Saving Love’s Face: On Geoffrey Hill

Abstract: To save love’s face is, for Geoffrey Hill, first to recognize why we are difficult with who and what we love, and how those modes of difficulty appear. Minimally, to save love’s face is to order love so that its failures, perversions and alienations are not noticed, at least not in public: here to save is to abridge, whether by recourse to social convention or to art. Yet love, for Hill, is far more extensive than evidenced in the difficulties of companionate marriage and its inevitable sorrows; and its demands on us exceed any gaze upon the naked face of the other person, which can always be no more (and no less) than the mistaking of one’s own gaze reflected in the other’s face to the inevitable pain of both parties.