The Mixed Marriage

Paul Muldoon1

Paul Muldoon’s first book was aptly titled New Weather: it introduced us to a distinctive sensibility, a supple inward music, a poetry that insisted on its proper life as words before it conceded the claims of that other life we all live before and after words. Mules continues and develops this hermetic direction and is a strange, rich second collection, reminding one sometimes of the sophisticated repose of poésie pure, and sometimes bringing one down to earth in the simple piety of the local ballad. It is as if the poems spring from some mixed imaginative marriage, as if their genesis is mule-like, and indeed one excellent entry-point into the book is a poem called ‘The Mixed Marriage’. I quote it in full, because I feel that with this poet it is essential to hear the delicate tone, half-way between cajolement and disdain, and the deft transitions, half-way between the playful and the poignant:

My father was a servant-boy.

When he left school at eight or nine

He took up billhook and loy

To win the ground he would never own.

My mother was the school-mistress,

The world of Castor and Pollux.

There were twins in her own class.

She could never tell which was which.

She had read one volume of Proust,

He knew the cure for farcy.

I flitted between a hole in the hedge

And a room in the Latin Quarter.

When she had cleared the supper-table

She opened The Acts of the Apostles,

Aesop’s Fables, Gulliver’s Travels.

Then my mother went on upstairs

And my father further dimmed the light

To get back to hunting with ferrets

Or the factions of the faction-fights,

The Ribbon Boys, the Caravats.

Of course, the first thing there is the melody, the play on the octosyllabic metronome, a music that by its deliberation and technical self-assurance belies the naif wording. There is a connoisseur’s savouring of the dialect and of the arcane in farcy, Caravats, billhook and loy, ferrets and faction-fights, all of which invite us to indulge a version of Ulster pastoral. But that indulgence is just disallowed by Proust and the Latin Quarter, not to mention Castor and Pollux and Gulliver’s Travels. It is as if the imagination is fathered by the local subculture on the mothering literate culture of the schools. Muldoon’s is a sceptical, playful imagination, capable of allegory and parable, in poems like ‘How to Play Championship Tennis’ and ‘At Martha’s Deli’, in love with riddles and hints and half-disclosures in poems like ‘Cheesecake’, ‘Boon’, ‘The Country Club’ and ‘Duffy’s Circus’, but finally at its richest when it dwells and broods over one suggestive image—‘The Merman’, for example—until that image slowly and richly begins a series of metamorphoses and the poem is finally and simply the process of the image’s life-history. Here is a poem called ‘Centaurs’ which clearly shows this process in action. It is as if the centaur notion is the larva from which the butterfly gorgeousness of the poem’s movement emerges naturally:

I can think of William of Orange,

Prince of gasworks-wall and gable-end.

A plodding, snow-white charger

On the green, grassy slopes of the Boyne,

The milk-cart swimming against the current

Of our own backstreet. Hernan Cortes

Is mustering his cavalcade on the pavement,

Lifting his shield like the lid of a garbage-can.

His eyes are fixed on a river of Aztec silver,

He whinnies and paws the earth

For our amazement. And Saul of Tarsus,

The stone he picked up once has grown into a hoof.

He slings the saddle-bags over his haunches,

Lengthening his reins, loosening his girth,

To thunder down the long road to Damascus.

I think the wrong question here is ‘What’s it about?’, the wrong quest the quest for the poem’s relationship to the world outside it. Fundamentally, the poem displays the imagination’s confidence and pleasure in re-ordering the facts of place and time, of history and myth. The milkman in the milkcart heading into a backstreet under the figure of William of Orange flourishes and blooms into voluptuous conceptions of Cortez and Saul of Tarsus. If we miss the opulence of the music, the overspill of the creative joy, we miss the poem. The life of the thing is in the language’s potential for generating new meanings out of itself, and it is this sense of buoyancy, this delight in the trickery and lechery that words are capable of, that is the distinguishing mark of the volume as a whole.

I think this is where reviewers of Muldoon’s earlier book missed the point when, after praising the technique, they asked what he had to say. What he has to say is constantly in disguise, and what is disguised is some conviction like this: the imagination is arbitrary and contrary, it delights in its own fictions and has a right to them; or we might quote Wallace Stevens: ‘Poetry creates a fictitious existence on an exquisite plane.’ In Muldoon, the plane varies from sequences like ‘Armageddon, Armageddon’, from a parable like ‘Lunch with Pancho Villa’ to a beautiful direct meditation like ‘Paris’.

The hermetic tendency has its drawbacks, however, and leads him into puzzles rather than poems—at least, that’s my response to some work here such as ‘The Big House’ and the ‘Ducking Stool’; and when in different poems we find girls called Faith, Grace and Mercy, and a boy called Will, our patience with the mode gets near to breaking point. But it holds, finally, and gratefully, because most of the time, we know we can trust ourselves to Muldoon’s good intentions. He is one of the very best.

Radio Telefís Eireann, 1978