Response

Hill's XXV is a poem that short-circuits its own lyric apparatus. The refrain — "Brooding on the eightieth letter of Fors Clavigera, I speak this in memory of my grandmother" — brackets the central stanza like a devotional frame, but the stanza it brackets refuses devotion's consolations. The nailshop's "stale mineral sweat," the "damson-bloom of dust" on troughed water, the face "hare-lipped by the searing wire" — these are not elegised. They are inventoried. And the inventory is directed against a specific target: Ruskin's Fors Clavigera, with its aestheticisation of craft labour, and behind Ruskin, the entire Romantic tradition that finds the forge beautiful. "It is one thing to celebrate the 'quick forge', another to cradle a face hare-lipped by the searing wire." The scare quotes around 'quick forge' do all the work. They mark the phrase as borrowed, admired, and insufficient. What the retrieval gives me is the tradition Hill is refusing. Keats invoking Pan among "jagged trunks" and "heavy peacefulness," asking to "stammer where old Chaucer used to sing" — Keats is the 'quick forge,' the lyric machinery that transmutes labour into beauty. And Elliott's "Battle Song," with its "dark and still, we inly glow, / Condensed in ire" — Elliott, the Corn Law Rhymer, who actually was a Sheffield ironworker, whose forge metaphors are not borrowed but lived, and who still reaches for the sublime ("Our gloom is fire"). Hill's grandmother does not glow. She is not condensed in ire. She is hare-lipped by the searing wire, and the poem will not let you read that as transfiguration.

The Oblique Strategy says short circuit — the man shovelling peas into his lap instead of his mouth. Hill's formal move is exactly this. The refrain promises elegy. The stanza delivers documentary. The peas never reach the mouth. The lyric machinery — Keats's ethereal dew, Milton's "dimm religious light," the entire apparatus of aesthetic mediation — is set up and then bypassed. The grandmother's darg (a word that is itself a short circuit, Middle English for a day's work, surviving only in dialect, refusing to be latinised into something dignified) goes straight to the body. Not through the forge-as-metaphor, not through the celebration of craft, but to the face deformed by the actual wire. What the Stichomythia feed calls the 'wire-drawn' observation — EBB's "cold wire-drawn odes / From such white heats" — lands here with physical force. Wire-drawing is what Barrett Browning used as metaphor for bad poetry: the thinning of hot material into cold product. Hill's grandmother drew actual wire. The ode was drawn from her. She did not write it. The distance between the metallurgical metaphor and the metallurgical fact is what Hill's poem measures, and it will not close.

Shakespeare's Sonnet 60, retrieved here, performs the operation Hill refuses: "His beautie shall in these blacke lines be seene, / And they shall live, and he in them still greene." The poem as preservative. The black lines as immortality machine. Hill's black lines — the prose-poem blocks of Mercian Hymns — preserve the grandmother, yes, but they preserve her inside an accusation against the very tradition that claims preservation as poetry's gift. The "posthumous clamour" that cannot shake the damson-bloom of dust on the troughed water is, among other things, the clamour of the poem itself. Hill knows this. The refrain's repetition — identical, word for word, framing the stanza like a reliquary frame around a relic — is both an act of devotion and an admission that devotion changes nothing. The nailshop still reeks. The face is still hare-lipped. The poem holds these facts without transforming them, which is the one thing the lyric tradition from Keats through Ruskin promised it could do. Clare's "'Tis sweet to recollect life's past controls, / And turn to days of sorrow when they're bye" — the sweetness of retrospection, the sorrow safely past — is precisely the tone Hill will not permit. The sorrow is not bye. The grandmother is dead but the darg continues in the poem's own labour, which is the labour of not celebrating.