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For the Unfallen
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For the Unfallen
For the Unfallen is a 1959 collection of poems by English poet Geoffrey Hill. The poems in the collection have been described as largely vatic in nature. The collection garnered acclaim upon release, and contains the famous poem "Genesis".
For the Unfallen contains 29 poems. They are:
The poem "Genesis" was written in 1952. The poems from "Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings" to the work "Of Commerce and Society" were written from 1955 to 1957. The last five poems, which in the words of scholar Vincent B. Sherry "signal a reassessment of the working approaches" in most preceding poems, are from 1958.
Sherry argues that throughout the collection, the speaker believes words do not need to have single clear referents. He notes how the poet-speaker in "Genesis" first feels hope about the power of his words to "create a world", then despair when failing to represent surrounding occurrences accurately, and ultimately openness to a word lacking a single reference – and how the last phase is an aspect of the later poem "Holy Thursday" as well.
The three lines in Part V of the poem, which start with "By blood we live", are among Hill's more famous lines.
William Logan claimed that this poem is about "the absence of gods, not the presence of devils".
According to David C. Mahan at Yale University, this poem is about a communicant at the Eucharist who experiences "distressed belief": he believes, but cannot truly engage. In Mahan's view, the poem "generates a muted longing for the authentic, a yearning for contact with spiritual reality"; however, it still does not, in Mahan's view, advocate "any easy resolution to the difficulties and ambiguities" of faith. The scholar also questions whether the poem's title refers to a God who has been invited at the rite to attend, or refers to the communicant (who is like a guest in his aloofness).
A ballad from 1953, John P. Vickery said in the book The Modern Elegiac Temper (2006) that Hill explores the elegiac convention with "a resolute quizzicality" in this poem, refusing both to mourn explicitly and to "exalt his subject extravagantly". Vickery noted that the last stanza is characteristic of an elegy, but that there is a low-keyed rendering of the death. Erica McAlpine, in the book The Poet's Mistake (2020), interpreted the last part of the poem as "a spring that cannot quite console".
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For the Unfallen
For the Unfallen is a 1959 collection of poems by English poet Geoffrey Hill. The poems in the collection have been described as largely vatic in nature. The collection garnered acclaim upon release, and contains the famous poem "Genesis".
For the Unfallen contains 29 poems. They are:
The poem "Genesis" was written in 1952. The poems from "Requiem for the Plantagenet Kings" to the work "Of Commerce and Society" were written from 1955 to 1957. The last five poems, which in the words of scholar Vincent B. Sherry "signal a reassessment of the working approaches" in most preceding poems, are from 1958.
Sherry argues that throughout the collection, the speaker believes words do not need to have single clear referents. He notes how the poet-speaker in "Genesis" first feels hope about the power of his words to "create a world", then despair when failing to represent surrounding occurrences accurately, and ultimately openness to a word lacking a single reference – and how the last phase is an aspect of the later poem "Holy Thursday" as well.
The three lines in Part V of the poem, which start with "By blood we live", are among Hill's more famous lines.
William Logan claimed that this poem is about "the absence of gods, not the presence of devils".
According to David C. Mahan at Yale University, this poem is about a communicant at the Eucharist who experiences "distressed belief": he believes, but cannot truly engage. In Mahan's view, the poem "generates a muted longing for the authentic, a yearning for contact with spiritual reality"; however, it still does not, in Mahan's view, advocate "any easy resolution to the difficulties and ambiguities" of faith. The scholar also questions whether the poem's title refers to a God who has been invited at the rite to attend, or refers to the communicant (who is like a guest in his aloofness).
A ballad from 1953, John P. Vickery said in the book The Modern Elegiac Temper (2006) that Hill explores the elegiac convention with "a resolute quizzicality" in this poem, refusing both to mourn explicitly and to "exalt his subject extravagantly". Vickery noted that the last stanza is characteristic of an elegy, but that there is a low-keyed rendering of the death. Erica McAlpine, in the book The Poet's Mistake (2020), interpreted the last part of the poem as "a spring that cannot quite console".