JEFFREY DONALDSON
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itself as stopping short of that fall, turning aside towards its own troubled
contemplation, and asks the questions: How are we liable (literally tied
or bound) to what we have made? What can it have meant for Peguy to
"defend your first position to your last word?" And finally, how do we
situate ourselves between such fatal defenses and the living demands of the
imperfect work at hand?:
Did Peguy kill Jaures? Did he incite
the assassin? Must men stand by what they write
as by their camp-beds or their weaponry
or shell-shocked comrades while they sag and cry?
Even as Hill first asks whether such fealty towards what we have
made need exist ("Must men stand by what they write?"), he invokes a
physical dimension that will determine the relationship throughout the
poem.
In
what way can one be thought to stand by one's work? Is it a
physical gesture, as to stand up beside the bed one will lie down in, the
weaponry one will use, or one's wounded comrades? The entire passage,
bearing on the preposition in "stand by," becomes itself a prepositioning
of the question of a writer's responsibilities and the directions in the
poem that it will take. The
mise en scene
with which
Hill
represents
Peguy's life and death comprises various landscapes, some real and some
imaginary , and he is careful to distinguish them. Peguy cu ltivates, on the
one hand, notions of an ideal country, partly a reactionary vision of
"Old France," and partly a dream of a future socialist Utopia:
Yours is their dream of France, militant-pastoral:
musky red gillyvors, the wicker bark
of clematis braided across old brick
and the slow chain that cranks into the well
morning and evening.
Hill returns, after Pcguy's "fall," to this nostalgic vision:
There is an ancient landscape of green branches -
true temperament de droite, you have your wish -
crosshatching the twigs and light, goldfinches
among the peppery lilac, the small fish
pencilled into the stream. Ah, such a land
the lie de France once was.
I .. ·1
Iron men who bell the hours,
marshals of porte-cochere and carriage-drive,
