The life of an honest man must be a perpetual infidelity. For the man who wishes to remain faithful to truth must make himself continually unfaithful to all the continual, successive, indefatigable renascent errors. And the man who wishes to remain faithful to justice must make himself continually unfaithful to inexhaustibly triumphant injustices.
—Charles Péguy, in Bar-Cochebas

The tongue’s atrocities.
—Geoffrey Hill, in “History as Poetry”

When a major new work appears by one of the best poets now writing it is reason enough to command our attention. But when the work marks a significant departure in the poet’s career, it is cause for our most careful scrutiny. When Geoffrey Hill’s long poem, The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy,[1] was published in Britain last year, it was immediately apparent to readers familiar with Hill’s career that the poet was, at the age of fifty, striking out in a new direction. For thirty years, Hill had written poems whose central characteristic was a deep unease with the whole idea of writing poetry. Indeed, so fiercely had Hill’s work questioned itself that at times it often seemed as if he would cease writing altogether. With the publication of Tenebrae, in 1978, Hill’s hand was so palsied by a near-nihilistic despair that his career seemed expended. But with Péguy, he has burst forth with one hundred quatrains of expansive, and in some ways vigorous, homage. Péguyis a moving rebellion against Hill’s own previous