The epigraph of Hill's "September Song," "born 19.6.32 - deported 24.9.42"--a poem that was published in Hill's second book King Log (1968) but can be most easily obtained these days in Hill's

Selected Poems--places the deportation to Auschwitz of the Jewish child whom Hill makes his almost exact contemporary--the child's birthday is only a day later than Hill's own--on a day that passes this week. The format of the epigraph, of course, simulates the dates that one normally observes on a gravestone, though it is important to note that September 24 is the date of the child's deportation, not his or her death. Death will, of course, come, but it is, at least if we take the epigraph's form at face value, determined by the fact of deportation. The actual date of death could be, in some way, secondary, or our inability to know it could be a further reminder of the indifference with which the victim's life was regarded. The poem's second stanza confirms either suggestion:

As estimated, you died. Things marched,

sufficient, to that end.

Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented

terror, so many routine cries.

Much has been written about the matter-of-factness of these lines, the way the diction and rhythm call attention to the bureaucratic nature of the terror that took place in the concentration camps, with its marching, estimations, sufficiency, and routineness.

The next stanza, the parenthetical "(I have made/ an elegy for myself it/ is true)," strikes me as the more haunting. On the one hand, it calls attention to the fact that the elegist is interested in his poem as much as, if not more than, the subject of the elegy, if we take the words to mean, "I have written this poem to satisfy my desire to write poetry." On the other hand, the stanza turns the loss of Hill's anonymous victim into something that affects the speaker on a personal level, endowing him or her with a significance he or she lacked in life, that is, if we understand the words to mean, "knowing the manner of your death kills something in me that needs to be elegized."

The later reading seems to address Adorno's pronouncement that "To write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric" and suggests that to fail to write lyric poetry that deals with Auschwitz is to risk failing to give voice to the personal significance Auschwitz should have for each of us. (Jim Reilly's Shadowtime: History and Representation in Hardy, Conrad and George Eliot briefly discusses Hill's reacting to Adorno, though his interests take him in a different direction.) We can choose to speak "too late or not too late," to appropriate a line from "Hill's "'Christmas Trees,'" a poem from Tenebrae (1977) that deals with Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the theologian who was involved in the German resistance movement and who was executed by the Nazis in 1945, a few months before World War II ended.