april warman
one hand only to be whisked away by the other. The unexpected substitution
atonce confounds and exposes readerly expectation to be titillated by excitingly
contemporary subject-matter.
Again, the preoccupation with Muldoon’s native county of the sonnet sequence
‘Armageddon, Armageddon’ (also fromMules),^27 and its allusions to violence
(especially internecine violence: ‘Were Twin and Twin at each other’s throats?’;
‘Our father...torn between his own two ponies,||Their going their different ways’)
tempt us to read for veiled commentary on the Ulster situation. References such
as that in Sonnet III to ‘where the first Orange Lodge was founded,||An orchard
full of No Surrenders’, explicitly invoke Northern Irish politics. Yet the sequence’s
unstable mix of ill-defined, semi-fantastic scenarios resists any coherent (let alone
political) reading. The seven sonnets cover Mediterranean island hopping, Irish
folklore, a kind of tourist’s guide to Armagh, a dream vision on a train, and
three unrelated, nightmarish scenarios which adumbrate some kind of societal
breakdown. As Peter McDonald observes, ‘these pieces make up a peculiar kind
of sequence, one characterized more bynon sequitur than connection.’^28 It is
impossible to take the specifically Ulster references as clues to a larger political
meaning for the poem. Added to this destabilization of Northern Irish (political)
reading is the fact that the sequence is narrated with such casual affectlessness that
an interpretation which tries to read it as responsible commentary risks appearing
faintly ridiculous: in Sonnet IV,
He [our brother] had guarded our mother bent-double
Over the kitchen sink, her face in the basin.
She had broken another of her best dishes,
We would bury her when we were able.The speaker bathetically ventriloquizes the mother’s probable misplaced reaction,
which renders the loss of a best dish as significant as her own undignified death. The
casual response to the latter, treating it only in terms of its practical ramifications,
refuses to acknowledge the ethical dimensions of cruelty and loss, and thus, also,
their potential political significance.
InWhy Brownlee Left(1980), sectarianism and its consequences start to feature
in Muldoon’s poetry in a relatively overt and undisrupted way. ‘Anseo’ famously
relates the childhood brutalization of the speaker’s classmate. Repeatedly punished
at school for lateness, for failing to answer ‘Anseo’ at roll-call, Joe Ward, now a
paramilitary living ‘In a secret camp|On the other side of the mountain’ where
he fights ‘for Ireland,||Making things happen’,^29 is shown to have internalized the
authoritarian mind-set of his school:
(^27) Muldoon, ‘Armageddon, Armageddon’, inPoems 1968–1998, 67–71.
(^28) Peter McDonald,Mistaken Identities: Poetry and Northern Ireland(Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1997), 162–3.
(^29) Muldoon, ‘Anseo’, inPoems 1968–1998,83–4.