Our chequered country

Our chequered country John le Carré says of his character George Smiley, hero of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, that he is a romantic, in love with an England that never existed, committed to standards of behaviour nowhere found. While his avowed love was for the German poets, it might have been he who wrote

Reading Dante in a mood of angry dislike
for my fellow sufferers and for myself
that I dislike them.

But it was Geoffrey Hill, writing in The Orchards Of Syon of his yearning for a mythical Goldengrove, his acquisition of a hard-won knowledge of what wears us down. (Billy Bragg: I’m not looking for a new love, I’m just looking for a new England.) Debit the lot to our chequered country. Here are two of the closing stanzas.

LXX

Right, one more time! Pomerium will not
pass muster as orchard. That place of last
reckoning, at the Berlin Wall,
more resembled it; or say Carthage
chemically defoliate, salt understood
here as a chemical. Or the French con-
nection, cordon sanitaire? Contingent
natures of all things save God. Uncompromising
self-sufficiency work for the cockroach.
Difficult to end joyful starting from here,
but I’ll surprise us. Inurements
I allow, endurances I approve;
nothing of ours is irreducible
though passion of failed loves remains
in its own selving. So let us
presume to assume the hierarchies,
Goldengrove, even as these senses fall
and die in your yellow grass, your landscape
of deep disquiet, calm in its forms: the Orchards
of Syon, sway-backed with pear and apple,
the plum, in spring and autumn resplendent.
Syon! Syon! that which sustains us and is
not the politics of envy, nor solidarnosc,
a hard-won knowledge of what wears us down.


LXXI

But now and in memory never so
wholly awaited, the breadth of this
autumnal land. In Goldengrove the full
trees trumpet their colours: earth-casualties
majestic; unreal as in life they build
riches of cadence, not yet decadence,
ruin’s festival. This much is allowed
us, forever tangling with England
in her quiet ways of betrayal. Natural
mother, good but not enough. Again, bring
recollection forward, weeping with rage.
Debit the lot to our chequered country,
crediting even so her haunted music.
Loyal incoherence not official
but now and then inspired: when circling
Heathrow on hold we are entertained
by Windsor’s scaled-down perfect replicas;
or as Sussex, dormant, rippling with shadows
of airflow, tilts, straightens under, and they
switch off the flight chart.
So much for my conclusion, a small
remembrance, nos fidelités sont
des citadelles—PÉGUY. Our fealties taken
to be your places of refuge and defence.