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Thomas L. Muinzer
A response to ‘September Song.’
This short essay is an analytical interpretation of the poem ‘September Song’ by Geoffrey Hill
written in 1968. Emphasis shall fall upon Formalist methods of investigation; the ‘words on
the page’ assume the primary point of investigation, whilst authorial, reader-response,
historicist and other analytical assumptions are sidelined. The investigation will address the
form and structure of the text before looking specifically at any implicit textual ideas. Finally,
the study will be drawn together in a culminative conclusion.
The poem’s actual layout on the page is peculiar to an extent. When Oscar Wilde met Walt
Whitman on his tour of America, Whitman made a remark that stayed with Wilde for life: he
said that he tried to arrange his poetry on the page as one arranges words on a tombstone, so
that they look pretty. There is an obvious tension between a beautified tombstone and the
grim reality of death that the stone symbolises. One may see in ‘September Song’ a more
literal ‘tombstone’ layout than the one Whitman alluded to. The epigraph ‘born 19.6.32-
deported 24.9.42’ is suggestive of the ‘lived’ and ‘died’ dates commonly found upon
conventional Western gravestones. Yet Hill’s words are not laid out ‘prettily’; rather, they are
disjointed, ragged, emphasising the disgusting quality of death. Keywords are strategically
hung upon the ends of metrically irregular, unrhymed lines in such a way that emphasis is
conferred upon them: ‘untouchable…marched…patented…enough.’ The curious, perhaps
bitter and ironic concluding line (‘This is plenty. This is more than enough.’) may be
interpreted as that which closes the details of the gravestone. It is an overarching after-
