edna longley
Perhaps to balance ‘Whitethorns’, Muldoon’s ‘At the Sign of the Black Horse’
representshistory as still in dangerous, rather than salutary, flood. After Hurricane
Floyd, the poet’s family perches outside their house above a flooded American
road, while the baby sleeps in an ‘old Biltrite pram’. Relocating Yeats’s storm as the
hurricane, Muldoon entwines an intertextual critique of ‘Prayer’ with metaphorical
flotsam of the years since 1919—flotsam largely determined by his child’s Irish-
Jewish heritage: ‘Asher slept on, his shawl|of Carrickmacross lace, his bonnet tied
with silk reputed to come from Samarkand.’^94 The Holocaust is among the reasons
why the speaker recurrently doubts that ‘the soul’ will ‘recover radical innocence’
anytime soon. Nonetheless, the future sleeps in the child. Set between history and
home, Muldoon’s poem is another marginal eclogue, another war pastoral that
defines peace or civilization by contraries. Itsrelation to ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’
underlines how war pastoral builds up civilization by building upon its own history.
(^94) Muldoon, ‘At the Sign of the Black Horse’, inMoy Sand and Gravel, 77.