Memorial Day

This memorial day, TBG and I watched The Pianist. Thinking of a way to celebrate Memorial Day this year now that my grandfather is gone, I offer a poem of witness from Geoffrey Hill: "September Song."

The title is almost Keatsian (perhaps intentional for the self-reflective poem that follows) in its lyrical evocation of the classic Autumn / leading-to-death paradigm, bolstered by the dates below. These dates illustrate the occasion of the poem: the deportation (unto death) of a child in 1942. The tone of that word "deported" in those dates is cool and bureaucratic, a distancing of the description of the event from any human reality. The child was simply processed and deported, inconsequentially. It is an unsettling resistance to expectation and an implicit connection of deportation with certain (as in factual) death, but also mirrors the type of conveniently narrowed (en)vision that allowed for so many to die in the holocaust.

The first line acknowledges the position / excuse of a strained government and society ("Undesirable you might have been") at war, and closes with the "untouchable" that is, perhaps, more damning than "undesirable" for its connections with disease and low caste. I feel that the words "caste" and "cast" — as in, cast out of heaven or the holy land — was certainly a connection the poet held in mind for this word choice in line one: an implication of the ancient traditions of Judaism, its history of abuse and diaspora, and its conflict with the mechanistic modern nation state.

Line two — "you were not. Not forgotten" — turns on the first line and redeems "untouchable." It is a true statement of witness in its resistance to forgetting. It affirms as it unties what was left of sense in the previous line. In the third / last line of the stanza, we come upon another untying of sense in the questioning of the very act of witness: the fact that the child was not missed or "passed over" by the state is itself worth lamentation. Again, "passed over" is no random selection — passover is strong in the phrase, as is the sense of being "chosen" as the Hebrews are (an ambiguous honor, not clearly beneficial).

The second stanza details the systematic ("Things marched"), bureaucratic ("sufficient, to that end."), and scientific ("Zyklon and leather") process of the child's death in the holocaust camps. Hill emphasizes the juxtaposition of violence against the child — "leather, patented / terror" — by evoking the patent leather shoes that school-children wear in England. And then we find the surprising inward turn of stanza four; it is an admission of complicity or at least self-doubt, again drawing in to question the act of witness in a new way. The lines ask, Is the act of witness also an act of self-regard? It is a stark reminder that we must not focus on the feelings that the event raises in us, but in the reality of its actual circumstance in fact — it attempts to rescue the description of terrible facts from safely-distancing fiction.

Following from this, the next line — "September fattens on vines" — seems to be an indictment of the poem itself as an "elegy." The fattening calls to mind corpulence, bodily and human, and the vine original sin (itself laying a bodily penance, giving way to the pains of birth and the sins of Cain and Abel). This moment of moral /ethical and religious reflection returns the poem to the historical moment (rose wallpaper crumbling from the city's bombardment), and then to the personal, to sight and witness. The smoke in this speaker's eyes is the smoke of the bombing but recalls the cinder of bodies burning; it is the point at which the concerns and questions are atoned — though obscured, or imperfect, the witness that we enact for those who've died is still (as the loaves and fishes were) "plenty."