Funeral Masque: An Elegy for Geoffrey Hill
Ishion Hutchinson Remembers the Late British Poet
Poet Ishion Hutchinson remembers Geoffrey Hill, a contemporary of Ted Hughes often hailed as one of the foremost English-language poets of his time, who died last week at age 84.
Funeral Masque
i.m. Geoffrey Hill, 1932-2016
See the marigolds fired to a pyre,
at once a gold ship rising for Cumae,
no, Bromsgrove, the sun’s other margin,
dimly spring as if in defiance of history,
returning to begin again life’s oratorio
over the wrath of traffic at Hereford
and Worcester. But can you hear none
of this triumphal fall, your mind quiet
at last, shatters into rain showers
on ramparts and ruins with abandon
pricked and shining tadpoles seems
to yield signals from the spheres,
the annual wound of your name.
Ishion Hutchinson
Ishion Hutchinson was born in Port Antonio, Jamaica. He is the author of House of Lords and Commons (FSG, 2016) and a professor at Cornell University.
