“To William Cobbett: In Absentia” from Canaan
Geoffrey Hill
Penguin Books, 1996
Review by Ghivarghese Kuzhikandam

The reading gestured at below will I hope find readers struck enough by the poem to have become curious, at least, about William Cobbett : and for readers to whom the name is new I shall attempt to trace out an impression such as an encyclopaedia might produce. The older Brittanicas devote a page or more to him : and my edition, from the middle of the last century, conjures Cobbett as “that marvel, a literate peasant” : an epithet which seems to sufficiently introduce the  persona Hill is addressing. An Oxford Companion to Literature of the same vintage fills out the picture thus : Cobbett is said to have written with “perspicuity and vigour” : but his “honesty and shrewdness” are supposed to have been “marred by an arrogant and quarrelsome attitude, and by wrong-headed prejudices.”

The construals of lyric doing that follow will not seem only extravagant, I hope, to those who are more acquainted ― and minutely, even ― with the contrary creature the political Cobbett was. One could properly say of him that he was “not faithless in standing without faith” as he “kept open vigil at the site” : and saying so properly circumscribes an acting in absentia. The poem’s speaker seems to voice such stigmatising questions, I shall now hazard saying, as Cobbett might have asked were he among us : warranting thusly the bid to let stand the entire deposed authority of vision just as it fell : in the like absence that willing readers here come to inhabit. And what the voice that has so bid us proceeds to invoke appear, themselves, as stigmata of deposed authority and fallen vision :

your righteous unjust and cordial anger,
your singular pitch where labour is spoken of,
your labour :

inasmuch as that has brought to pass reborn Commodity. Cobbett’s political labour is worked ― however crosswise ― into the weft of the industrial transmogrification of English polity. That the contrarian impulses of a “marvellously literate peasant” should have been subducted by the progress of industrial democracy is a properly dialectical irony : since industrialization seems to “democratise” by taming every sort of political animal : by turning each into a voting consumer : the ostensible satisfying of whose “preferences” ― reformulated and concerted by the instruments of “public policy” that the “social sciences” have become ― has long constituted the developed polities, as they are termed, of England and America.

• Regarding “subducted” : consider the intent, and the intended readers, of the grammar Cobbett wrote.
• Regarding “constituted” : the word is appropriate only if “polity” denotes the instancing or ‘eventuating’ of some structure : parole rather than langue, in the argot of the structural linguists. English lexis seems to discourage such use : and my first use of the word seems to take a polity for a structure. But construing “polity” as I do just after, for that first use even, does not seem unnaturally strenuous.

 
Consider now that even those citizens of these Occidental polities who most cherish their “civil” origins will find it very difficult to resist being voting consumers : for their bodies have been recruited to the “enterprise associations” these polities become in the course of their industrialization : and remain, in the epoch of Information that seems to have followed.

• Regarding “civil” versus “enterprise” association : the distinction is Michael Oakeshott’s. Enterprise compromises the civil character of polity when, to give a conspicuous example, the State exercises its right of “eminent domain” to pursue “development” : consider the damming of the Narmada.
• Regarding the “recruiting” of the body : inevitable to the extent that national economies are run like extended households.
• Regarding “the epoch of Information” : the extent to which “informational polities” differ from the industrial polities of the First Machine Age does not seem germane here.

 
One might summarise thus : voting consumers are joined at the hip in “bodies politic” under the aegis of Commodity : and civil resistance to such jointing would go too much against the grain of such material existence as they thusly enjoy. Their civil selves are rehearsed in absentia if at all, we might therefore insist : and it is into such an absence, over readers rehearsing exiguous civil selves, that reborn Commodity looms, I venture to say now, at the close of our poem : looms, gelid as an allegory in marble, into the  absentia from within which the poem is both said out and comes to be heard.

I have just attempted ― in what will seem a sudden and extravagant way, no doubt ― to characterise the sensuous action which ends the poem : whatever is bodily done by the finial versing, as it were, of

your labour that brought to pass
reborn Commodity with uplifted arms
awed by its own predation

Let me note that I mean to characterise doing : not meaning. I take a poem to mean just what it says : and to do a great deal by saying what it says. The imaginal thrust seemingly natural to English threatens to confine lyric doing here, as I have construed it, to the eye. But the image proffered by “uplifted arms” seems to inflect, only, a primarily somatic sensuous action : which is keyed to “awed” and “predation” : and my “gelid as an allegory in marble” is meant to somatically correct an initial imaginal response.

• The capital “C” seems warrant enough for “allegory” : and with “gelid as marble” I mean to insist upon and qualify the somatic doing of the final line. Coming back to “looms … into” : here are two “somatical” transcriptions : “bulks into” and “crowds” : but these seem a little too “active” for the last line.
• Lyric doing in the last two lines might be formally summarised thus : “reborn Commodity with uplifted arms” traces the contour of such an image as Pound might have prized : but “awed by its own predation” fills out that contour somatically.
• The pronounced “length” of all the stresses in the last line, compared to the preceding two, is the formal agency here : these long stresses slow the lengthening turn at “arms” to the peculiarly “stopped” bodily state that awed by its own predation would be.

 
These last lines of the poem will not, by themselves, abet the characterization of their doing that I have just offered : and to advance my case I must now dress Absentia as I have cast her. The poem begins by presenting us abruptly to her : the blunt assertion of

I say it is not faithless
to stand without faith

conducts us to her without ceremony. The questions that follow limn her presence : as stigmata would, I shall now repeat. If my reading seems overwrought let me step out more coolly : thus : the blunt assertion the poem begins with brings the reader up against the absence its title announces : the medley of questioning that follows draws the speaking voice — which seems to contract itself to a question, almost, even as the questioning mounts — into that absence : which its stigmatising questions themselves scan.

So much for the voice that says the poem out : now for the ear it is pitched at. Hard upon these questions, the renewed bluntness of

I say let stand the entire
deposed authority
of vision just as it fell

compasses the absence they scan, closing the willing ear within it : the ear becoming willing inasmuch as the assertiveness of “I say let stand” deposes itself with “just as it fell.”

• Regarding “compasses” : what we are bid to let stand is the entire deposed authority of vision just as it fell : as much as the entire deposed authority of vison, just as it fell.
• Regarding “deposes itself” : verbal action here might be characterised as a rapid declension of assertoric force : through a contrast with the earlier elaboration of such force, pointed by the later versing.

 
The “absence” I have contrived is close enough, I trust, to receive as deposed authority Cobbett’s righteous unjust and cordial anger and singular pitch : in the shadow ― as I would have it, at least ― of reborn Commodity. I have wanted to diagram lyric doing, only, in such preliminaries to a reading as I have offered : a word like “looms” serves that exercise poorly here : and one could wish now for other means than poeisis employs. But the versing of our poem has enough discursive definition, surely, to show through any obscuring of its doings by my construals of such : by such picturings, for instance, as those construals may themselves induce.

It might be well now to set out what I assume in assaying the poem as I do : and the theses that follow are intended to excuse my rather summary proceeding.

• A lyric poem means just what it says : or, more negotiably, a putative lyric succeeds as such inasmuch as it means just what it says : and, conversely, fails inasmuch as what it means can be otherwise said.
  • Such ambiguity as Empson anatomised only conditions, and does not compromise, a lyric’s meaning just what it says.
• Understanding lyric poems is a matter of following what they specially do : a lyric is a swerving path, one might say, through a field of perlocutionary force.
  • How much more this conveys to the reader depends on his appetite for what used to be called ordinary language philosophy : the sort of thing Wittgenstein’s students got up to. But I shall make no more of the fancy. My purposes require only the everyday distinction between doing and meaning, as that is ordinarily instanced by the use of words.
  • Ambiguity in meaning serves lyric doing : which itself could never be uncertain.
• To formally understand a lyric poem is to gather how it does whatever it specially does.
• What lyrics do cannot be understood otherwise than as their makers’ doings : however “involuntary” or “passive” such doings may be : or however “negatively capable,” only, poets are supposed to be.
  • Or, more negotiably again, what lyrics are taken to be doing must be something their makers could understand themselves to be doing : or to be making words do : however “inadvertently” they may have come to do so.
  • So, understanding a lyric formally could not consist in specifying some underlying “pathology” : of which it is allegedly a manifesting “symptom.” The task of formal understanding is to specify the conditions of “surface reading” rather than “deep reading” : these modes of interpretation were distinguished by Arthur Danto, notably, in The Philosophical Disenfranchisement of Art.

 
I distinguish the completed understanding of a lyric poem ― as a comprehending, however fugitive, of its concerted doing ― from the formal understanding of that concerting : and would insist that sensuous advance toward such comprehending does not wait upon any intellected formal understanding. Such scruple may seem reactionary : or an atavism, vestigially surviving a “modernity” long since undone or outmoded. I can only confess the fault.

One last and topical matter : an example of a taunting if not idle honour. The world’s richest prize for a work of literature ― as The Hindu reports it ― has recently been instituted by an American company whose business is described as “management productivity” : whose principals would belong to the upper echelons of the nomenklatura president now over America : over the participatory plutocracy into which that polity has been latterly transformed, not least by the subverting praxis of Management.

-Bangalore, April 2008

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To William Cobbett: In Absentia

I say it is not faithless
to stand without faith, keeping open
vigil at the site.
Who shall endure? What force throws off
the verdict of each day’s
idle and taunting honours,
the lottery, the trade in grief,
the outrageous quittance, the shiftless
orders of fools?
I say let stand the entire
deposed authority
of vision just as it fell;
your righteous unjust and cordial anger,
your singular pitch where labour is spoken of,
your labour that brought to pass
reborn Commodity with uplifted hands
awed by its own predation.

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