Genius Loci
i.m. D S C H
I
Music’s poltergeist among the grand spirits,
can you now tell what such possession is
or was
saying: I know the woman who stands here
in Pushkin’s clock-haunted house,
shadowy figure nimbus’d by light’s mode
amid the wan company thinning at dawn.
The air sways, a lamp holds vigil
with its smoky flame.
The fiddle is in velvet, the cello
has ceased to urge her proud commodious song.
II
The cello’s long since ceased to urge her proud
commodious song. It is like a love story
that ends up tragic; or some common débâcle
heroic by decree.
There’s breach of custom that privileges laughter.
In art we hazard so much void of compulsion.
The silence and down-turned thumb are not
compulsion but luck, or the climate, being in the wrong place.
The sublime wearies, so we have farting on brass
like one of Stalin’s jokes. This is a sketched-in
historical thesis. You will call it parody.
III
You will call this parody yet your own music
is like a spectral dance more than a dance of spirits
when it is not
like a wide city under a bronze sky,
when it is not the Neva or a high voicing
of a passion-nocturne by Aleksandr Blok;
the unheard-of threnos brought into hearing
and, once heard, a presentiment from nature
no more to be wondered at
but in the broad way of wonder and acceptance.
Not parody precisely. It is true I think
IV
that I have now confused you with Zhivago
and Pushkin and my own ambition
to write Onegin and fifteen string quartets
and some sparely glittering poem about Christmas
or Easter;
to get the drum-raps right for cracking the spring ice:
more fitful as a human testament
than heart-murmur or tinnitus, or the way one’s jaw
creaks when eating. Finally I declare homage
to the late Frank O’Hara, intelligent, choosy
lover of Russia and of Russian music.
V
Who is this woman who stands here in Pushkin’s
clock-haunted house? I do not know.
I cannot
tell presence from memory amid the wan
company thinning at dawn. She is a muse
of sorts, that much is certain. Her hand
is nimbus’d in a gesture of rebuke
or blessing, and the lamp holds vigil
with its well-trimmed flame.
The house-door stands ajar. The cello has now long
languished from her immemorable aubade.
Copyright © 2024 by Geoffrey Hill. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 13, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.
“Geoffrey Hill wrote ‘Genius Loci’ in the summer of 2004. It was one of the first poems he wrote as part of a new book, the volume A Treatise of Civil Power, which appeared in an abbreviated form as a pamphlet in 2005, and which was later published, after major revisions, in 2007. Those revisions include scrapping the long title poem for parts, adding new poems, and, in the case of ‘Genius Loci,’ withholding one of the additional poems from publication. This is a remarkable change, because at one stage ‘Genius Loci’ was to have been placed as the first poem of the whole volume. The poem is addressed to, and in memory of, Dmitri Shostakovich; the locus is Petersburg. It strikes a characteristic note of the whole book: the music is tragic and parodic, it is involved in but also withdraws from the history and politics of its time and its subsequent mythologizing.”
—Professor Kenneth Haynes
Sir Geoffrey Hill
Born in England in 1932, Geoffrey Hill is known for his barbed criticisms of modern society and fellow poets. In 2012, he was knighted for services to literature.