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ment about the social function of the elders in any society. The poem begins
with the young and their excursions beyond the "bay mouth":
The old watch them. They have watched the safe
Packed harbours topple under sudden gales,
Great tides irrupt, yachts burn at the wharf
That on clean seas pitched their effective sails.
There are silences. These, too, they endure:
Soft comings-on; soft after-shocks of calm.
Quietly they wade the disturbed shore;
Gather the dead as the first dead scrape home.
Here as so often in the poetry of Hill, a general statement is caught up
in a concrete form.
This tightly intermeshed logic, image, and grammar achieves a closer
and more graceful organization in Hill's later verse. "Pavana Dolorosa" in his
1978 volume,
Tenebrae,
is a good example. The speaker says that:
Loves I allow and passions I approve:
Ash-Wednesday feasts, ascetic opulence ...
but he goes on to berate himself for such negative and self-wounding
gestures and in the sestet states firmly what lies in store for himself:
Self-seeking hunter of forms, there is no end
to such pursuits. None can revoke your cry.
Your silence is an ecstasy of sound
and your nocturnals blaze upon the day.
I founder in desire for things unfound.
I stay amid the things that will not stay.
Hill's athletic handling of metaphor and his incessant confrontations of
the orthodox world with the claims of twentieth century secularism have a
deep relation to a basic issue in history and thought, something that Walker
Percy has recently called "the San Andreas fault of the modern mind," the
chasm between the world outside man's mind, the world that the "hard sci–
ences" have so triumphantly measured, explored, and put to use - our secu–
lar world - and the world of man's inner self. Rene Descartes in the seven–
teenth century was the first to identify this chasm, but since his time, its
implications have developed in a startling fashion. For the typical emancipated
individual of today, the objective truth has more and more become only that
which can be established by scientific testing. The meanings which for ages
