164
PARTISAN REVIEW
As
though the dead had
Finis
on their brows;
Oh my dear one, I shall grieve for you
For the rest of life with slightly
Varying cadence, oh my dear one;
Theology makes good bedside reading. Some
Who are lost covet scholastic proof,
subsistence of probation, modest balm;
Whatever strikes and maims us is not
Fate, to our knowledge. En avant, Peguy!
The irony of advancement. Say 'we
possess nothing: try to hold on to that.'
These are cited, respectively, from "Genesis" (a poem in five sections),
"Ovid in the Third Reich" (of which this is the second of two
quatrains), "The Imaginative Life" (in six unrhymed tercets), "The
Songbook of Sebastian ArruITUz" (an eleven-poem suite), "An Apology
for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England" (a sequence of
thirteen sonnets), and "The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Peguy" (a
hundred quatrains in ten sections), which span the thirty years between
1952 and 1983.
Among the epigraphs to the 1985
Collected Poems
-
precursor of the
present volume - Hill included the line "In the gloom, the gold gathers
the light against it" from Pound's eleventh
Canto,
"last of the
'Malatesta' Cantos" although certainly not the last of Sigismondo
Malatesta. In
The Enemy's Country
Hill returns to the line and to this
" 'famous condottiere, military engineer, and patron of the arts', one of
the great factive heroes of the
Cantos,"
who "defines himself by resistant
achievement," transfiguring syntax. For Hill, Pound's line not only
describes what Pound in 1915 referred to as the "intelligence at bay,"
but itself displays the very intelligence that Hill locates in an irreducible
"ambivalence within the term 'at bay' ":
It is both 'the chorus of barking raised by hounds in immediate
conflict with a hunted animal' and the 'position of a hunted animal
when, unable to flee farther, it turns, faces the hounds, and defends
itself at <;:lose quarters.' The 'chorus' determines the 'position' but the
creature in that position manifests its own determination and may
well force that chorus back upon an urgent and surprising
redefinition.
