unavowed engagement recover radical innocence and learn at last|thatit is self-delighting’. The suggestion
is that the historical detail which the poem has been accumulating has caused
this altered view: the self-sufficiency of Yeats’s ‘self-delighting,|Self-appeasing,
self-affrighting’^53 soul is unattainable to the individual bound up (by, for one thing,
ancestry) in the processes of history. The poem can be seen to be about the inevitable
implication of even the most innocent individual, like the new-born Asher, in the
imperfections of history.
Such a meaning is also furthered by another of the poem’s repeated devices,
the recurrent intrusion of the language of public injunction into the fabric of the
poem, which stylistically enacts the inextricability of private and public spheres.
In content, these interjections will, again, often appear nonsensical: the ‘Please
Examine||Your Change’ quoted above seems a meaningless intrusion on an image
that is already elusively whimsical. But closer examination of such moments reveals
them almost always to bear some relevance to the context in which they appear.
When this is the grotesque relevance of ‘For Hire’ (as of an unoccupied taxi) to ‘the
morning when Dr Patel had systematically drawn|the child from Jean’s womb’
(a recent miscarriage is one of the recurring preoccupations of the poem), it adds
to theQuoof-like affectlessness of the poem’s speaker. But ‘Please Examine Your
Change’ reappears later:
Ton upon ton of clay, hay, hair, shoes and spectacle frames
made it less and less likely that we would land
on our feet on the Griggstown Causeway any time soon, Ramp Divides,
Please Examine Your Change As Mistakes Cannot Be Rectified.The full version of the phrase (combined with the ‘less and less likely’ that
will later be applied to the possibility of recovering ‘radical innocence’) suggests
the irredeemability of the past (clay, hay, spectacle frames, and so on, reappear
throughout the poem as a shorthand, with their connotations of the confiscated
belongings found in the concentration camps, for the debris of history).
Through such oblique devices, Muldoon draws together the surface incoherencies
of the poem towards a single specific theme: the relation of the individual to history.
Critics have been quick to notice this: Quinney sees in the poem ‘the panic
of...participation in history’.^54 Longley reads Yeats’s presence as indicating a
Muldoon ‘freshly interested in Yeats’s manner of moving between public and
private worlds’.^55 Robert MacFarlane attributes to the poem ‘an examination of
the emotional mechanisms by which we come to understand tragedies in which
we had no part’.^56 Rather than, as in his early work, resisting a predetermined
(^53) W. B. Yeats, ‘A Prayer for my Daughter’, inThe Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent,
1990), 237.
(^54) Quinney, ‘In the Studebaker’, 21.
(^55) Longley, ‘Twists and Turns’,Poetry Review, 92/4 (Winter 2002–3), 65.
(^56) Robert MacFarlane, ‘High and Dry in the Flood’,Times Literary Supplement, 11 Oct. 2002, 24.