Reading the new issue of Poetry, I was happy to see several new poems by the great British poet Geoffrey Hill (husband of Nixon in China librettist Alice Goodman). I immediately noticed that one big new poem, "Précis or Memorandum of Civil Power," alludes to Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time. It's hard to sum up the drift of this typically rich, dense, and elusive text ("What lives is the arcane" is one telling line), but Hill seems to be arguing for the power of a more oblique art to act on history with positive force. The poem ends with an encomium to Messiaen's masterpiece, placing it in historical context that may also be a metaphor for the present moment:
...it strikes chords
direct and angular: the terrible
unreadiness of France to hold her own:
nineteen forty
and what Marc Bloch entitled Strange Defeat;
prisoners, of whom Messiaen was one,
the unconventional quartet for which
the Quatuor
was fashioned as a thing beyond the time,
beyond the sick decorum of betrayal,
Pétain, Laval, the shabby prim hotels,
senility
fortified with spa waters....
Strike up, augment,
irregular beauties contra the New Order.
Make do with cogent if austere finale.
