untainted or uncorrupted. The poem is hardly a fine example of
mediation or ëbalanceí between cultures.
However, the poem is not this simple. First, it is difficult to
locate the voice of the poetic speaker. The poem begins with the word
ëWeí, suggesting that the speaker is one of the natives smoking
willow-tobacco. Yet s/he may be a mediator between the two since
s/he calls out in French. The French are traditionally enemies of the
English and so an Indian speaking French would be seen as a
collaborator or double enemy. Her/his use of French is ëno less
strangeí than the estranged encounter. The French words like the
British are alien to the speaker, and there is a sense of the speaker
encountering alterity and being assimilated by it in her/his use of a
foreign tongue: ëCíest la lavande,/ une fleur mauve comme le ciel.í
The introduction of the French creates confusion and interplay
between British, French and native identities, which oscillate between
one another suggesting along with metaphors of disease that cultural
identities, languages and bodies are not self contained but interactive.
Moreover, the form of the poem is built with two line stanzas
that are divided yet run into one another with the use of enjambment.
Even words such as ëhandkerchiefí split and merge into the following
stanza. The form enacts the theme of the poem where identity and
language itself is conveyed as a process of perpetual splitting and
merging. In ëMeeting the Britishí, identities are held in binary
opposition to one another yet there are hints of infiltration between
bodily, linguistic and ideological frontiers. However, the transgression
of cultural boundaries is presented in negative terms as being
exploitative and damaging.
As Tim Kendall notices, Muldoon has remained aware of
parallels between the respective fates of the Irish and native
Americans. Acknowledging that many Irish became settlers in
America, taking over native American territories, Muldoonís ëThe
More a Man Has the More a Man Wantsí from Quoof (1983) narrates
of a ëSioux busily tracing the family tree/ of an Ulsterman who had
some hand/ in the massacre at Wounded Kneeí.^27 Muldoon
27 Muldoon, ëThe More a Man Has the More a Man Wantsí, New and Selected
Poems 1968ñ1994, p.88.