eoffrey Hill’s long poem “De Jure Belli Ac Pacis” ("The Law of War and Peace") is based upon the same titled 1625 work by Hugo Grotius. In his treatise, Grotius emphasized the importance of moral laws and how such laws should rule both the individual and the state. Hill’s poem appears in his1995 collection Canaan, and is one of the strongest poems in that critically acclaimed collection. With its emphasis on faith and martyrdom, along with a rightly rooted but spiritually infused national pride, “De Jure Belli Ac Pacis” brings together those traits that work best in Hill’s poetry. Also present, however, is the bitter voice of a satirist. The way the poet plaits both elegy and satire makes for an unusual, but accomplished, poem that aims for the highest stakes through both song and sneer.
Hans-Bernd von Haeften is the subject of the poem’s elegy. Haefton was part of the July 20, 1944, plot to kill Hitler. He was associated with the Kreisau group, whose own motivations for Hitler’s removal were multiple. Art, literature, religion and socialism were all topics of interest (and debate) for the group. Compared to other anti-Hitler groups (others were involved in the plot), the Kreisau group in particular embraced various utopian ideas of what they hoped would be a new Germany after the monster’s death. They were the dreamers. Whatever the Kreisau group’s differences, they were united in their disgust with Hitler and sought desperately some sort of deal with the Allies before their country was burned to a cinder. Some, such as Haefton, a member of the Confessing Church, instilled their mission to strike down Hitler with religious necessity. The plot failed, and most of the plotters were rounded up and executed — some in a horrible manner. Haefton was executed August 15th at Plotzensee Prison. He was hung with piano wire from an iron beam. The execution may, as with others, have been filmed for Hitler’s enjoyment. This flawed but real heroism is juxtaposed throughout the poem with Hill’s sense of where Europe, in all its current gray ambiguities, now finds itself.
Hill begins the poem with a compressed parody of Genesis - a sonorous proclamation from Europe’s new “assessors” that the “people moves” now as “one spirit.” The satiric play on the socialist and singular “people” is followed immediately by the verb “moves” which is hardly singular in the directions it suggests. Clearly, Hill sees hypocrisy at the moment of new creation, with creation here being the Europe of the Maastrict Treaty. Further compounding the satire, the use of “spirt” is meant to recall, through contrast, the Trinitarian God moving across the waters in the early part of Genesis. Hill concludes this inversion with “water is no longer found” in this New Europe. Hitler’s violent dream of a unified Europe has to some extent come into bland being - one that blurs borders and sucks away national identity:
The people moves as one spirit unfettered claim our assessors of stone. When the nations fall dispossessed such conjurings possessed them, elaborate barren fountains, projected aqueducts where water is no longer found.
Such bitterness and black humor over modern day politics is probably more in keeping with the savage, and equally allusive, spirit of a Donne satire. At the end of the section, Hill asks — with gallow’s humor (“high strung”) — the question which fuses together elegy and satire, forcing the reader throughout the poem to look outward to the historical and political landscape (past and present), but also inward to weigh within Time’s balance the recurring costs of discipleship:
Could none predict these haughty degradations as now your high-strung martyred resistance serves to consecrate the liberties of Maastrict?
The “liberties” are, of course, ironic. And such irony in what is ultimately an elegy requires immediate relief. Hill delivers grimly, in Part II, the reality of Haefton’s terrible death, with“chapel windows” signaling crucifixion rather than comfort:
The iron-beamed engine-shed has chapel windows. Glare-eyed, you spun. The hooks are still in the beam;
However, such sufferings, such losses, are no longer contemplated or even remembered by an unthinking Time that simultaneously “strengthens” even as it fades. The burden of Remembrance is up to man. But in that special category of Remembrance — Martyrdom, the state that straddles the physical and spiritual worlds — Hill, throughout the body of his poetry, has always found individuals and events that exist both in history and outside it. They are concurrent, but separate. Martyrdom can “set its own wreath.” In contrast Europe, Europa, is a high class whore “displaying her parts.” Yes, Europe is a new power again, but one that has no sense of its previous history, suggesting a future that will be shallow, unrealized.
Time passes, strengthening and fading, Europa hetaera displays her parts, her triumph to tax even Durer’s resplendent economy in rictus and graven sorrow.
In Part IV, Hill continues to scour the New Europe. The poet finds that the place of execution, Plotzensee, has been polluted by a sentiment that lacks understanding, and worse, recalls the cynical opportunism of Cicero:
In Plotzensee where you were hanged they now hang tokens of reparation in good faith compound with Cicero’s maxims, Schiller’s chant, your silenced verities.
In the next two lines, Hill achieves a perfect blend of satire and elegy. First, there is the satiric blast, right down to isolation of “ec”:
To the high-minded base metal-forgers of this common Europe, community of parody, you stand ec- centric as a prophet.
And next is the song — in effect, a Manichaean psalm for the martyr:
There is no better vision that I can summon: you were upheld on the strong wings of the Psalms before you died. Evil is not good’s absence but gravity’s everlasting bedrock and its fatal chains inert, violent, the suffrage of our days.
At this point, Hill’s fury at the New Europe is largely spent. The poem’s final three sections focus more on the suffering of Haefton, his dark nights of imprisonment, his Gesthemane:
Not harmonies - harmonics, astral whisperings light-years above the stave; groans, murmurs, cries, tappings from cell to cell. It is a night watch, indeterminate and of vast concentration, of those redeeming their pledged fear, who strike faith from the hard rock of God’s falleness;
This compression is particularly impressive. The pun on stave, its associations with the iron beam of execution and the act of staving is effective. Here, the act of striking (like Moses) the hard rock yields the ever new discovery of a different stone: Jesus, the Cornerstone.
Parts VI and VII widen the scope of the historical tragedy. Haefton was not the only one to die. Goerdeler, Hofaker, and Fellgiebel (not members of the Kreisau group, but plotters all the same) are also victims, but victims that occupy narrow Dantean “hypocausts” in the “stark reich” where, hopefully, mercifully, Christ will descend to preach to those lost in Hell.
For Hill, the mystery of evil and what God allows is never dodged. In section VII, Hill continues his martyrology, presenting the image of the impatient SS officer, a demon of the 20th Century, and then leaping back to the days of Nero and the deaths of the faithful “elsewhere” as “self-torches.” The linkage doesn’t stop there, as God’s absence is also “elsewhere.” The Book of Daniel, the fiery furnace, Zion’s “lamentation” and the fate of the plotters all unite in a mystical convergence of suffering and salvation:
Smart whip-tap at boot-top, absolute license of demons to wreck their correction; elsewhere they are fixed self-torches in sulphur; as there is a God, elsewhere, of jealous mercy this is not news; the book of Daniel’s strength unwritten, Zion’s resurgent lamentation in Kreisau’s witnessing here undenizened in the sand, to the old waste.
Here, Hill lodges his final complaint against the New Europe. Kreisau’s “witnessing,”unlike Nero’s human torches, or the suffering Jews of the Holocaust, is not remembered. To some extent, Hill is revisiting old ground already covered in earlier sections of the poem, with Europe again portrayed as a shallow whore. However, if one remembers the lavish praise bestowed upon the historical and mercenary figure of Schindler after the Spielburg movie Schindler’s List, I can understand Hill’s desire to get one more thumb into the unrepentant hooker’s eye. The ultimately cheap sentiment of that movie isn’t enough. True, Schindler saved Jews, and some of them may have even clapped for him in the last minutes of the last reel, but the plotters sought to slay the dragon himself:
So let the rights be speculation, fantastic pickings, late gold of Europa in her brief modish rags - Schindler! Schindler!
The elegist takes over in Section VIII. The gentle and meditative repetition of “if” is like a finger thoughtfully tapping the poet’s temple as he considers the facts and testimonies. Such considerations provide the poet with his own opportunity bear witness. To some extent one senses Hill’s impotent fury at his own bloodless suffering. Nevertheless, Hill, the poet and martyrologist (to borrow Harold Bloom’s appropriate tag for Hill), will dutifully remember. The psalm, in order to rise to God, must outwrestle the satire:
But if - but if; and if nowhere but here archives for catacombs; letters, codes, prayers,
Haefton and his fellow plotters may not be your classic martyrs. (They wanted a man dead for God’s sake.) However, given the last century’s evil extremes, the plotters are worthy examples, illuminative lamps even ("Lucerna"), for those who continue to meditate, pray, and hope in our times of fire:
Lucerna the soul flame, as it has stood through the ages, ebbing, and again, lambent, replenished, in its stoup of clay.© Steve Harris