We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most “intellectual” piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?2 With these words, part of an interview published in the Paris Review in 2000, Geoffrey Hill responds to the interviewer’s comment that his poetry is often thought to be inaccessible by presenting this abstruseness as a natural and appropriate response to the challenges of understanding humanity itself. In particular, Hill touches on two themes which, this essay argues, were of profound concern to writers and theologians in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: the opacity of the self to the self, and the capacity of poetics to explore this mystery