at http://litthe.oxfordjournals.org/

Stefan Hawlin is Professor of English at Buckingham.