specific history. There is little sense of a foundational ënational Heimí,
gravity or fixity within the poem.
ëThe Mixed Marriageí from Mules (1977) explores issues of
mingling and apartness, hybridity and difference, from the point of
view of a child of mixed parentage who, as Clair Wills notes, is a
mule-ish go-between:^40
My father was a servant boy.
When he left school at eight or nine
He took up billhook and loy
To win the ground he would never own.^41The mother is a ëschool mistressí from the ëworld of Castor and
Polluxí, while it is likely that the father is a Catholic and Republican
since he joins ëThe Ribbon boysí. The marriage is one between
opposing identities yet the relationship is sustained as the couple allow
each other to lead their separate lives: one in ëa hole in the hedgeí, the
other in ëa room in the Latin Quarterí. This metaphor provides yet
another division between the couple in terms of the rural and the
urban: the father is provincial and grounded in the Irish landscape
while the mother is educated and cosmopolitan. Their separation is
enacted in the verse form whereby each parent resides in a different
stanza. They belong to separate worlds and this is evoked by the
reference to ëGulliverís Travelsí where the protagonist journeys
between radically different realms. Yet the opposition between the
parents is not seen simply in terms of the anticipated Irish/English,
Catholic/Protestant divisions but also in terms of French, Irish,
Eighteenth Century, Classical, peasant and republican identities, and
earth and sky.
The agrarian struggles of the Ribbon men over the land with
which the father is associated is opposed to the heavenly ëworld of
Castor and Polluxí at which the mother gazes. The child is a product
of parents from different worlds who have disjunctive perspectives.
The childís position between earth and heaven can be compared with
the dual vision of the person in ëBlemishí who looks out of two
different eyes:
40 Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon, p.49.
41 Muldoon, ëThe Mixed Marriageí, Mules (London: Faber, 1977), p.42.