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Mercian Hymns
48 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
2 people are currently reading
259 people want to read
About the author
Geoffrey Hill
87 books50 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Sir Geoffrey William Hill was an English poet and professor emeritus of English literature and religion.
Sir Geoffrey William Hill was an English poet and professor emeritus of English literature and religion.
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
January 23, 2012
These poems put me in mind of PJ Harvey’s latest, Let England Shake. All soil and toil, fantastic gloom. I nabbed this collection from my girlfriend who knows how to read poems. Ask her, she’s nicer than me, and a talented playwright. Or perhaps you can form your own opinion? Here’s stanza III, part XXII to consider: “Then, in the earthly shelter, warmed by a blue-glassed storm-lantern, I huddled with stories of dragon-tailed airships and warriors who took wing immortal as phantoms.” That sort of thing. Very English!
March 24, 2019
30 short stanzas, strange gobs of larded language, eldtrich affect.
Bygone eras, childhood embers, maimed kingdoms.
Some sort of wyrd genius, really.
Bygone eras, childhood embers, maimed kingdoms.
Some sort of wyrd genius, really.
August 24, 2020
This book is not for everyone. Geoffrey Hill is not for everyone.
From Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian: "If the phrase 'greatest living poet in the English language' means anything, then we should use it to describe Hill.'
We lost a powerful, skillful, erudite poet when Mr. Hill passed. May he rest in peace.
(A quick aside: I read difficult poetry almost exclusively. I'm not an academic. I wasn't even fortunate enough to go to college. I'm autodidactic, and my education is far from complete. Also, I haven't read everything Hill wrote, yet. I have all of his poetry, and I'll eventually read it.)
Though Hill wrote difficult poetry, Mercian Hymns is not difficult. If you want difficult, try Paul Auster's Spokes, John Berryman's Dream Songs or Berryman's Sonnets To Chris, or The Art Of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler.
Geoffrey Hill is for people who enjoy intelligent, symbolic, allusive, difficult poetry. He is not for people who don't read poetry or can't understand it, people who only read pop poetry and pop novels, or people who pretend to be readers.
(Pretend readers collapse when the few times in their lives they say to themselves, "today I'm going to do it. I'm going to take the plunge and read something, really read something. . . ." They grab a book, read a snippet or two, then fall into an hysterical paroxysm of pure hatred. Reading just isn't for them, but for some strange reason they like to pretend that they love it.
Then there are the pop readers. They encounter something challenging, hate it all the way down to their souls, then fire off thousands of characters worth of toxicity about how terrible the writer is, how the writer's works made them gag, and how the writer's parents should've reconsidered having children. Not once do they think the piece of writing they just read might be smarter than they are. And instead of being filled with the desire to learn from it, they go back to pretending to be a reader on the internet for meaningless views and even more meaningless internet points. . . . This is just my opinion.
Also, I'm not implying that a person who doesn't understand a piece of writing isn't a serious reader.
I mean, John Ashbery’s first book, Some Trees, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. W.H. Auden was the judge, and he said later that he hadn’t understood a word of the winning manuscript.)
Anyway, Mercian Hymns: in the beginning of the book you might get the impression that only English people and Anglophiles will like it. This may be true for many people, but I think it gains wider appeal as it goes along. There are some beautiful turns of phrases in this work. I'm American, and even though I think I'm not part of its target audience, I enjoyed it. Currently, I give it a 4.5. I may change that to a 5 in the future.
From Poetry Foundation:
" Known as one of the greatest poets of his generation writing in English, and one of the most important poets of the 20th century, Geoffrey Hill lived a life dedicated to poetry and scholarship, morality and faith.
He was born in 1932 in Worcestershire, England to a working-class family. He attended Oxford University, where his work was first published by the U.S. poet Donald Hall. These poems later collected in For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958 marked an astonishing debut.
Hill’s work is noted for its seriousness, its high moral tone, extreme allusiveness and dedication to history, theology, and philosophy. In early collections such as...Mercian Hymns (1971), Hill sought 'to convey extreme emotions by opposing the restraint of established form to the violence of his insight or judgment,' according to New York Review of Books critic Irvin Ehrenpreis. 'He deals with violent public events... Appalled by the moral discontinuities of human behavior, he is also shaken by his own response to them, which mingles revulsion with fascination.'
[...] Mercian Hymns, a series of prose poems combining memories of Hill’s childhood with tales of the eighth-century Mercian king, Offa... acclaimed for their use of Christian symbolism combined with what Craig Raine called the 'high seriousness' of the poet’s style. In a New Statesman review of Mercian Hymns, Raine added that a reader of Hill’s work “can’t miss the noble application of scruples to life... It makes no concessions to our intellectual and moral self-esteem.'
Hill has responded to the oft-leveled charge that his poetry is 'difficult':
'In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools. And that particular aspect, and the aspect of the forgetting of a tradition, go together.'
Hill also has said of difficulty, 'We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most ‘intellectual’ piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why... does poetry have to address in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes.' "
From Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian: "If the phrase 'greatest living poet in the English language' means anything, then we should use it to describe Hill.'
We lost a powerful, skillful, erudite poet when Mr. Hill passed. May he rest in peace.
(A quick aside: I read difficult poetry almost exclusively. I'm not an academic. I wasn't even fortunate enough to go to college. I'm autodidactic, and my education is far from complete. Also, I haven't read everything Hill wrote, yet. I have all of his poetry, and I'll eventually read it.)
Though Hill wrote difficult poetry, Mercian Hymns is not difficult. If you want difficult, try Paul Auster's Spokes, John Berryman's Dream Songs or Berryman's Sonnets To Chris, or The Art Of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler.
Geoffrey Hill is for people who enjoy intelligent, symbolic, allusive, difficult poetry. He is not for people who don't read poetry or can't understand it, people who only read pop poetry and pop novels, or people who pretend to be readers.
(Pretend readers collapse when the few times in their lives they say to themselves, "today I'm going to do it. I'm going to take the plunge and read something, really read something. . . ." They grab a book, read a snippet or two, then fall into an hysterical paroxysm of pure hatred. Reading just isn't for them, but for some strange reason they like to pretend that they love it.
Then there are the pop readers. They encounter something challenging, hate it all the way down to their souls, then fire off thousands of characters worth of toxicity about how terrible the writer is, how the writer's works made them gag, and how the writer's parents should've reconsidered having children. Not once do they think the piece of writing they just read might be smarter than they are. And instead of being filled with the desire to learn from it, they go back to pretending to be a reader on the internet for meaningless views and even more meaningless internet points. . . . This is just my opinion.
Also, I'm not implying that a person who doesn't understand a piece of writing isn't a serious reader.
I mean, John Ashbery’s first book, Some Trees, won the Yale Younger Poets Prize. W.H. Auden was the judge, and he said later that he hadn’t understood a word of the winning manuscript.)
Anyway, Mercian Hymns: in the beginning of the book you might get the impression that only English people and Anglophiles will like it. This may be true for many people, but I think it gains wider appeal as it goes along. There are some beautiful turns of phrases in this work. I'm American, and even though I think I'm not part of its target audience, I enjoyed it. Currently, I give it a 4.5. I may change that to a 5 in the future.
From Poetry Foundation:
" Known as one of the greatest poets of his generation writing in English, and one of the most important poets of the 20th century, Geoffrey Hill lived a life dedicated to poetry and scholarship, morality and faith.
He was born in 1932 in Worcestershire, England to a working-class family. He attended Oxford University, where his work was first published by the U.S. poet Donald Hall. These poems later collected in For the Unfallen: Poems 1952-1958 marked an astonishing debut.
Hill’s work is noted for its seriousness, its high moral tone, extreme allusiveness and dedication to history, theology, and philosophy. In early collections such as...Mercian Hymns (1971), Hill sought 'to convey extreme emotions by opposing the restraint of established form to the violence of his insight or judgment,' according to New York Review of Books critic Irvin Ehrenpreis. 'He deals with violent public events... Appalled by the moral discontinuities of human behavior, he is also shaken by his own response to them, which mingles revulsion with fascination.'
[...] Mercian Hymns, a series of prose poems combining memories of Hill’s childhood with tales of the eighth-century Mercian king, Offa... acclaimed for their use of Christian symbolism combined with what Craig Raine called the 'high seriousness' of the poet’s style. In a New Statesman review of Mercian Hymns, Raine added that a reader of Hill’s work “can’t miss the noble application of scruples to life... It makes no concessions to our intellectual and moral self-esteem.'
Hill has responded to the oft-leveled charge that his poetry is 'difficult':
'In my view, difficult poetry is the most democratic, because you are doing your audience the honour of supposing that they are intelligent human beings. So much of the populist poetry of today treats people as if they were fools. And that particular aspect, and the aspect of the forgetting of a tradition, go together.'
Hill also has said of difficulty, 'We are difficult. Human beings are difficult. We're difficult to ourselves, we're difficult to each other. And we are mysteries to ourselves, we are mysteries to each other. One encounters in any ordinary day far more real difficulty than one confronts in the most ‘intellectual’ piece of work. Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are? Why... does poetry have to address in simplified terms, when if such simplification were applied to a description of our own inner selves we would find it demeaning? I think art has a right—not an obligation—to be difficult if it wishes.' "
December 21, 2022
Geoffrey Hill’s modernist mash-up of his own Midlands childhood and the reign of Offa, the great Saxon king of Mercia remains -despite subsequent parodies (see, e.g. Wendy Cope’s Duffa Rex in Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis) - a powerful work of history, people and place. The form and the language owe much to Anglo-Saxon poetry, and the sense of another world that is now only dimly visible through fragmentary artefacts and snatches of verse, but to which we are still beholden, is strong indeed.
August 11, 2025
Wow. Hill’s language at its most incantory and hypnotic. Often, reading this, I was caught at the level of language rather than the level of the sense - but you can’t fault it when the language is this well-wrought. An annotated edition is surely needed, and I hope is on its way. Pulls together temporalities and cultures (the Celtic, the late classical, the Anglo-Saxon, the 20th century) into something entirely, radically itself - the closest parallel I can think of is Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. I liked it; sing it again.
March 18, 2021
I have very wtf is going on at all times vibes reading Geoffrey Hill, but the music and archaic beauty of the language cannot be denied. I will reread this at some point when i feel like my brain cells decide to actually show up for once.
Read
September 25, 2022weaving mythmaking I'm thinking Blake but with Complexity capital C. Anglic or, Mercian. Encouraging though preferring still Unfallen
April 22, 2020
The last 15-30 years of Hill’s career is beyond my caring—book after book of gnarled knotty phrases and subordinate clauses for what? Beats me. His best, for me, is the lyric—the early lyric work: Ovid in the Third Reich, September Song, Sebastian Arrurruz, sonnet 6 of Funeral Music—the poems in which Hill comes out from behind his “I’m too difficult to understand” mask and speaks in our common language, more to be found in King Log than elsewhere. Occasionally a lyric from For The Unfallen or Tenebrae joins the King Log best. And what to make of Mercian Hymns? A collection of snapshot images, almost devoid of “sense,” King Offa and Childe Geoffrey entwined. Not awful and senseless like the late work generally seems to be, but simply not much of a whole—a family album for a family you don’t know.
Read
October 15, 2024“Exile or pilgrim set me once more upon that ground;
my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-
faced, sick on outings – I who was taken to be a
king of some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one.”
my rich and desolate childhood. Dreamy, smug-
faced, sick on outings – I who was taken to be a
king of some kind, a prodigy, a maimed one.”
April 4, 2022
“Masterworks of treacherous thread.” -MH XXIII
March 28, 2025
big up the west middies !!
Read
June 4, 2025My fourth or fifth reading--always rewarding....
February 21, 2016
In this collection, Hill takes the historical figure of King Offa and builds a series of modern hymns around him. Honestly, I found the idea behind this collection more appealing than the execution of it. There's a very strong (perhaps too strong) reliance on historic/modern melding - for instance, in the first hymn, Offa is "King of the perennial holly-groves, the riven sandstone: overlord of the M5..." - but this trick didn't sustain my interest. Which is a shame, as there were odd lines - my favourite concludes hymn 14 ("At dinner, he relished the mockery of drinking his family's health. He did this whenever it suited him, which was not often") - that I found bitingly entertaining. Shame they were so often smothered by effect.
January 19, 2016
Rather interesting. It starts out as a panegyric to Offa, King of Mercia in the 8th century, but within a few lines we have encompassed all of English history. The juxtaposition of past and present continues through all 30 poems, along with a blurring between Offa and Hill, himself, perhaps. A bit bewildering at first, the final impression is of Englishness, landscape, history, depression/decline, abuse of power, and the things that last for hundreds of years - (Offa's dyke, his coinage, the language.) Written in imitation of Anglo-Saxon poetry, with hints of Beowulf, Milton, Boethius, and probably T.S. Eliot.
December 27, 2007
Almost unforgettable, though not quite.
January 22, 2012
A very difficult reading, considering I had to do it all in one week. I like Hill's precision. A collection of condensed and evocative poems.
December 21, 2012
Interesting conceptually, but not really my bag in terms of poetic style generally.
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews