unavowed engagement wilfulness of the girl’s action and the theatricality of ‘announced’ suggest that she
insistson the fact of a death in order to relish her own implication in it. The
title’s allusion to Donne’s enthusiastic self-abasement (‘O thinke mee worth thine
anger, punish mee’^22 ), along with the Christian iconography of ‘lamb or herring’,
reinforces this second interpretation, inviting a reading of the poem involving a
critique of Christianity as a religion of guilt and punishment. As with ‘The Field
Hospital’, neither reading is given precedence over the other, but here the lack of a
definitive version of events leaves us unable even to begin to make our own moral
judgement. With its closing couplet—‘Children were warned that it was rude to
stare,||Left with their parents for a breath of air’—the most the poem comments
on is the general reluctance of those ‘implicated simply by being on the sidelines’^23
to confront a morally ambiguous situation.
New Weather, as I remarked, contains no direct reference to the Troubles, but,
appearing as it did in a context where it could be felt that ‘it is arguable thatany
poem by a Northern Irish poet since 1968, on whatever subject, could be termed
a Troubles poem, in that it may, consciously or unconsciously, reflect the context
in which it was written’,^24 it is inevitable that Northern Irish meaning should be
read into its violent parables. Kendall, for example, describes ‘The Field Hospital’
as ‘Set during the American Civil War but clearly analogous to the conflict in
Northern Ireland’.^25 InMules(1977), his next volume, Muldoon begins to include
the Troubles as subject-matter, but more through their teasingly foregrounded
absence than through their presence; he addresses them through knowing play on
the expectations for Northern Irish relevance that readers will inevitably, and not
unreasonably, bring to his work.
The horrors that are hinted at in the first stanza of ‘Bang’ (‘For that moment
we had been the others|These things happen to....Which of us had that leg
belonged to?’^26 ) are suddenly left behind as the narrator improbably asserts: ‘It
brought me back years to that Carnival|In the next parish.’ When this reminiscence
ends with a girl ‘moaning the name of the one who had scored the goal|Earlier
that evening’, the sexual overtone requires a reassessment of the earlier scenario.
If the narrator is ‘brought back’ to the carnival by the event of the first stanza,
then this, which the title, and the expectations created by Muldoon’s Northern
Irish context, had led us to identify as an explosion, reconfigures itself as a sexual
encounter. The unclaimed leg becomes as likely to be tangled indistinguishably
with a partner’s as severed in a blast. The suggestion of violence is proffered with
(^22) John Donne, ‘Goodfriday, 1613. Riding Westward’, inComplete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides
(London: Dent, 1985), 358. 23
Muldoon, ‘Paul Muldoon’, 133–4. Muldoon refers to the situation imagined in his poem ‘The
Country Club’.
(^24) Frank Ormsby, ‘Preface’, inidem(ed.),A Rage for Order: Poetry of the Northern Ireland Troubles
(Belfast: Blackstaff, 1992), p. xviii. 25
Kendall,Paul Muldoon, 31.^26 Muldoon, ‘Bang’, inPoems 1968–1998,65–6.