JEFFREY DONALDSON
551
It is here that we "contemplate the working/ of the radical soul ..
. waking/ into the foreboding of its inheritance/ its landscape and inner
domain; images/ of earth and grace." Landscape becomes Peguy's
"inheritance" ("Dying, your whole life/ fell into place"), a new inner
domain, anticipated by his Utopian "true domaine" and "field of dis–
course." Thus being "dug from the claggy Beauce and returned to it,"
Peguy is imagined as dying "happy" for the "terre charnelle," to which
he falls, and "in strange Christian hope, [goes] down into the darkness of
resurrection," where his assumption continues:
Woefully battered but not too bloody,
smeared by fraternal root-crops and at one
with the fritillary and the veined stone,
having composed his great work, his small body,
for the last rites of truth....
The landscape, then, is Peguy's "Mystcre," literally the place of his
rite, his vigilant "standing by." He atones for his troubled field of dis–
course by dropping to the field of battle it had become. Yet Hill reminds
us that he himself is still standing, "counting his blessings," "empty
handed":
We are 'embusqucs,' having no wounds to show
save from the thorns, ecstatic at such pain.
Once more the truth advances; and again
the metaphors of blood begin to flow.
As such who are "constrained/ to leave [Peguy] sleeping and to step
aside/ from the fleshed bayonets ... " we "embusques" have much to
account for. How shall contemplation respond? How might this
"stepping aside" and "turning away" become a "standing by?" How
might poetry itself keep a vigil? The poem involves Hill's own attempt
to "stand by" his work, to embody some expiatory act as his own re–
flection of Peguy's example.
In "Poetry as Menace and Atonement," Hill borrows a phrase from
Claude Levi-Strauss, who remarks that "the poet behaves with regard to
language like an engineer trying to form heavier atoms from lighter
ones." He also cites Karl Barth's remark, "Sin is the specific gravity of
human nature as such," concluding in turn:
... it is at the heart of this 'heaviness' that poetry must do its atoning
work, this heaviness which is simultaneously the "density" of lan-
