Contemporary Poetry

138 contemporary poetry

themselves in this way. I did immediately see it as an extended

sequence.^14

The sonorous momentum of the sections is often incantatory,
fusing private history with shards of broader historical narrative.
A central fi gure in the sequence is the Anglo-Saxon King Offa
who ruled Mercia during the eighth century. Geographical space
and the historical fi gure cannot be disentangled from one another.
Within Mercian Hymns there is also a strong autobiographical nar-
rative. Hill admits a rather disturbing link between the king and
childhood:

The murderous brutality of Offa as a political animal seems

again an objective correlative for the ambiguities of English

history in general, as a means of trying to encompass and

accommodate the early humiliations and fears of one’s own

childhood and also one’s discovery of the tyrannical streak in

oneself as a child.^15

The opening of Mercian Hymns prepares the reader for an
archaeological work, where buried in the text are strata of co-
existent histories. Beginning the sequence with a panegyric, the
speaker’s praise of Offa includes titles such as King of ‘holly
groves’, ‘overlord of the M 5 ’ and ‘architect of the historic rampart
and ditch’ (p. 105 ). Later, in section twelve, Hill presents a scene
of excavation. Beginning with ‘Their spades grafted through the
variably-resistant soil’, we are introduced to workers paid to ‘caulk
waterpipes’ (p. 116 ). Confusion regarding time and period is delib-
erate, the most immediate anchor being the landscape and earth
where ‘Chestnut-boughs clash their infl amed leaves’ (p. 116 ). The
succeeding section presents the results of an archaeologist’s dig
which include Offa’s hoard of coins: ‘Trim the lamp; polish the
lens; draw, one by one, rare coins to the light’ (p. 117 ). The location
of this fi nd resonates as a space where history and ritual coalesce ‘far
from his underkingdom of crinoid and crayfi sh’ (p. 117 ). This layer-
ing of the text enables Hill to introduce small narrative excerpts of
his childhood. In the twenty-fi fth section we are introduced to his
grandmother’s work in a nail shop. A visceral memory of the build-