Geoffrey Hill, Laureate of Rain

With rain continuing to lash much of the country, my mind turned to the poetry of rain - and thereby to Geoffrey Hill. Our Greatest Living Poet is a veritable laureate of rain. Rain is his res, his thing; no one writes better about English rain in its various moods, its coming and going, its effects on light and leaf and landscape. Skimming through the Selected Works, I compiled this mini-anthology of Hill on Rain, some poetical succour for these drenched days...

'But leave it now, leave it; as you left
a washed-out day at Stourport or the Lickey,
improvised rainhats mulch for papier-mache,
and the chips floating.
Leave it now, leave it; give it over
to that all-gathering general English light,
in which each separate bead
of drizzle at its own thorn-tip stands
as revelation.'
[From The Triumph of Love, which begins and ends with the glorious line 'Sun-blazed, over Romsley, a livid rain-scarp']

 'Memory worsening - let it go as rain
 streams on half-visible clatter of the wind
                lapsing and rising,
 that clouds the pond's green mistletoe of spawn,
 seeps among nettle-beds and rust-brown sorrel,
 perpetual ivy burrowed by weak light...'
[Sorrel]

'First day of the first week: rain
on perennial ground cover, a sheen
like oil of verdure where the rock shows through;
dark ochre patched more dark, with stubborn glaze;
rough soggy drystone clinging to the fell,
broken by hawthorns...'
[from Speech! Speech!]

 'Two nights' and three days' rain, with the Hodder
 well up, over its alder roots; tumblings
 of shaly late storm light; the despised
 ragwort, luminous, standing out,
 stereoscopically, across twenty yards,
 on the farther bank. The congregants
 of air and water, of swift reflection,
 vanish between the brightness and shadow...'
 [from The Orchards of Syon]

 'Sage-green through olive to oxidised copper,
the rainward stone tower-face. Graveyard
blossom comes off in handfuls; the lilac
turned overnight a rough tobacco brown.
Every few minutes the drizzle shakes itself like a dog...'
 In Ipsley Church Lane, 2]

 'For rain-sprigged yew trees, blockish as they guard
 admonitory sparse berries, atrorubent
 stone holt of darkness, no, of claustral light...'
 [Offertorium]

 'When to depict rain - heavy rain - it stands
in dense verticals diagonally lashed,
chalk-white yet with the chalk translucent;
the roadway sprouts a thousand flowerets,
storm-paddies instantly reaped, replenished,
and again cut down:
the holding burden of a wistaria,
drape amid drape, the sodden
copia of all things flashing and drying:
first here after the storm these butterflies
fixed on each jinking run,
probing, priming, then leaping back,
a babble of silent tongues;
and the flint church also choiring
into dazzle...' [Broken Hierarchies]

 There - feels better already, doesn't it?