aesthetic concord. As "His embroidered / Cloak floats" by, the lovers may follow the model of "the two great-eyed greyhounds," who "leap like one, making delighted sounds."
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Like Hill and, before him, Allen Tate, Hughes utters "the 'formal pledge of art against aimless power.'" These principles are pushed to visionary extreme in "The Martyrdom of Bishop Farrar," which includes the (reputed) last words of the title figure in the epigraph: "'If I flinch from the pain of the burning, believe not the doctrine that I have preached.'" Like this witness's body, Hughes's own artifice attests to the powers of a transcendent art by containing the pain of history, subduing its primary violence to the higher order of arta poetry lined by the silence of its own constraint.
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The skill and nerve needed to hold this New Critical balance are too often lost in
Hawk in the Rain
, which lapses frequently into sheer verbal sensationalism. The textured tensility of its best poems proves the norm rather than the exception in Hughes's second book,
Lupercal
(1960). His achievement finds precept and example in "To Paint a Water Lily," which develops a contrast between the exquisite flowerprecious as the verbal surfaces of his best verseand the submarine horrors, the elemental forces that Hughes both replicates and contains in the well-behaved body of his poetic language. Here the trim couplets convey a sense of immanent forceas a barrel of water charged with a million volts might show only the faintest rippling on the surface:
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 | | Now paint the long-necked lily-flower
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| | Which, deep in both worlds, can be still
As a painting, trembling hardly at all
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| | Though the dragonfly alight,
Whatever horror nudge her root.
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The successes of
Lupercal
turn on acts of verbal restraint that suggest a psychological complex and interest of their own. The first two poems frame it. "Things Present" develops a comparison between a tramp's shelter, fabricated out of materials at hand, and the make-shift constructions of the poet, whose "hands" use words to "embody a now, erect a here"a homey version of the New Critic's verbal icon. But the lowly circumstances of the tramp's abode generate a compensatory fantasy''My sires had towers and great names, / . . . dreams / The tramp in the
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