Point of View

This poem is told through an unusual first-person omniscient point of view. The narrator’s first-person “I” pronoun only appears in the fifth stanza, once, as a dialogue tag. The preceding stanzas use a more fluid third-person voice. Observations like “locked church doors even denied him refuge at night” (Line 11) implies a knowledge beyond the breadth of this first-person narration. The poem can also be interpreted as having two narrators: a third-person omniscient voice that later shifts into the more grounded first-person voice. Through the narrator, the reader is able to see a fallen god as he appears to everyday urban commuters.

Language and Meaning

The language overall is straightforward and accessible, in the tradition of most contemporary free-verse speculative poetry. The first two stanzas in particular utilise common street vernacular such as “shuteye” (Line 8) or “grime” (Line 5) that root the poem in the modern...