By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Ovid in the Third Reich’ deals with a challenging topic, and presents several challenges to the reader. The poem was first published as the opening poem in Geoffrey Hill’s second collection, King Log (1968). Before proceeding to our analysis of the poem, you might want to read ‘Ovid in the Third Reich’ here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Geoffrey Hill, who died in 2016, once defended ‘difficulty’ in poetry, arguing that ‘genuinely difficult art is truly democratic’. Human beings are complicated, so any poetry that is to be worthy of us should reflect our complexity, whether moral, emotional, or intellectual. ‘September Song’ reflects Hill’s dedication to this principle, tackling one of the most ‘difficult’ subjects for a poet to write about: the Holocaust. ‘September Song’, which can be read here, was published in 1968.
The poem is grimly prefaced by the birth and death dates of a child who, we are told, was ‘deported’ in 1942. As we read on, we realise that ‘deported’ is a military euphemism, and the child was in fact killed in 1942, aged just ten years old, presumably in one of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps. The (fictional) child’s birth date, ‘19.6.32’, is significant: this is the day after Hill himself was born.