Awkward Bow 

Jeremy Noel-Tod

The first poem of For the Unfallen (1958), Geoffrey Hill’s first book, was entitled ‘Genesis’. It declared:

By blood we live, the hot, the cold,
To ravage and redeem the world:
There is no bloodless myth will hold.

Hot blood is at the heart of Hill’s theological, oppositional poetics. Man’s passions may turn vicious, but without them he is unredeemable. Hence Hill’s admiration for righteous anger and blood sacrifice. Blood, in his poems, functions as a metonym for sincerity as much as savagery; and the image of fake blood (a ‘wound’ from a ‘red biro’) recurs as a metaphor for the problem that preoccupies Hill as a writer: how to be both artful and sincere. ‘Artistic men prod dead men from their stone’ in one early poem. The ambiguity – whose stone is it? – is accusatory. Hill presents himself as a writer compelled to memorialise the glorious dead in verse, even though the cold-bloodedness of the artist aestheticising the suffering of others troubles and inhibits him.

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