It takes a stern Puritan to appreciate the pleasures of the flesh. Restraint whets the senses. John Milton, the most sensuous of English poets before Keats, illustrates this principle throughout his work but perhaps nowhere more magnificently than in his masque “Comus,” first performed in 1634 at Ludlow Castle for the Earl of Bridgewater. A masque is a courtly spectacle performed to music; it’s hard to imagine, though, how music, even by Henry Lawes, could have added to the supreme melodiousness of this short work. Comus himself is a sorcerer, a seductive advocate of pleasure, who urges the virtues of satiety. The beauty of creation, to which Milton was unusually sensitive, is his realm; or, as he puts it, “Beauty is nature’s brag, and must be shown / In courts, at feasts, and high solemnities / Where most may wonder at the workmanship.”

Against this Milton pits the virtue of chastity. There wouldn’t seem to be much of a contest. In fact, however, the singular triumph of the masque is to make chastity appear more compelling, even more seductive, than license; for Milton, in the person of the unnamed Lady whom Comus attempts to seduce, equates chastity with freedom. Though bound by a spell, the Lady abjures Comus with these lines: “Thou canst not touch the freedom of my mind / With all thy charms, although this corporeal rind / Thou hast immanacled.”

The debate between order and disorder, reason and unreason, freedom and entanglement, provides the theme for Geoffrey Hill’s new sequence of poems “Scenes From Comus”(Penguin UK, 128 pages, L9.99).Like all Mr. Hill’s work, the sequence is densely textured, allusive, and even cryptic at times, shot through with magical evocations of landscape and the shift of seasons, and commanding a verbal music – a “grand and crabby music,” as he puts it – that can encompass a snarl as easily as a song. “Scenes From Comus” strikes me as one of Hill’s finest and most complex works, not only because of its difficult beauty but because it embodies, as no other contemporary poetry I know, a rare moral passion.

This fierce amalgam of swooping verbal beauty with thorny scrupulosity hasn’t been much in evidence in English poetry since Eliot’s “Four Quartets,” and Mr. Hill struggles against this legacy even as he enriches it. The oddity of Mr. Hill’s accents, which seem to come from a deeper stratum of the tradition of English poetry than we are accustomed to nowadays, may account for the dismaying neglect he has suffered in his adopted country (he’s been professor of literature and religion at Boston University for more than 10 years now).

I have it on good authority that “Scenes From Comus,” though welcomed with tremendous acclaim in his native England – and rightly so – has yet to find an American publisher. To their shame our editors and critics favor those whom Mr. Hill terms “the self servers now in full career.” That Mr. Hill could be ignored while last year’s Pulitzer was awarded to the maudlin doggerel of Franz Wright, to mention but this squalid instance, tells us all we need to know about the American poetry scene.

Mr. Hill’s new book is both an homage and antiphon to Milton’s “Comus.” But Mr. Hill’s Comus is a subtler personage than Milton’s, for Mr. Hill can openly identify with him (Milton does so only covertly), as in poem 39 of the sequence, here in its entirety:

Rewriting his own deepest reading: that
fair comment on the wiped out fifty years
from genesis to this? Give me a break
in concentration, so I can concentrate,
as I once did – a Comus child – on pignuts,
on how the tree gum, malleable, came to hand
as damson-amber; which I tried to burn.

Mr. Hill here refers to his own early poetry, especially his great lyric “Genesis,” written a half-century before. But the implicit pathos lies in his wish to recapture the child he was once, enraptured like Comus himself with the fruits of the earth. What better image for the concentrated longing of childhood before the obdurate inexhaustibility of the world, than that pliable resin, “damson-amber,” which he tried in vain to burn?

The poems in which Mr. Hill, a Comus fettered by old age, conjures up the earth are the most approachable on a first reading. And there is a new note, more conciliatory, more accepting, in his verse now, as when he writes: ” There is a dogged beauty in the world, / Unembarrassing goodness, honesty unfazed.” Mr. Hill has always been a poet of praise but here his praise is full-throated, and all the more moving for that:

Praise all change
this side of chaos, with the immovable.
Praise hook-wheeled constellations, praise autumn’s
dense clearances, its disfiguring splendours,
far-riding glacial rock, the setting
sun like a stoke-hole, the winter woods
gutted by fire.

This evokes the bleak grandeur of Iceland, which appears alongside piercing memories of England throughout the sequence, as though a contemporary Comus must summon up not lush woodlands and brimming glades but the most austere of landscapes to give full voice to his love of the world. Though Mr. Hill’s landscapes are invariably paysages moralises – countrysides saturated by consciousness – they are also vividly real, as when he writes of “Thule’s irregular reefs” and says, “try naming them / natural pindarics.” There is a scansion of landscape at work here in which painstaking vision colludes with language to create “ceremonies of speech.”

By many, I fear, Mr. Hill’s new work will be dismissed as inordinately “difficult.” True, he inserts untranslated snippets of Welsh and Icelandic; he alludes, often glancingly, to other poets from Chaucer to Wyatt and Marvel; his voice shifts registers without warning, so that we sometimes aren’t sure who is speaking; in short, he makes no concessions. This matters not at all. “Scenes From Comus” deepens with every reading. I don’t pretend to “understand” it all, even after several. But, then, I don’t “understand” Beethoven’s Late Quartets or the paintings of Balthus; yet I love them more each time I encounter them, as I do Mr. Hill’s poetry.

Like the books that have preceded “Scenes From Comus” during the last astonishing decade of Mr. Hill’s production – he has published more in those 10 years than in the preceding 40 – this is a sequence to be lived with, and experienced, over time. Mr. Hill, unlike his more lauded contemporaries, refuses to compose disposable poetry. Against the “leadenness of things,” he hopes and strives for “a portal for the hierarchies.” If we’re stubborn and patient enough, his work suggests, we may get a glimpse through those portals where “in shifting ‘scapes eternity resumes.” And who ever claimed that that would be easy?