Hill's Mercian Hymns

I think that Geoffrey Hill may be yet another confusing, difficult poet, like T.S. Eliot. However, as with Eliot, you can certainly enjoy his poetry without quite understanding the references. Hill's references are muddled in time and space, rather than in past works of literature and song, it seems.

He begins Hymn VI with what seems a John Clare-like praise of the majesty of nature: "The princes of Mercia were badger and raven", and then reminds me of Dylan Thomas' 'Fern Hill', when he talks of those childhood days of digging and hoarding, and drinking "from honeycombs of chill sandstone", but humans enter the scene, and Hill then dashes back and forth with VII being a strange mix of the modern and the ancient. We have the "Gasholders, russet among fields", and he references "a biplane", but then links these things with a character called "Coelred", before finally returning to a little boy in a "private derelict sandlorry named Albion". This section of 'Mercian Hymns' does seem to be about Albion, from the medieval to the childhood of the poet, a puzzling story of the nation. It links history with memory, and you have to know about things like gasholders and biplanes to be able to absolutely locate where we are in Hill's train of thought. It doesn't help much that the poem is puzzlingly arranged; written in prose but set out like a poem, with the indented lines. Hill makes you concentrate to understand, but equally, if you decide not to concentrate, you can get a very powerful sense of the poem simply by reading it in your head, since the vocabulary is so rich and evocative.