550
this is indeed the perfection, this is the heart
of the mystere.
PARTISAN R.EVIEW
The landscape is politicized, becoming the wished-for home of the
"true temperament de droite." The actual lie de France notwithstanding,
this "lie" is set in isolation, in a nostalgic fictional frame (where life is
pencilled into the real), protected by "porte-cochcre and carriage-drive"
from the external world. Yet in the same place there is another
environment, a dimension of reality other than this Utopian VISIon, an
historical world over which Pcguy has no dominion:
This world is different, belongs
to
them -
the lords of limit and of contumely.
This is your enemies' country which they took
in the small hours an age before you woke ...
This is no old Beauce manoir that you keep
but the rue de la Sorbonne, the cramped shop,
its unsold
Calliers
built like barricades,
its fierce disciples, disciplines and feuds ...
The place is the same, save that the "lie" was " taken" while Pcguy
was in the process of dreaming it. As he wakes into the real world he
had been fashioning in his dreams, he finds it changed, alien, discom–
posed. Hill warns, "such dreams portend." The "old Beauce manoir"
becomes a front, a cramped barricaded shop portending war: "here is
your true domaine, its fields of discourse ripening to the Marne." Peguy's
own fictions of an ideal world and landscape ripen
to
a field of battle.
His Utopian visions become grim realities: "the line/ /falters, reforms,
vanishes into the smoke/ of its own unknowing." The line between fic–
tional and ostensibly real landscapes here is a thin one, so much so that
lines of prose, and frontier lines of battle shade together.
I
t is, Hill be–
lieves, Peguy's peculiar and exemplary act of atonement that he crosses
that line, falls into the landscape he had idealized by "standing by,"
physically giving himself to the real ground of that envisioned country,
which, in his poetry, he had fallen short of:
So you spoke to the blood. So, you have risen
above all that and fallen flat on your face
among the beetroots, where we are constrained
to leave you sleeping and
to
step aside....
