> What's the sense of this last line, Dom?
Heavily ironic, I think. This is the poem that speaks of a painting of the
martyrdom of Saint Sebastian as depicting "a grotesque situation, but
priceless, and harmless to the nation" - the voice here is the voice of an
aesthete appraising the world of "high art" as pleasingly cleansed of the
"cold blood of sacrifice". Hill sees it differently - "there is no bloodless
myth will hold", etc. - although there's an ambivalence here too: on the one
hand, he seems to want the accomplishment, the "fitness", of the art work to
atone for the "unlikeness" of the world; on the other hand, he's constantly
pointing out the inadequacy, not to mention the heartlessness, of the
"fictive consonance" offered by art - "when we would accost her with real
cries / silver on silver thrills itself to ice".
This presupposes an aesthetic of coherence and formal accomplishment, of
course; I think the later work shifts towards a more dialogic understanding
of poetry, away from the poem that "comes right with a click like a closing
box" and towards the poem as a kind of dubiously self-auditing heteroglossia
(to put it crudely - Merle Brown puts it better in his discussion of Hill's
"double lyric", although - inconveniently for my thesis - what he's
discussing is the *early* work) - which brings a different, and I think more
interesting, set of problems with it. Incidentally, "Speech! Speech!", the
new collection with one poem for each of the 120 days of Sodom (how's *that*
for a conceit?), is out later in November - see Amazon.com for details...
- Dom
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