I very much admire Seamus Heaney, whose translations of Beowulf and the Aeneid excel the others that I’ve read. He led me to another Irish poet, Paul Muldoon, who’s perhaps equally attracted to using traditional (especially Gaelic) forms in non-traditional ways. Muldoon’s acute sense of place and history naturally play into his “Irish poems,” but he uses this sensibility to cast his voice in other contexts too, including American ones.
Today I’ve been looking at “Meeting the British,” the title poem of his 1987 volume which is a beautiful and startling monologue spoken by an indigenous American. Evocative lines such as
The sky was lavender /
and the snow lavender-blue
give me pause while I paint and enjoy the picture for myself, if you see what I mean. The poem goes on in two-line stanzas of somewhat uneven length and with rational line breaks mostly after full stops, before coordinating conjunctions, etc. He employs more of that idyllic imagery — until the whites enter the poem.
Muldoon alludes to the relationship between Lord Jeffrey Amherst, the head of the British military in the colonies during the French and Indian War, and Colonel Henry Bouquet, a mercenary who exchanged a fair amount of correspondence with him in the 1750s to 1760s. Neither can bear, according to Muldoon’s speaker, the smell of the Indians’ willow tobacco, the fragrance of which Bouquet counteracts by using a scented hankie.
I mentioned the variable line length, certainly not unusual in modern verse; but interestingly, the last line is longer than the others, and more irregular:
They gave us six fishhooks
And two blankets infected with smallpox.
Notice the effect of the spondees on reading aloud:
‘ ‘
six fish
‘ ‘
two blank
which really slow us down with both a sense of shock and a sense of an impending conclusion.
Amherst, after whom Amherst College was later named, had in fact contacted Bouquet about the desirability of wiping out the Indians by means of germ warfare. He wrote: “You will do well to try to inoculate the Indians by means of blankets, as well as to try every other method that can serve to extirpate this execrable race.” Hence the smallpox-infected “gifts” pressed on the native Americans were no accident.
Muldoon has been publishing since 1968 and, from his perch at Princeton, is still going.