Childe Stauffenberg

Elsewhere, the figure of Stefan George inspires a less Shakespearean rhetoric:

Contempt is in order: one
would give much
to see those Frankish
rites nobly concluded.

Almost, for Childe Stauffenberg,
it fell so;
but this was tragedy
botched, unimagined,

within that circle.
Medallion-profile
of hauteur,
Caesarian abstinence!

„Childe Stauffenberg“ is Hill’s arch name for the aristocratic German officer, a disciple of George , who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944. „De Jure Belli ac Pacis,“ another sequence in the book, praises another of the so-called Kreisau conspirators, Hans-Bernd von Haeften. / Adam Kirsch über den Dichter Geoffrey Hill, The New Republic 27.5.02