The Atonement of Poetryn”Aye, those fair living forms swam heavenly/ To tunesnforgotten. …”n—John KeatsnGeoffrey Hill: The Mystery of thenCharity of Charles Peguy; OxfordnUniversity Press; New York.nGeoffrey Hill: The Lords of Limit:nEssays on Literature and Ideas;nOxford University Press; New York.nOne of life’s great joys is to comenacross a new work of literaturenthat is likely to last far beyond anynearly assessment of its value. In thencase of poetry, which chiefly concernsnus here, it is to have known at firstnreading that, say, T.S. Eliot’s “ThenWaste Land” was at once a master-npiece of the age or that Robert Frost’sn”Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,”na lyric of only four stanzas,nwould become a classic on both sidesnof the Adantic.nThomas McDonnell is a free-lancenwriter living near Boston.n101 CHRONICLES OF CULTUREnby Thomas P. McDonnellnMany readers will receive a similarnshock of recognition when they readnGeoffrey Hill’s long poem of 100 quatrains.nThe Mystery of the Charity ofnCharles Peguy (the tide is a reference tonPeguy’s great work Le Mystere de lanCharite de Jeanne d’Arc).nIt is almost too early for any seriousnappraisal to have appeared of GeoffreynHill, whose work includes four volumesnof poetry and a just-publishednvolume of critical essays. Hill was bornnin Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, 1932,nand currentiy lectures in English literaturenat the University of Cambridge.nHe is known in this country, of course,nbut not widely enough or with any-nthing like the recognition he deserves.nOne of the few American critics tondiscuss Hill is Harold Bloom. Bloom’snesoteric and highly idiosyncratic approachnto poetry may say more aboutnBloom than Hill. For instance. Bloomnselects for study the two extremelynconvoluted sonnets called “Annuncia­nnntions” and practically derives fromnthem the inference that Hill is thenmodern laureate of Gnosticism, andnso on.nWhatever Hill’s religious convictionsnmay be, he writes within a Catholicntradition which includes estrangement.nIn any case, though Hill seemsnneither comfortable nor pious in thenancient faith, he is nevertheless immersednin the knowledge of its sacramentsnand liturgy. As far as prosody isnconcerned, no one since Hopkins hasnpacked the English line with suchncompression and energy of language.nIn cogency is liberation. It is in thisnsense, I think, that Hill revivifies thenlanguage at a time when its devaluationnis everywhere apparent.nIn his earliest and still very powerfulnwork (some few items of which hencuriously disavows). Hill seems tonhave favored the quatrain in four-stressnlines as his chief unit of expression. Henhas also written some of the finest—nand, to say it outright, beautiful—nsonnets of our time. Hill then temporarilyndeparted from strict form,nwhich, in the essays he calls the use ofn”atonement” in artmaking, to composenthe great “Mercian Hymns.” Prosaicnin form but charged with poetry innlanguage and imagery, these autobiographicalnsegments run parallel to anrecreation of British prehistory andnmay remind us of the work of DavidnJones in The Anathemata (1952). Butnthe sequence by Hill is probably thenmasterpiece that Harold Bloom claimsnit to be.nAs Bloom predicted, Geoffrey Hillnhas returned to the “tighter mode” ofnthe earlier poetry and especially as nownexemplified in The Mystery of thenCharity of Charles Peguy. The 100nquatrains are in five-stress lines andnobliquely rhymed in the main. Thencritical function at this time can onlynbe to point at the complete poem itselfnand thus resist the temptation to quotenit at length. Peguy, of course, was thenFrench Catholic intellectual of peasantnstock who was killed “on the first daynof the first Battle of the Marne innSeptember 1914.” Hill perceives himnas a modern hero in the complexntragedy which would become knownn