Geoffrey Hill: Writing 'September Song'
This sequence of notes and drafts is a complete record of the development of 'September Song', a poem by Geoffrey Hill.
'September Song' was first published in 1968 in King Log, Hill’s second poetry collection, written while he was working at the University of Leeds.
The drafts are taken from two notebooks in the Geoffrey Hill Archive. The earliest notes can be seen amongst material for the 'Funeral Music' sequence in 'King Log Notebook IV', and can be loosely dated to November 1965. Hill returned to the the poem in the following notebook, '[King Log] Notebook V 1966 - 67'.
This second sequence shows a concentrated period of composition between 28 September and 20 October 1966. This is unusual for Hill, whose poems could evolve through numerous drafts across several notebooks.
These concentrated drafts make it possible to trace the sequence of composition of 'September Song' in detail. They demonstrate the precision with which words and phrases are selected: we see Hill try multiple possibilities across drafts for the poem’s first word, for example. Drafts also show ideas and phrases that were ultimately abandoned, giving insight into Hill's intent. The notebooks preserve the physical order of composition, showing how minor, late stage changes can impact the tone of the poem.
About the Poem
'September Song' is one of the most well-known and anthologised Holocaust poems written by a non-survivor. It is composed as elegy for an unnamed child born one day before Hill, whose death is framed against the industrialised horror of the Holocaust. 'September Song' is complex poem, and a striking example of the 'awkward poetics' of Holocaust poetry.
The earliest draft in the sequence identifies the child as Edita Pollaková. In a 2008 interview (Anne Mounic, Temporel), Hill explained that he had seen her drawings at an exhibition of artwork created by children from the Theresienstadt Ghetto, shown in Leeds in the early 1960s. The near coincidence of their birthdates first prompted the poem. Pollaková’s artwork is now held by the Jewish Museum in Prague.
Critical readings of September Song include Jon Silkin’s essay in British Poetry Since 1960: A Critical Survey (ed. Schmidt and Lindop, 1972), as well as discussions in Geoffrey Hill: Essays on His Work (ed. Peter Robinson, 1985), Christopher Ricks’s The Force of Poetry (1984), and Silkin’s The Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth-Century Poetry (1997). A more recent study, Anthony Rowland’s Reading Holocaust Poetry: Singularity and Geoffrey Hill’s “September Song” (2016), examines the poem in relation to these archival drafts.
