#10 from "Speech! Speech!"

From the beginning the question how to end

has been part of the act. One cannot have sex

fantasies (any way) as the final

answer to life. Shiftless,

we are working at it, butt-headed

Sothsegger for one, between bouts of sleep

and community arm-wrestling, elbows

in spilt beer. TALK ABOUT LAUGH, TALK ABOUT

ANGRY. But don’t count, don’t bet,

on who or what ends uppermost, the franchise

of slavishness being free to all comers

without distinction.

                                    —Geoffrey Hill (1932– )

                                                from  Selected Poems                                            
                                                  Yale University Press (2010)

COMMENTARY

“The thinker may be tempted, but he is not forced, to heighten his assertive participation in the imaginative symbolization of truth to a self-assertive, autonomous ultimacy; he need not deform the beginning of his quest into a Beginning that brings the End of all beginnings. He can remember his experience of movements and countermovements in the metaxy as the reality from which his assertive insights into true order have emerged . . . .”

Eric Voegelin, In Search of Order, Order and History, Vol V (Vol 18, The Collected Works), p. 55.

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