Wit Pietrzak

‘For “feather” read “father”’:

Death and Possibility in
Paul Muldoon’s Paternal Elegies
Beginning with the publication of The Annals of Chile, Paul Muldoon
has regularly written elegies for his friends and occasionally for his
family. Although one of his best-known mourning poems, ‘Yarrow’, is
devoted to the poet’s mother, Muldoon’s first elegiac attempts were
focused on the father. However, unlike the majority of contemporary
paternal elegies, in Muldoon’s work the father becomes a problematic
figure, who never offers the poet a stable point of origin, a genealogical
centre of gravity that fathers in the Irish elegiac poetry of the
post-World War II period tend to represent. This is the case in John
Montague’s ‘The Cage’, in which the poet son feels that he and his
disconsolate émigré father are linked in ‘the shared complicity / of a
dream’1 that manifests what Edna Longley calls ‘a deep Northern
[Irish] assumption about tribal inheritance’.2 A recognition of such
inheritance, fraught though it often is, reemerges in Michael Longley’s
‘In Memoriam’ (‘let no similes eclipse / Where crosses like some
forest simplified / Sink roots into my mind’3) as well as in Seamus
Heaney’s two paternal elegies, ‘Man and Boy’ and ‘Seeing Things’,4
which evoke the filial connection as a stable orientation point that
nourishes the imaginative genealogical continuity between the poet and
his father.
By contrast, for Muldoon, the father figure represents no point of
continuity but remains ‘a persistent metaphysical shadow’, as Edna
Longley has shown.5 However, in his paternal elegies, Muldoon not so
much ‘impugns […] any mythologized purity of family stock’6 as seeks
to reimagine the father figure as a poetic construct open to reinterpreta-
tion beyond the confines of his factual existence. Thus his elegies, which
span almost thirty years, elude both Peter Sacks’ model of mourning
verse as compensation for the close one’s departure7 and the melan-
cholic ‘immersion in [loss]’ that ‘refuse[s] such consolations as the

Irish University Review 51.2 (2021): 312–328

DOI: 10.3366/iur.2021.0521
© Wit Pietrzak
www.euppublishing.com/iur

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rebirth of the dead in nature, in God, or in poetry itself’,8 which has been
theorized by Jahan Ramazani and Clifton Spargo.9 Instead of respond-
ing to death by either trying to overcome the grief it has caused or by
delving deeper into the layers of sorrow until grieving over the dead
becomes an act of self-mourning, in Muldoon’s poems, death becomes a
trigger to the imaginative appropriation and revision of the deceased
father.

HIS FATHERS AND MOTHERS

Throughout Muldoon’s work, both parental figures recur on a
regular basis, with the father, in his reticence and withdrawn
attitude, offering a contrast to the overbearing position of the mother.
‘The Mixed Marriage’ focuses on the ill-paired parents, whose growing
separateness is cemented by the ending of the poem, in which as ‘she
went on upstairs’, he ‘further dimmed the light / To get back to hunting
with ferrets / Or the factions of the faction-fights’.10 Years later,
Muldoon will evoke the family drama in terms of coldness and lack
of empathy in ‘The Outlier’, which repeats the opening couplet ‘In
Armagh or Tyrone / I fell between two stones’ four times, at each
repetition adding a line until by the end it is revealed that the two
stones ‘raised me as their own’.11 Part of this stony upbringing endures
in the poet, who in Part II of ‘The Outlier’ travesties Yeats’s conclusion to
‘A Dialogue of Self and Soul’ by confessing: ‘all I looked upon / would
itself turn to stone’.12
The image of the parents’ relationship is revisited in ‘Milkweed
and Monarch’, a villanelle that fuses the parents, whose graves the
poet comes to visit. Just as the fact that the titular milkweed and
monarch are ‘two different names of the same American butterfly’13
suggests that the parents constitute one figure, the recurrent line ‘he
could barely tell one from the other’ highlights that their ‘antithetical
narratives become synthesis’.14 The mournful aura instilled in the
first line, ‘As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father’ (P, p.329)
is, however, quickly lifted as the poet looks to ‘a woman slinking
from the fur of a sea-otter / in Portland, Maine, or, yes, Portland,
Oregon’ (p.329). The deflection of grief signals the poet’s troubled
relationship with the parents but especially with the mother, who is
associated with anger and reproach throughout Muldoon’s work. In
spite of this mother-son animosity, ‘Milkweed and Monarch’ implies
that the grave is where their quarrels were ended. And yet, this
ecumenical message of grief for the parents who unite in the grave is
undercut by ‘Oscar’, which precedes ‘Milkweed and Monarch’ in The
Annals of Chile.

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‘Oscar’ opens with the speaker being woken by his dog, Oscar
MacOscair, which ‘whines at something on the roof’. Once awake, the
poet takes off

to a grave lit by acetylene

in which, though she preceded him
by a good ten years, my mother’s skeleton

has managed to worm

its way back on top of the old man’s,
and she once again has him under her thumb. (p.328)

The two stanzas playfully take up Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy
Mistress’ and its coaxing suggestion that ‘The grave’s a fine and private
place, / But none, I think, do there embrace’.15 Indeed, loath to embrace
her husband in either this or the next life, the mother reasserts her
dominance, even after death maintaining her authority, as the image
becomes all the more strikingly denuded of any indication of love for its
allusion to Marvell. The elegiac undertone to ‘Oscar’ amplifies the
haunting persistence of the parents that is hinted at in the offhand
reference to ‘quoof’, which the earlier poem of that name reveals to be a
‘family word / for the hot water bottle’ (P, p.112). And yet, ‘Oscar’ also
stresses the mother’s despotic manner, which contrasts with the poet’s
elusive, part ironic and part heart-felt, attitude.
In ‘Yarrow’, Muldoon’s protean elegy for his mother, she is associated
with ethical as well as grammatical correctness and purity. Both those
imperatives are implicit in a memory of his mother ‘rins[ing] my hair:
she’d sung “Eileen Aroon” // or some such ditty and scrubbed and
scrubbed / till the sink was full of dreck; “Stay well away from those
louts and layabouts at the loanin’-end”’ (P, p.358). The image is
anticipated in ‘Brazil’, in which the speaker is ‘hunched over the font
/ as she rinsed my hair’ (P, p.327) all the while trying to teach him
French. In an autobiographical sketch published in 1984, Muldoon
reminisces about how taken his mother was ‘by the idea of status’ and
having ‘high hopes for all her children’, which manifested in enrolling
them in ‘elocution classes and piano lessons’,16 a detail that will return in
‘Plan B’ whose speaker recalls lessons of ‘elocution and pianoforte’.17
The picture of the mother that Muldoon sketches in ‘Brazil’ obliquely
hints at the sort of stony coldness summoned in ‘The Outlier’ but the act
of washing stirs more violent memories in ‘They that Wash on
Thursday’, which recalls: ‘She was such a dab hand, my mother. Such
a dab hand / at raising her hand / to a child’ (P, p.442). Her cruelty, tied
up with a sense of unforgiving fairness, is yet again evoked in ‘Plume’,

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in which the poet remembers how the ‘vengefulness, […] sheer

vindictiveness’ of a trick he played on the mother was met with ‘a
vindictiveness now matched by hers’.18 Still, ‘The Outlier’ for once does
not spare the father, who ‘took no hand / in this. He washed his hands /
of the matter. He sat on his hands’ (p.442).
Yet, in spite of her vindictiveness and puritanism, it is the mother who
introduces the young Muldoon to poetry when she orders him in
‘Profumo’: ‘Away and read Masefield’s “Cargoes”’ (P, p.155).19
Masefield’s poem will return as the framing image of ‘7, Middagh
Street’, thus rewarding the mother’s educative efforts. However, for all
her associations with literature, ‘The world of Castor and Pollux’ (P,
p.60), the mother remains an alien and alienating figure. ‘Errata’, which
Muldoon points out ‘is a kind of autobiographical poem, masquerading
as an erratum slip’,20 opens with a reference to the parents:

For ‘Antrim’ read ‘Armagh’.

For ‘mother’ read ‘other’.
For ‘harm’ read ‘farm’.
For ‘feather’ read ‘father’. (P, p.445)

While the mock-Lacanian association of ‘mother’ with ‘other’ and the

homology between mother and ‘harm’ highlight her severity and
emotional distance, the connection between ‘feather’ and ‘father’ not
only associates him with birds (Muldoon’s father for a time farmed
dairy) and points to his cowardly inability to stand up to his dictatorial
wife, as indicated in ‘The Outlier’, but also bespeaks a bird-like lightness
that aligns him with poetry’s long and wide avian tradition. It is this
ambiguous nature of the father figure that Muldoon will use in his
paternal elegies in order to appropriate him after his bodily death in the
body of verse, endowing the father with a second life in which, in
contrast to traditional elegies, his emotional distance and coyness are
reworked.

IMAGINED AFFINITIES
The mode of imaginative appropriation enabled by death is implicit
already in ‘The Waking Father’, included in New Weather (a volume
opening with the dedication ‘For My Fathers and Mothers’). Written
long before Muldoon’s actual father, Patrick, died in 1985, the poem
veers towards the surreal in its second stanza, when the speaker
imagines the river, in which he and his father are fishing, brim with
piranhas. This gives him pause: ‘I wonder now if he is dead or sleeping’
and continues ‘I would have his grave / Secret and safe, / I would turn
the river out of its course, / Lay him in its bed, bring it round again’

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(P, p.10). The poem enacts a reversal of roles in that the father is evoked
as a child to be laid to bed, while the poet declares that he would ‘have
his grave’, with the line break suspending yet another reversal that now
suggests filial protectiveness and respect. The last stanza again shifts the
mood, as the speaker adds, partly in explanation, ‘No one would
question / That he had treasures or his being a king, / Telling now of the
real fish farther down’ (p.10). The ambiguity of the modal ‘would’, a
syntactic hallmark of Muldoon’s poetry, implies that the father either
was in possession of treasures and was an explorer king or that these
are no more than embellishments, as the father is submitted to the
transformative work of imagination. According to Clair Wills, ‘the poem
suggests that death will monumentalize the father, […], even as it
convinces us of the reality and significance of the everyday father’.21
And yet, this significance is only realized once the father is conceived
of as dead, which allows the poet to recast him as a hero in an
adventure tale.
Unlike ‘The Waking Father’, ‘The Mirror’ stresses its more
openly elegiac nature in its dedication: ‘In memory of my father’, which
is undercut by the concluding indication that the poem is in fact a
rendition of Michael Davitt’s ‘An Scáthán’.22 In Muldoon’s version, the
‘cold paradox’ that ‘He was no longer my father / but I was still his son’
(P, p.108) suggests that the poet assumes the genealogical inheritance
almost in spite of his father, which highlights the alienation between
the two. This fraught continuity is further probed in Part II that
explains ‘it was the mirror took his breath away. // The monstrous old
Victorian mirror’ (p.109). Reluctant to ask for help, the father ‘had taken
down the mirror’ and ‘soon he turned the colour of terracotta / and his
heart broke that night’ (p.109). As the poet resolves ‘to set about
finishing the job’, he suddenly ‘had a fright. I imagined him breathing
through it. / I heard him say in a reassuring whisper: / I’ll give you a
hand, here’ (p.109). The father’s inability to trust his son is dispelled
in imagination (the fright is not caused by any external manifestation
of a ghostly presence but by the poet’s own fancy, which is further
implied through the image of the mirror), as the silence that cost
him his life is lifted. The concluding image of cooperative effort, a
moment of affinity between the two men, leads to an overcoming of the
tensions when the poet declares he ‘drove home / the two nails’ (p.109).
This is no consolatory moment, though, for the image, suggestive of
crucifixion, announces a final severance of the genealogical link, which
alleviates the yearning for a closer relationship with the father, even
if the poet also accepts the blame for alienating him (it is he who cuts
off the genealogical connection, dismissing the opening insight that
he is still his father’s son) and so acknowledges his part in the father’s
demise.

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In its dynamic of connection and alienation between the poet and his
father, ‘The Mirror’ echoes Louis MacNeice’s ‘The Strand’, in which ‘The
mirror of wet sand’ catches the speaker’s footprints as it did his father’s
‘shape’. What at first appears to be a moment of unity between the two
soon dissolves: ‘then as now the floor-mop of the foam / Blotted the
bright reflections’.23 For an instant, the father and son are united, but this
only takes place in the realm of poetic fantasy. ‘The Strand’, like ‘The
Mirror’, employs the word ‘home’ to stress the termination of the vision,
for the implication of coming back to life entails severing the connection
with the deceased father, who can no longer come home. However,
while for MacNeice the separation is caused by death, for Muldoon, it
was in life that the father and son were alienated but once departed, the
father can now be reimagined, albeit for a fleeting moment, as a friendly
presence.
The search for affinity with the estranged father figure continues in the
series of paternal elegies in Meeting the British: ‘The Coney’, ‘Brock’ and
The Fox’, all of which postdate his death (though their manuscript
versions preclude precise dating). Although not dead, the father in ‘The
Coney’ is ‘too ill / to work’, so that the speaker takes to the scythe but
because it ‘would dull / so much more quickly in my hands / than his’,
the whetstone, which the father ‘had always left […] / safely wrapped /
in his old tweed cap’, is all used up and ‘and a lop-eared / coney was now
curled inside [it]’ (P, p.152). The disjunction between the country-skilled
father and the inept son, similar to that invoked in Heaney’s ‘Digging’,
bespeaks a rift more serious than the light tone of the poem might
suggest. But as the coney rather unexpectedly asks the poet about ‘the
name / of the cauliflowers’ before plunging into the water pursued by a
‘pack of dogs’ (p.153), his words that address the poet as Paddy
Muldoon, fusing the father and the son in a manner reminiscent of ‘The
Waking Father’ (‘I would have his grave’), precipitate a heart-felt
confession: ‘although I have never learned to swim / I would willingly
have followed him’ (p.153). The hypothetical ‘would’ points to the unreal
conditional clause whereby the poet would have followed if it had been
true that he was indeed Paddy Muldoon. Therefore, the evocation of the
speaking coney points up that the fusion is tenable only within the
realm of the fantastical. Throughout Muldoon’s work, talking animals,
especially horses, often theorize about continuity between the poet and
his forbears; in ‘Gathering Mushrooms’, the head of a horse tells the poet
to ‘let your song / tell of treading your own dung, / let straw and dung give a
spring to your step’ (P, p.106) and in ‘Madoc: A Mystery’, Robert Southey’s
colt, Bucephalus, regularly draws most inane etymological connections
between Native American place names and the Irish language. In each
case, though, these continuities, whether genealogical or linguistic, are
conceived solely as part of the poetic phantasmagoria.

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Just as the coney in ‘Brock’ recognizes Patrick Muldoon in the poet, so

in looking at a brock ‘piddl[ing] against a bullaun’, the poet declares
‘what I see // is my father […] patrolling his now-diminished estate /
and taking stock of this and that’ but also ‘my grandfather’s whiskers /
stained with tobacco-pollen’ (P, p.158). The phrase ‘what I see’, all the
more prominent for being italicized, echoes W. H. Auden’s ‘In Praise of
Limestone’ and its concluding acceptance of the impermanent beauty
that poetry can on occasions grant access to: ‘when I try to imagine a
faultless love / Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur / Of
underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape’.24 In echoing
Auden’s last line, ‘Brock’ suggests that the connection of the three
generations of Muldoons is conceivable as an impermanent poetic
construct.
Such impermanence also characterizes the most directly elegiac poem
of Meeting the British, ‘The Fox’. Woken ‘by the geese / on John Mackle’s
goose-farm,’ the speaker is moved to muse over the deceased father:
‘You lay / three fields away // in Collegelands / graveyard’ (P, p.166).
The direct address establishes the connection with the two but in
contrast to the conspicuously silent ‘The Wishbone’, where the son
ruefully keeps the father’s company on Christmas night, in ‘The Fox’,
the father speaks words at once dismissive and reassuring: ‘Go back to
bed. / It’s only yon dog-fox’ (p.166), which represent the only other
quotation from the father besides ‘The Mirror’. Like in ‘The Mirror’, ‘The
Fox’ too goes back to how distant the father and son were in life, as the
macabre image of his ‘face / above its bib / pumped full of
formaldehyde’ turns into a patronizing description of him ‘painstak-
ingly writing [his] name / with a carpenter’s pencil’ (p.166). The father
is both dead and seen as a barely literate child, a biographically
adequate description of Patrick Muldoon, who is remembered by his
son as being able to ‘read and write only with difficulty, needing help to
manage official documents and forms’.25 In this context, the deployment
of a four-syllable adverb to characterize how laborious the act of writing
is for the father sounds like a derisive stab at his shortcoming. And yet,
the seemingly superior position of the poet is undermined in the last
lines, in which he is addressed as a child so frightened by the uproar on
the neighbouring farm that he cannot bring himself to say what he saw
after opening ‘the venetian blind’ (p.166). Despite the parallel between
them, the father here, as in ‘The Coney’, only manages to speak to the
son through the mediation of the conditional clause. Thus, the words,
quoted as a conclusion to the poet’s speculation announced by ‘as if’,
again relegate whatever affinity the two might enjoy to the sphere of the
hypothetical, which can only be explored in imagination.
The attempts in Meeting the British to call up a space where the father
and son could find some affinity are complemented in ‘Cauliflowers’.

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Published in Muldoon’s subsequent collection Madoc: A Mystery, the

poem harks back to ‘The Coney’ and the question he posed to the poet.
‘Cauliflowers’ evokes the father and uncle Patrick Regan stopping to
make some repairs to their car during a return trip from the market
where they continue to have difficulty selling their cauliflowers. The first
four stanzas deploy the present simple tense, which initially suggests
that the poet is recounting a scene as it unfolds but there is no indication
that he is with the two men. In the fifth stanza, the poet shifts his
attention to a moment when ‘I listened to lovers / repeatedly going
down / on each other in the next room … “light / of my life …” in a
motel in Oregon’ (P, p.201). The single use of the past simple changes the
perception of the previous stanzas, indicating that the trip from the
market is not being described on the spot but rather that it belongs in
what Jonathan Culler calls the lyrical ‘here-and-now’: the presence of the
enunciation and not ‘some kind of transcendence of mortality’.26 The
interruption of the aural shows how brittle the vision of the first four
stanzas is, always at risk of being inundated by the allusive work of the
imagination. Eric Falci observes that the transition from visual to aural
imagination ‘sparks the allusive manoeuvres that determine the rest of
the poem’s unfolding’,27 ultimately revealing the fissured nature of
memory that undercuts the effectiveness of the elegiac aspirations the
poem announces in its last two stanzas. Such sudden swerves away
from the visual and visionary evocation are typical of Muldoon, whose
imagination often wanders to ‘think / of something else, then some-
thing else again’ (P, p.173). In ‘Cauliflowers’, though, the speaker will
not be deflected for long, as he returns to the sense of sight in response to
the question ‘are you grieving?’ (P, p.201).
What concludes the poem is a vision of ‘My father going down / the
primrose path with Patrick Regan. / All gone out of the world of light’,
including ‘the cauliflowers / in an unmarked pit, that were harvested by
their own light’ (p.201). The last image is informed by the epigraph that
cites an article from The National Enquirer: ‘Plants that glow in the dark have
been developed through genesplicing, in which light-producing bacteria from
the mouths of fish are introduced to cabbage, carrots and potatoes’ (p.200).
Throughout the first four stanzas it is the father and uncle who are
associated with light, as the former ‘stops at the headrig to light / his
pipe’ and the latter ‘tinkers with a light / wrench’ (p.200). Therefore, as
an emblem of the dead, the cauliflowers ‘harvested by their own light’
suggest that in living we exhaust life. Always on the brink of collapse
into darkness, life is interwoven with death within the textual space of
the poem. While the earlier paternal elegies identified death as the
starting point for the imaginary reworking of the father figure so the
poet might foster an affinity with the man who remained largely
inaccessible in life, ‘Cauliflowers’ seeks to capture the moment when life

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and death become a single entity. And so, the living and the dead,
rather than rage against its dying, come to share in the light, a fleeting
moment of affinity that offers comfort in the ‘here-and-now’ of the
poetic enunciation.

THE ‘UNREALIZED PLENITUDE’ OF DEATH:

‘THE BANGLE (SLIGHT RETURN)’
If Muldoon’s earlier paternal elegies tried to set up some mode of
affinity with the deceased father, ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ offers a
more radical revision of the premise first implied in ‘The Waking
Father’. Although death still offers the poet a chance to reimagine
the father, this leads to a probing of life’s possibilities that in the course
of living are gradually lost. Therefore ‘The Bangle (Slight return)’
suggests that once the singular self of the speaker no longer controls
the text, the poem can explore the potentialities of fictionalized lives.
In this sense, ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ represents one of Muldoon’s
most complex attempts at investigating his long-held idea that poems
are products of one’s opening to the largely mysterious work of
language.
The three epigraphs to the poem offer a commentary that helps frame
the discussion of the idea of the opening of the self to language. The
quote from Emil Cioran’s The Trouble with Being Born captures the tenet
of his book that in being born we are plunged into the realm of actuality
where our every action or decision extinguishes the pure possibility
implicit in non-being. The ‘unrealized plenitude’ that is cited in the
epigraph represents a pre-linguistic state ‘anterior to selfhood’, in which
action as well as discourse are withheld and ‘merely mus[ed] on’.28
Although he rejects the possibility that there is any way life can be
enjoyed, Cioran does invest poetry with the capacity to revive pure
possibility but in order to do so, it must defy coherent discourse: ‘if
anything has outlived its usefulness it is “coherent” metaphor, one with
explicit contours. It is against such metaphor that poetry has unceas-
ingly rebelled, to the point where a dead poetry is a poetry afflicted with
coherence’.29 Thus true poetry, which Cioran recognizes in the work of
Rimbaud but also in Nietzsche’s last books, ‘excludes calculation and
premeditation: it is incompletion, foreboding, abyss’.30 By dismissing
premeditation, Cioran implies that poetry is not the work of a self,
instead what speaks in it is the pure possibility of meaning inherent in
the language as a system.
Cioran’s idea of the relation between poetry and language as it is used
on a daily basis reflects the logic of langue and parole. As an aside to his
considerations of law and linguistics, Giorgio Agamben pertinently
notes that ‘language presupposes the nonlinguistic as that with which it
must maintain itself in a virtual relation (in the form of a langue or, more

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precisely, a grammatical game, that is, in the form of a discourse whose

actual denotation is maintained in infinite suspension) so that it may
later denote it in actual speech’.31 Agamben situates the infinite
suspension of meaning in the sphere of potentiality, which is expired
each time it is deployed in an actual speech act. Similarly, for Cioran,
poetry as built upon the logic of pre-discursive langue, the Agambenian
potentiality, is the closest we can get to an expression of a pre-birth
plenitude. Hence the second epigraph in ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’:
“Does the fetus dream? If so, of what? No one knows” (P, p.458). As it is not
yet born, the fetus’s dreams represent the sphere of pure possibility,
which precludes knowledge in the sense of coherent understanding.
Following on from that claim, the third epigraph, from The Importance of
Being Earnest, focuses on Algernon’s as-yet-unrealized choice “between
this world, the next world, and Australia” (p.458). According to Cioran’s
(but also Agamben’s) logic, this is the single instant when Algernon
fleetingly transcends life’s limitedness.
A sequence of thirty sonnets that comprise four interrelated
narratives, ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ situates itself in the realm of
pure possibility, embodied in the figure of Virgil, who commands each
of the narratives. His authority over the poem is highlighted from the
beginning, as he unabashedly enthuses that ‘The beauty of it is that
I delivered them from harm; / it was I who had Aeneas steal / back to
look for Creusa’ (p.461). These words are addressed to the poet who is
having a sumptuous dinner with a woman dubbed Creusa, as though to
imply that he is a latter-day Aeneas. This doubling of characters
between myth and the poem’s current moment in the restaurant
indicates that although the poet, who is revealed to be Muldoon
himself (with all the necessary wariness as to the identification), initially
appears to be Virgil’s interlocutor, he too is a figure in Virgil’s song.
Virgil repeatedly draws attention to the fact that the narrative depends
on the vagaries of his imagination, for it is he ‘who had Creusa pout, “A
demain”’ (p.461), the farewell that two cantos earlier “she seemed to
pout” (p.460) at the poet; it is also he who tells Muldoon: ‘your father
and the other skinnymalinks / may yet end up a pair of jackaroos / in
the canefields north of Brisbane’ (p.459). In an interview given long
before the composition of the poem, Muldoon admitted: ‘I seem to
remember my father telling me that he determined once to emigrate to
Australia. Now he tells me it was a hen’s yarn’; he also explains that this
image ‘troubled me for ages, since it underlies the arbitrary nature of so
many decisions we take, the disturbingly random quality of so many of
our actions. I would speculate on my father’s having led an entirely
different life, in which, clearly, I would have played no part’.32 The
vision of the father’s life in Australia emphasizes its status as fiction,
with the arbitrariness being vested in Virgil’s swerving imagination.

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Thus, like Eliot’s Tiresias in The Waste Land, who may be ‘a mere
spectator and not indeed a “character”’ but ‘sees, in fact, the substance of
the poem’,33 Virgil is included in the narrative spun by Muldoon even if
he has more agency than Tiresias, determining the actions of other
characters. As a result, the poem suggests a palimpsest of superimposed
storylines, where Virgil and the poet occupy the same position,
responding to each other’s verses.
This correlation between Muldoon and Virgil is addressed in
Canto XVIII. The image of the packet barely navigating the rough
seas morphs into a comment on the nature of the poem: ‘the packet
[…] seemed as likely to overturn as uphold / the established order,
such order as we decipher / while we sit and play, or are played
by, our toccatas’ (pp.468–69). This is Cioran’s ‘unrealized plenitude’
in operation in that the poem finds itself not only all at sea but on the
brink of irreconcilable ideas: neither the packet nor ‘the established
order’ can at once be about to collapse and stabilize their position.
The notion that we ‘play, or are played by, our toccatas’ is equally
unresolvable to the quandary from ‘Twice’: ‘“Two places at once,
was it, or one place twice?”’ (p.331, emphasis in original). This
vacillation also points to the question of the poet’s authority, which
Muldoon’s poems consistently grapple with. Already in a poem
like ‘Immram’, it is scarcely feasible to decide whether the
poet-detective is the source of the story or if the logic of the poem,
manifested in the puns and wordplay, dictates his actions. In ‘The
Bangle (Slight Return)’, this question is put forth more radically,
as Muldoon and Virgil both interact in the construction of the
narrative and take turns becoming figures in their respective visions.
For the last forty years Muldoon has often spoken about a poet’s relation
to the act of writing, stressing the submissive attitude that one needs to
adopt.
This submission is given three inflections. On the one hand,
Muldoon claims that ‘one can only be faithful to the language, and
the way in which it presents itself to you, […] the writer’s duty is to
be open’34 and that ‘one is really in the service of the poem’.35 On
the other hand, this openness is given an erotic connotation, as
Muldoon mentions in another interview that allowing a poem to be
written through one is akin to having ‘had some kind of affair’ with the
language.36 Moreover, the erotics of letting poems speak is given
religious connotations when Muldoon tells Lyn Keller that ‘the only
state in which I think anything half-decent might get done is to be
humble before the power and the possibility of language, to let it
have its way with you, as it were’.37 Although the colloquial nature of
the phrase ‘have its way with you’ keeps the implication on the
mundane plane, there is also an element of ecstatic spirituality

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to writing, which in the same interview Muldoon takes further,

conceding that

one is not in command. That one may have some free will, insofar
as we have such a thing, but basically one has given oneself over to
something beyond oneself. In this case, the language. And
allowing it to do with one what it will. So a kind of subservience
before the other, which is a feature of most of the main religions of
the world.38

The gamut of modes of submission to language is expressed in

Muldoon’s early unpublished poem ‘Unborn’, which conceives of the
act of writing as giving birth:

It has become a part

Of me. I might try to abort

The poem. Noone would know

But myself. God I should have known

Never again to start

A poem. Now that the start

Is made, I have no right

To say the end. No right.39

Explicitly addressing the thorny issue of sexual politics and the

Catholic Church’s grip over the matters of birth control in Ireland in
the 1960s (the poem is dated 1969), ‘Unborn’ stresses the poem’s
complete autonomy from the speaker. The confession ‘I have no right /
To say the end’ will return decades later in Muldoon’s claim in reference
to Marina Tsvetayeva’s ‘Poem of the End’ that ‘a “long poem”
[…] might be a poem that resists coming to a close, or drawing its
own conclusions’.40 This life-long commitment to poetry as a form of
language that refuses to surrender the potential for maintaining
multiple meanings parallels Cioran’s devotion to poetry as the space
of ‘unrealized plenitude’. Since, for Muldoon, the termination of the
poems is a symbolic death, the end of elegy and its consolation must be
to revive the deceased as pure fantasy, for the actual lived life, as Cioran
insists and Muldoon implicitly agrees, can only be mourned as gradual
dying. Even though Muldoon never goes to the other extreme of
Cioran’s dialectic and does not end up loathing life, his view of the

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writing process is in tune with Cioran’s emphasis on the extinguishing

of the self in the creative act.
This idea of self-removal is central to ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ in
that Muldoon projects himself onto Virgil, who spins the narratives of
the father, the Greeks and the packet. However, neither is Virgil an
independent voice in that his song is framed, in turn, by Muldoon’s
ruminations in the restaurant. Still, this framing is not absolute, for
Virgil also determines what happens to Muldoon: ‘“For it was I who had
a Hennessy broach // the subject of joining their fellow nightclubbers”’
(P 469), the nightclubbers being Muldoon and Creusa, and the Hennessy
one of two Frenchmen, whom Muldoon thinks he may have known
back in Belfast. Such interpenetration of the poem’s reality and mythical
fantasy embodies the pure possibility, which Virgil regards as ‘the sheer
beauty’ in Canto XXIX:

“The beauty of it is that your da and that other phantasm

no more set foot in Queensland

than the cat that got the cream

might look at a king. That’s the sheer beauty of it.
Ne’er cast a clout, heigh, in midstream.
No brilliant. No brilliantine, ho. No classifieds

in The Tyrone Courier.

No billabong. No billy-boil.
No stately at the autoharp.

No MasterCard. No mainferre. No slopes of Montparnasse.

No spare
the rod and spoil
the horse lost for want, heigh ho, of enough rope”. (p.475)

Identifying the father and his companion as phantasms, Virgil cancels

all the narratives that have been spun so far. None of it is what
happened, no action took place: no credit card was lost, no ‘blood-
brilliant Greeks’ pillaged Troy. The entire poem, Virgil implies, is no
more and no less than a celebration of pure possibility.
And yet, of all these figures and phantasms it is only the father and the
other skinnymalinks who get to ‘[stare] into the “unreal- / ized
plenitude”, both looking back down the drain / of eternity on their
enterprise of such great pith’ (p.470). The splitting of ‘unreal- / ized’
highlights that the pure possibility they behold is unreal in the sense that
it can only function in the realm of poetic fantasy. The echo of Hamlet

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suggests that they are indeed transposed onto the plane of imagination
but whereas for Hamlet ‘the dread of something after death’ causes
‘enterprises of great pitch and moment / [to] lose the name of action’,41
for Virgil as well as the father, who is already a traveller in ‘the
undiscovered country’, death represents an entry point to the realm of
plenitude. Therefore, the wellspring of poetry, the potentiality inherent
in langue as a system, is implied to be death. As the poem proffers a
corrigenda of Hamlet’s soliloquy, swapping ‘pith’ for ‘pitch’, it trans-
forms elegy into a celebration of pure possibility, unconstrained by
decisions of one’s own life that inevitably extinguish other options.
Rather than ‘liberat[ing] the filial subject from identitarian processes of
origin and anamnesis’ and so ‘enabl[ing] the individual to speculate on
affirmative self-formation in the wake of abandoned origins’,42 ‘The
Bangle (Slight Return)’ suggests the self needs to be withdrawn if the
language is to be allowed to ‘have its way’.
What enables ‘the sheer beauty’ is therefore depersonalization, the
Eliotean ‘extinction of personality’43 that has appealed to Muldoon
in The Waste Land.44 In contrast to Eliot, however, in Muldoon’s
poem, depersonalization creates the space for biographical revision.
Thus, the apparent two poles of Muldoon’s poetics45 are bound together
in a dialectic of removal and imaginary recreation that is committed
to maintaining potentiality of ‘unrealized plenitude’ inherent in
poetic language. In ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’, it is once the self is
given up that Virgil, who controls the ‘slip / twixt what one supposedly
determines / and the al-al-al-al-aleatory’ (p.466), can come to finish the
poem with a catalogue of errata, a regular stylistic feature of Muldoon’s
post-Madoc poetry: ‘For “errata”’, Virgil smiled, ‘read “corrigenda”’. /
He looked straight through me to Lysander and Hermia. / […] / ‘For
“Wooroonooran”, my darlings, read “Wirra Wirra”’ (pp.475–76). Iain
Twiddy notes that ‘Muldoon cannot resist the root of “errata” – “
wanderings”’, as he ‘posits alternative histories’ in which ‘the imagined
takes place of the real’.46 And yet, the poem takes this insight further, for
in lieu of the substitution of fantasy for reality in pursuit of ‘corrections
of life’,47 the imagined is founded on the extinction of the real. As
Muldoon’s ‘wanderings’ are set off by the father’s death, they become
explorations of pure possibility unconstrained by the actualities of lived
experience.
These errata tie ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’ to the celebration of the
‘slip’48 in ‘Yarrow’, a poem with which ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’
shares not only the elegiac motif but also, like ‘Third Epistle to Timothy’,
‘Incantata’ and ‘Frolic and Detour’, a rhyme scheme. However, in
contrast to ‘Yarrow’, where an erring memory mixed with fantastical
self-mythologization is pitched against the inevitability of death, in ‘The
Bangle (Slight Return)’ death is what opens the path to imaginary

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wanderings. Thus, we are returned to ‘Errata’, for whereas the mother is

identified as ‘other’, a person whose insistence on puritanical morality is
at odds with the poet’s rambling fantasy, the father is associated with the
potential for imaginary intervention in the mundane life. It is this
capacity for fantastical revision that in ‘The Bangle (Slight Return)’
makes the father a figure of depersonalized pure possibility. What
Muldoon’s last paternal elegy offers is a celebration of ‘the sheer beauty’
of imaginative speculation, as it transposes the deceased father onto the
realm of ‘unrealized plenitude’, in which the poet’s self must fade into
the singularity of mere life.

This article has been written within the framework of the project financed by
The National Science Centre, Cracow, Poland, pursuant to the decision number
DEC 2017/25/B/HS2/02099.

NOTES
1. John Montague, New Collected Poems (Loughcrew: The Gallery Press, 2012), pp.59–60.
2. Edna Longley, The Living Stream (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1994), p.157.
3. Michael Longley, Poems 1963–1983 (London: Secker and Warburg, 1991), p.48.
4. Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 1998), pp.314–15, pp.316–17.
5. Longley, The Living Stream, p.169, p.170.
6. Longley, The Living Stream, p.169, p.170.
7. See Peter Sacks, The English Elegy (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985),
pp.4–18.
8. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
1994), p.4.
9. Spargo posits that what he terms anti-elegy ‘insists on the relentless present tense of
grief, referring us to the ongoing contingency of our decision to remember the dead
or forget them and describing the faculty of remembrance in its daily rhythm as
set against mystified, stultifying institutionalized forms’. R. Clifton Spargo, ‘The
Contemporary Anti-Elegy’, The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, ed. by Karen Weisman
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p.417.
10. Paul Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998 (London: Faber and Faber, 2001), pp.60–61.
Subsequent references to this volume are noted in parenthesis in the text.
11. Paul Muldoon, Horse Latitudes (London: Faber and Faber, 2006), p.47.
12. Muldoon, Horse Latitudes, pp.47–48.
13. Florence Schneider, ‘Muldoon’s Palimpsestic Identities,’ in Affecting Irishness:
Negotiating Cultural Identity Within and Beyond the Nation, ed. by James P. Byrne,
Padraig Kirwan and Michael O’Sullivan (Bern: Peter Lang, 2009), p.254.
14. Fran Brearton, ‘For Father Read Mother: Muldoon’s Antecedents’, in Paul Muldoon:
Critical Essays, ed. by Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald (Liverpool: Liverpool
University Pres, 2004), p.56.
15. Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’, in The Norton Anthology of Poetry, p.479,
ll.31–32.
16. Paul Muldoon, ‘A Tight Wee Place in Armagh’, Fortnight 206 (July-August 1984), 23.
17. Paul Muldoon, Maggot (London: Faber and Faber, 2010), p.3.
18. Paul Muldoon, Frolic and Detour (London: Faber and Faber, 2019), pp.76–77.

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19. Muldoon recalls that ‘oddly enough, there were very few books in the house. About
the only thing I remember was a copy of The Poems of Rupert Brooke which had been
given to my mother as a prize at St Mary’ College of Education in Belfast’. Muldoon, ‘A
Tight Wee Place’, p.23.
20. Lance Rutkin, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon,’ American Poetry Review 46.3 (2016).
Accessed 10 July 2020.
21. Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe, 1998), p.32.
22. Muldoon’s rendition of ‘An Scathán’ was included along with Davitt’s original in
Poetry Ireland Review 84 (2005), pp.6–9.
23. Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2016), pp.263–64.
24. W. H. Auden, Collected Poems, ed. by Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1991),
p.542.
25. Paul Muldoon, ‘Notes for Chez Moy: A Critical Autobiography’, The Paul Muldoon
Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript, Archives, and Rare Books Library, Emory
University, Atlanta, USA, MSS 784, Box 29, Folder 2.
26. Jonathan Culler, Theory of the Lyric (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2016),
p.16.
27. Eric Falci, Continuity and Change in Irish Poetry, 1966–2010 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012), p.69.
28. Emil Cioran, The Trouble with Being Born, trans. By Richard Howard (New York:
Vintage, 1973), p.22.
29. Cioran, p.90. Emphasis in original.
30. Cioran, p.186.
31. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen, in The Omnibus Homo
Sacer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017), p.21. This point, though marginal, is
central to Agamben’s delineation of the idea of sovereignty. A thorough analysis of
language is provided in The Kingdom and the Glory, where language is shown to be
predicated on its performative efficacy.
32. Paul Muldoon, ‘Paul Muldoon Writes…’, The Poetry Book Society Bulletin 106 (1980), 1.
33. T. S. Eliot, Collected Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p.72.
34. John Brown, In the Chair: Interviews with Poets from the North of Ireland (Cliffs of Moher:
Salmon Publishing, 2002), pp.187–88.
35. Dan Eltringham and Kit Toda, ‘Interview with Paul Muldoon (Part 1),’ literateur.com,
11 November 2009 [accessed 1 July 2020].
36. Michael Donaghy, ‘A Conversation with Paul Muldoon’, Chicago Review 35.1 (1985),
p.82.
37. Lyn Keller, ‘An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, Contemporary Literature 35.1 (1994), p.27.
38. James Wilson, ‘The Art of Poetry LXXXVII: Interview with Paul Muldoon,’ The Paris
Review 169 (2004), p.78.
39. Paul Muldoon, ‘Unborn’, The Paul Muldoon Papers, Stuart A. Rose Manuscript,
Archives, and Rare Books Library, Emory University, Atlanta, USA, MS 784, Box 30
folder 8.
40. Paul Muldoon, The End of the Poem (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.299.
41. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, in The Complete Works, ed. by Stanley Wells et al.
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), p.698.
42. Ruben Moi, ‘“I, Too, Have Trailed My Father’s Spirit”: Alternative Memories in the
Poetry of Paul Muldoon,’ Nordic Irish Studies 6 (2007), p.125.
43. T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and Individual Talent,’ in Selected Essays (London: Faber and
Faber, 1999), p.11.
44. Muldoon says that ‘this idea of the impersonality of the poem I find quite attractive’,
Eltringham and Toda. In his introduction to the poem, Muldoon makes an even bolder
point: ‘It’s almost impossible to think of a world in which The Waste Land did not exist’,

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though the use of the past simple subtly hints at the poem’s diminished validity for the
contemporary times. ‘Introduction’ to T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, ed. by Paul Muldoon
(New York: Liveright, 2013), p.5.
45. Peter McDonald zeroes in on this internal polarity of Muldoon’s poetry and criticism,
noting how they are mutually subversive. Peter McDonald, Mistaken Identities: Poetry
and Northern Ireland (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), pp.149–50.
46. Iain Twiddy, Pastoral Elegy in Contemporary British and Irish Poetry (London:
Continuum, 2012), p.222.
47. Twiddy, p.222.
48. Matthew Campbell argues that Muldoon’s elegiac mode in ‘Yarrow’ ‘seek[s]
compensation, however small, by a corresponding attachment to remains – an
attachment not just to memory, but to those small things which refuse forgetting or
disavowal, which refuse to accept annihilation’. Matthew Campbell, ‘Muldoon’s
Remains’, in Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays, p.173. Campbell’s insight is shared by the
majority of commentators; Wills observes that ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Incantata’ represent
meandering explorations of grief that cannot be relieved. Reading Paul Muldoon, p.178,
181. Similarly, Ann Karhio suggests the two elegies admit of reenactment of mourning
but offer no consolation. Slight Return: Paul Muldoon’s Poetics of Place (Bern: Peter Lang,
2017), p.130.

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