april warman
poet’s role in a divided society’.^20 Thisis a possible reading, but to present it as the
only interpretation the poem affords collapses the ambivalence which is sustained
to the last line. It is the voice of the physicians that likens the moths to medals; the
value they place on their own impartiality is not itself an impartial viewpoint.
In fact, their language suggests a degree of unease within their self-congratulation:
the very act of comparison (‘Likemedals’) is based in a recognition of essential
difference (notreallymedals: bravery remains unguaranteed). Furthermore, the
phrase ‘brushed right over her wounds’ contains an unpleasant suggestion that the
moths, as they are appropriated to the physicians’ rhetoric, perform an obscuring
or minimizing of the girl’s injuries. In this poem, the positions of the healers
and of the girl who might be seen as their victim are uneasily juxtaposed: its
strength lies precisely in its refusal to endorse either. Essential to a clear reading
is an appreciation of the poem’s status as dramatic presentation of an unresolved
opposition of viewpoints, rather than a vehicle for the poet’s views, a ‘tacit
manifesto’.
‘The Field Hospital’ does acknowledge that suffering exists, and that it creates
moral difficulties, which are made the more immediate by Muldoon’s refusal to
resolve them. ‘Good Friday, 1971. Driving Westwards’ is even more indicative of
Muldoon’s future development, in that it unsettles any factual basis for the exercise
of moral judgement. The poem describes a car journey that ends in what may or
may not be a hit-and-run accident:
for a time I lost
Control and she thought we hit something big
But I had seen nothing, perhaps a stick
Lying across the road. I glanced back once
And there was nothing but a heap of stones.
We had just dropped in from nowhere for lunch
In Gaoth Dobhair, I happy and she convinced
Of the death of more than lamb or herring.
She stood up there and then, face full of drink,
And announced that she and I were to blame
For something killed along the way we came.^21In making it uncertain whether or not a victim ever actually existed, Muldoon
leaves readers unsure whether they are seeing an evasion of responsibility by the
narrator or a display of melodramatic (and drunken) self-importance on the girl’s
part. The narrator’s determination to be ‘happy’ despite the accident, his insistent
repetition of the word ‘nothing’, and his changing version of the harmless things
they might have hit—‘perhaps a stick’ or ‘a heap of stones’ (itself connotative of
a grave-cairn)—suggest that he is protesting too much. On the other hand, the
(^20) Tim Kendall,Paul Muldoon(Bridgend: Seren, 1996), 31.
(^21) Muldoon, ‘Good Friday, 1971. Driving Westwards’, inPoems 1968–1998, 19–20.