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Geoffrey Hill's First Poem 'Genesis' - A Brief History Of Passion

The English poet Geoffrey Hill died at eighty-four in 2016

His first poem, the aptly named Genesis, taken from his first book, For The Unfallen, was published in the Summer of 1953


 

I

Against the burly air I strode,

Where the tight ocean heaves its load,

Crying the miracles of God.

 

And first I brought the sea to bear

Upon the dead weight of the land;

And the waves flourished at my prayer,

The rivers spawned their sand.

 

And where the streams were salt and full,

The tough pig-headed salmon strove,

Curbing the ebb and the tide’s pull

To reach the steady hills above.

 

II

The second day I stood and saw

The osprey plunge with triggered claw,

Feathering blood along the shore,

To lay the living sinew bare.

 

III

And I renounced, on the fourth day,

This fierce and unregenerate clay,

 

Building as a huge myth for man

The watery Leviathan,

 

And made the glove-winged albatross

Scour the ashes of the sea

Where Capricorn and Zero cross,

A brooding immortality—

Such as the charméd phoenix has

In the unwithering tree.

 

IV

The phoenix burns as cold as frost;

And, like a legendary ghost

The phantom-bird goes wild and lost,

Upon pointless ocean tossed.

 

So, the fifth day, I turned again

To flesh and blood and the blood’s pain.

 

V

On the sixth day, as I rode

In haste about the works of God,

With spurs I plucked the horse’s blood.

 

By blood we live, the hot, the cold

To ravage and redeem the world:

There is no bloodless myth will hold.

 

And by Christ’s blood are men made free

Though in close shrouds their bodies lie

Under the rough pelt of the sea;

 

Though Earth has rolled beneath her weight

The bones that cannot bear the light.

 

                                                                                  ***

 

Genesis of the poem –

I can see myself…I was standing looking out and there was somebody I knew walking along the far side of Liddon … and as I looked, in a kind of vacant mood, a line and a half came into my head, and I didn’t know what to do with that line and a half. And then later, during vacations back in Worcestershire, I began to shape the poem that was ‘Genesis,’ and it appeared in an Oxford pamphlet, one of the Fantasy pamphlets, in the October or November of that same year, 1952 (Geoffrey Hill)

 

                                                                                  ***

 

The blood of life, hidden yet vital, throbbing and felt, like Faith, the blood of belief and action, the blood that gives shape and meaning to the individual and country, the blood that creates and destroys -

 

By blood we live, the hot, the cold

To ravage and redeem the world

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