Geoffrey Hill, To the High Court of Parliament
November 1994
Where’s probity in this—
the slither-frisk
to lordship of a kind
as rats to a bird-table?England—now of genius
the eidolon—
unsubstantial yet voiding
substance like quicklime:privatize to the dead
her memory:
let her wounds weep
into the lens of oblivion.
Strange week for his death; I had been thinking about this poem in particular, with the UK taking itself apart. One of the great, mournful questioners into the nature of that country (PJ Harvey the other).
