'The Distant Fury of Battle

Hi everyone, this is Maria.

I found Geoffrey Hill’s ‘The Distant Fury of Battle’ (p.1831 in the Norton) striking in its depiction of the struggle to preserve human meaning against the brutality of physical reality. These modes of meaning range from ‘Words glossed on stone’ to ‘licence and duress’ and although they wield power over humankind (with unions ‘Claim[ing] the born leader, the prepared/ Leader’) their agency is incompatible with the sheer physicality of nature which in itself reduces us to purely physical beings in death, where all we can do is ‘test /Alike the endurance of yews’.

Despite this bleak destiny, Hill explores alternative ways of finding meaning in life through ‘the arrangement of love’, yet the mention of ‘auspices’, ‘subjects’ and ‘profits’ suggest that humans who turn to this particular method end up becoming a slave to this quest for meaning in their anxiety to extract gratification from it. I think that in light of this, the poem’s last sentence ‘Some, dug out of hot-beds, are brought bare, Not past conceiving but past care.’ doesn’t necessarily evoke bleak resignation , but a neutrality to the battle between meaning and reality where the preservation of meaning after death isn’t worth spending one’s life agonising over. This would explain the title ‘The Distant Fury of the Battle’; the fury is distant as it is the individual’s choice whether or not to engage in this battle to preserve that which they feel is important enough to withstand the tests of time and nature.