Thomas Hood

The Fall

Who does not know that dreadful gulf, where Niagara falls,
Where eagle unto eagle screams, to vulture vulture calls;

Niagara as literal and metaphorical

Hood opens with the actual waterfall but immediately abstracts it into spiritual territory—'despair and death,' 'rainbow without hope.' The physical catastrophe is a vehicle for existential crisis.

Where down beneath, despair and death in liquid darkness grope,
And upward on the foam there shines a rainbow without hope?
While, hung with clouds of fear and doubt, the unreturning wave
Suddenly gives an awful plunge, like life into the grave;
And many a hapless mortal there hath dived to vale or bliss;
One—only one—hath ever lived to rise from that abyss!
O heaven! it turns me now to ice with chill of fear extreme,
To think of my frail bark adrift on that tumultuous stream !
In vain, with desperate sinews, strung by love of life and light,
I urged that coffin, my canoe, against the current's might;
On—on—still on—direct for doom, the river rushed in force,
And fearfully the stream of time raced with it in its course.

Time as river current

Hood collapses Niagara with the 'stream of time'—the waterfall isn't just geography, it's mortality itself. The speaker can't escape the current because time moves only forward.

Sensory inversion

The speaker closes his eyes but *still sees* the shore vividly ('through transparent lids'). Hood reverses the logic of blindness—shutting out the world doesn't stop internal vision of disaster.

My eyes I closed I dared not look the way towards the goal;
But still I viewed the horrid close, and dreamt it in my soul.
Plainly, as through transparent lids, I saw the fleeting shore,
And lofty trees, like winged things, flit by forevermore!
Plainly—but with no prophet sense—I heard the sullen sound,
The torrent's voice—and felt the mist, like death-sweat, gathering round.
O agony! O life! My home, and those that made it sweet!
Ere I could pray, the torrent lay beneath my very feet.
With frightful whirl, more swift than thought, I passed the dizzy edge;
Bound after bound, with hideous bruise, I dashed from ledge to ledge,
From crag to crag—in speechless pain—from midnight deep to deep;

Repetition of 'From'

The four 'From' clauses ('From crag to crag—from midnight deep to deep') accumulate without resolution. The speaker bounces endlessly rather than reaching bottom—a nightmare of interrupted falling.

I did not die, but anguish stunned my senses into sleep.
How long entranced, or whither dived, no clew I have to find.
At last the gradual light of life came dawning o'er my mind;
And through my brain there thrilled a cry,—a cry as shrill as birds
Of vulture or of eagle kind, but this was set to words:—

The sudden deflation

After 24 lines of Gothic horror, the poem pivots to domestic comedy: the speaker was sleepwalking and fell down stairs. Hood abandons the metaphor entirely, leaving the reader disoriented.

"It's Edgar Huntley in his cap and nightgown, I declares!
He's been a-walking in his sleep, and pitched all down the stairs!"
Source Wikipedia Poetry Foundation

Reading Notes

The Bait-and-Switch: Metaphor Collapse

Hood spends 24 lines building a sustained metaphor of drowning in Niagara as a metaphor for existential terror—the 'stream of time,' the inescapable current, the plunge toward death. The reader invests in this symbolic architecture. Then, abruptly, Hood reveals the speaker was literally sleepwalking down stairs, and the entire Gothic apparatus collapses into domestic farce.

This isn't carelessness. Hood is doing something specific: he's showing how easily the mind inflates ordinary danger into cosmic horror when consciousness is absent. The speaker's nightmare-logic—where a fall becomes *the* Fall, where a staircase becomes an abyss—is exposed as the delusion of a man in his nightgown. The poem's real subject is the gap between inner experience and outer fact, between what we *feel* is happening and what *is* happening.

Why Sleepwalking Matters

Hood's choice of Edgar Huntly isn't random. CONTEXT In Brockden Brown's novel, the protagonist commits terrible acts while sleepwalking—he's not responsible because he's not conscious. Hood uses this to ask: if the speaker's terror felt entirely real, if the metaphorical drowning was genuinely experienced, does it matter that the cause was a staircase?

The poem suggests that subjective horror is real *as an experience* even when the objective threat is trivial. The speaker survived Niagara's abyss only to discover he was never in danger at all—but he was genuinely terrified. Hood is exploring the unreliability of consciousness itself, especially in states where the rational mind is offline. The final punchline isn't a joke; it's a philosophical problem dressed in comedy.