The Public and Private Realms of Hill's Mercian Hymns

Abstract

In his essay Poetry and Politics-the lead piece of a recent TriQuarterly special issue-Terrence Des Pres makes a call for poets to produce writing strong enough to handle history and stay cowed within the world of self. Des Pres values poetry not so much grounded in ideology as in the concrete reactions of men and women who find themselves in history's path.' Since the 1970s a number of British poets have begun producing works growing out of rootedness in a particular locality's history, topography, and mythology. Dissatisfied with discrete lyrics bounded by Des Pres' halting world of self, these poets-including Irishman Seamus Heaney, Scotsman George MacKay Brown, Welshman R. S. Thompson, and Englishman Jeremy Hookerhave been working on extended structures: sequences and narratives focusing on history, culture, and politics. Among English poets today, Geoffrey Hill, in his sequence Mercian Hymns, has gone furthest toward placing the self within the historical and political life of his or her culture.2 Even though Mercian Hymns weaves in material from Hill's personal experience, the self does exist in isolation in the sequence. Instead, the various speakers of these hymns3 interact with past and present elements of English culture. Hill achieves this interaction by creating an idiom that allows a public voice to take on the intensity and immediacy of a private consciousness, and a private voice to gain the breadth, resonance, and authority of a public persona. Mercian Hymns is a record of the growth of a poet's mind4 and of the development of a culture. It is a self-portrait, particularly of Hill as a child growing up in England in the 1940s; but it is also a portrait of a potent British myth: Offa, the king who stands at the beginnings of