war, politics, and disappearing poetry Either way, I am
Throughwith history...Again, as we have seen with Yeats above, there is the self-contradicting claim for silence—‘Not
knowing a word of the language’. ‘Either way’ signals that ‘Through with history’ is ambiguously
contradictory, and we may read that ambiguity back into the previous stanzas of seemingly innocent
escapist fantasy: what, in this Irish context, might those ‘milk churns’ contain or conceal? In the
supposed beauty of the night, there is violence in‘strikes’ and fire. And what does that bulging bag
contain? In life, a string bag is distinguished by the fact that one can see through it, and when ‘bulging’,
its contents are overt and obvious. In Mahon’s poem, poetic trickery withholds such information and
insight from us.
The Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon has engaged overtly with Auden’s ‘poetry makes nothing
happen’ in his poem ‘7, Middagh Street’, inPoems 1968–1998(London: Faber, 2001), 175–93, and in
discursive mode has declared how in his poetry he does ‘quite often engage in leading people on, gently,
into little situations by assuring them that all’s well and then—this sounds awfully manipulative, but
part of writing is about manipulation—leaving them high and dry, in some corner of a terrible party,
where I’ve nipped out through the bathroom window’ (An Interview with Paul Muldoon’, by Clair
Wills, Nick Jenkins, and John Lanchester,Oxford Poetry, 3/1 (Winter 1986/7), 19–20). For a critical
discussion of how Muldoon’s verse evades interpretation, see John Lyon, ‘ ‘‘All That’’: Muldoon and
the Vanity of Interpretation’, in Tim Kendall and Peter McDonald (eds.),Paul Muldoon: Critical Essays
(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004), 110–24.