unavowed engagement record unfolding events. Incidents are narrated, or hinted at, but no comment
upon,or even reaction to, them is indicated; their moral implications are altogether
ignored. Muldoon’s approach to violence is, to borrow D. W. Harding’s remark
on Rosenberg, ‘unusually direct’, with ‘no secondary distress arising from the sense
that these things ought not to be’.^17
Such inscrutability in the poems’ personae means that access to the poet’s own
views on violence is thoroughly obstructed. The common readerly temptation to
conflate poet and speaker is unhelpful here: it only adds to the impression that
Muldoon himself has nothing he wishes to say on the subject. It is, indeed, what
lies behind frustration such as that of Barra O Seaghda, who dismisses Muldoon as
a poet who ‘plays with politics, but snaps his fingers and disappears, vapour-like,
up the postmodern chimney when any reality comes knocking at the door’.^18
Muldoon’s first collection,New Weather(1973), contains no direct reference
to the Troubles, but its parabolic narratives do raise some of the questions of
responsibility that violence evokes. Two poems from it are exemplary of his future
attitude to the issues raised by conflict, in their withholding of moral judgement
in situations which seem to demand it. ‘The Field Hospital’ entirely and overtly
separates the positions of writer and speaker, voicing dramatically the concerns
of the physicians of the hospital of the title. What seems like moral clarity in the
physicians, with their rhetoric of self-sufficiency (‘with the strength of our bare
hands’^19 ) and pride in their aloof impartiality before all causes except the saving of
lives(‘WeanswertonogreySouth||Nor blue North...But that hillside of fresh
graves’), is abruptly brought into question, and possibly recast as complacency, by
the reality of a suffering victim, and their casual, even callous, attitude towards her:
Would this girl brought to our tents
From whose flesh we have removed
Shot that George, on his day off,
Will use to weight fishing lines,
Who died screaming for ether,
Yet protest our innocence?Tim Kendall reads the poem’s last stanza as a resolution of this conflict: he sees the
gigantic, yellow moths
That brushed right over her wounds,
Pinning themselves to our sleeves
Like medals given the braveas ‘connect[ing] her wounds with their [the physicians’] deserved commendation’,
and the poem as a whole as valorizing the dispassionate: ‘a tacit manifesto for the
(^17) D. W. Harding, quoted in Seamus Perry, ‘Old Druid Time’,Times Literary Supplement,25Nov.
2005, 8. 18
19 Barra O Seaghda, quoted in Goodby, ‘Hermeneutic Hermeticism’, 152.
Muldoon, ‘The Field Hospital’, inPoems 1968–1998(London: Faber, 2001), 33.