TOPIC: DICTION
Poem: From Mercian Hymns by Geoffrey Hill
eoffrey Hill's use of vocabulary in "From Mercian Hymns" is a key factor in the interpretation of the excerpted poetry. Exotic words are interchanged with those more common, even vulgar, within the same verses. These strange combinations call up confused mental images, such as "honeycombs of / chill sandstone"(4) - difficult to picture, but it sounds graceful enough. Children's knees are "garnished" like food, yet Hill chooses to make the garnishment of impetigo, a contagious skin disease. (14) Animals are princes, imitated and celebrated by the poet as he "dug and hoarded", respectively akin to the "badger and raven" in line 1. Conversely, there are several images described that are commonplace, such as the "Candles of gnarled resin, apple-branches, the tacky / mistletoe," (8) the schoolyard and cloakrooms (12). Far from the elevated subjects usually found in poetic discourse, we are even told of "scars of dried snot" and, as mentioned before, impetigo. (13) Hill's use of varying levels of words, from those of everyday life to those describing a fantastic metaphor such as the honeycombs, serves as a transition between the reality of the world being written about mingled with the poet's own interpretations of his environment.
Though we are never told directly the age or gender of the speaker in the poem, we can deduce from the described actions and feelings that we are experiencing the moments of a young boy. "Thrall" to ravens and badgers, digging, hoarding, fancying the smaller elements of the landscape such as apple-branches (and incapable of taking in the entire scene, as it flows away from him), he speaks of a schoolyard, cloakrooms, and other children. We feel distant from other speakers in the poem because the poet is distanced from them, following each interjection with, "But I"...have no brothers, do not stop to look, "fostered a strangeness".(6,9) By separating himself from everyone else, speaking in first person, we are encouraged to "feel" the intimacy of certain experiences. In this sense, Hill is undermining the mundane nature of the very words he uses, inducing complex emotions from simple diction. For example, we feel wonder for the "princes", placed in the position of the thrall, enthralled by them. We feel lonely without brothers, we feel disgust at the social habits of children in the schoolyard. The childish innocence mixes with adult observation within the language, commonplace and poetic words together bringing a question to the reader of the speaker's maturity.
Copyright 1995, Kaye Anfield