The first three couplets have slant-rhymes that seem to suggest approach and the approximation of one viewpoint to the other: “winter”/“lavender,” “blue”/“below,” “together”/“over.” In the fourth stanza, however, which describes Muldoon’s main musical experience these days comes through his involvement with his rock band in New Jersey, Wayside Shrines. If puns are good enough for Christ, they should be good enough for the rest of us.”. Encyclopedia.com. In 1973, he graduated from Queen’s University with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and began work at BBC Belfast as a radio and television producer. These are sonic links for which there is little or no semantic basis, according to Times Literary Supplement reviewer Mick Imlah, who notes that “rhyme words are often joined by little more than the letters they have in common.” The opening rhyme is an odd exception to this rule, encompassing both a sense of stasis (“winter”) and fertile growth (“lavender”), a paradox that recurs in the lines “the sound of the two streams coming together / (both were frozen over).” This image is as contradictory as it is metaphorical, for, as Clair Wills points out, “nature is in stasis even while it moves, just as the two sides are in process, ‘coming together’ while they are ‘frozen over’ linguistically.”, The speaker’s very deliberate use of poetic language in describing the sky as “lavender” and the snow as “lavender-blue” shows how much his perception of the world has been altered by his European contacts and how powerfully his own words can shape and assert his own particular view of the world.
“The thing about Joyce and many great writers who had such a particular style is that you can only go down that road a certain distance. DIED: 1972, Enfield, Conn. Line 17 suggests that this meeting is a standard example of trade. © 2020 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. “There’s a fascinating book, The Archaeological Survey of the Dingle Peninsula, which is basically an account of every stone on the peninsula. In choosing to write in English, he can access words and images from a variety of cultures and from a huge literary tradition. I was at a school where there was a lot of music in the air, literally. Its clever, almost surreal poems, tinged with themes of mortality and the physical body, seemed to stretch his idiosyncratic style and technique to their limits. He and his wife would come to Enniskillen for the day and have a drink before they’d go back to Leitrim. SOURCES (September 30, 2020). In four counties, between 26 and 41 percent of Catholic-owned land was taken. His 1994 poem Incantata, addressed to a deceased former girlfriend, Mary Farl Powers, refers to His Nibs Sam Bethicket before name-checking characters: Vladamir and Estragon, Nagg and Nell. Muldoon himself writes most of his poetry in English, the language of the people who colonized his country, rather than using Irish Gaelic, mother tongue of his tribe. Write a poem about your sense of belonging to your country. © 2020 eNotes.com, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Furthermore, it emphasizes the speaker’s sense of estrangement from his own voice, as he calls out across the clearing in a language not his own. The house band for Muldoon’s Picnic is Rogue Oliphant. Though both sides use the word “lavender,” the plant to which it refers is European in origin and, hence, alien to the speaker. Poetry for Students. Longley, Edna, “‘When Did You Last See Your Father’”: Perceptions of the Past in Northern Irish Writing 1965-1985,” in The Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1994. Retrieved September 30, 2020 from Encyclopedia.com: https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/meeting-british. Since 1990, he has been the director of the creative writing program at Princeton University. As a result, the Irish population suffered from mass starvation and disease, including typhus and cholera. Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/tools_citationguide.html. In a single stroke, Muldoon’s hyphenated compound—which draws attention to the way meanings are assembled and precisely how unstable those meanings are—foreshadows the destruction of both a place and a way of life based upon it. Described by the Times Literary Supplement as the most significant English-language poet born since the second World War, he looms large in Irish literature, his relentlessly inventive, intricate work inviting a response from readers and other writers of poetry. “Lead Editorial on the Irish Famine,” The Times (London), October 4, 1848, http://www.people.viriginia.edu/~eas5e/Irish/Times.html, accessed August 4, 1999. The repetitiveness with which the speaker applies the epithet “lavender-blue” expresses the transformative power of poetic language, or what Wills calls the speaker’s “command of language to command our view of nature.” Lavender also, “The narrative Muldoon spins so sparely and artfully in ‘Meeting the British’ is as old and familiar as Homer’s story of the Trojan horse.”. The provision of a wider context for his work reveals its scope and interest.
“Actually, I bumped into a cousin of mine on the way here, would you believe.”. Muldoon explores the construction and de-construction of historical events and personal identities in “Meeting the British.” For example, Colonel Bouquet was a British officer with a French name (he was born in Switzerland) who was Paul Muldoon is one of Ireland’s most outstanding contemporary poets, and one of the most admired English-language poets anywhere in the world. The time frame of the poem’s action can also be narrowed to the 1760s. Osborn, Andrew. The situation is simple and, in Muldoon’s presentation of it, understated: coming together in winter with a British general and French colonel, the Indian trader is tricked into accepting smallpox-infested blankets. Yet this take on deadly double-dealing in the game of territorial conquest brings a thoroughly postcolonial, postmodern approach to the traditional genre of the eyewitness, historical account. Through Muldoon’s inventive use of hyphenated compounds and line breaks, what at first looks like a proffered handshake, a gesture of goodwill, turns out to be little more than an ostentatious and affected waving of a handkerchief—an ultimately hollow and false gesture of peace: “As for the unusual / scent when the Colonel shook out his hand- / kerchief....” This piece of cloth, like the blankets that are the instruments of genocide, bears the outward stamp of civility yet comes to symbolize an unspeakably inhuman act of betrayal. He could see it, the humour.”. Indeed, as we soon find out, the gesture is far from innocent, and its rather fey appearance camouflages its true nature.
In the August 21, 1987, edition of The New Statesman, reviewer John Lucas wrote about the poem “Meeting the British”: “The stupidity and malevolence of the gift says a good deal about the nature and character of British Imperialism.” Lucas finishes by saying that Meeting the British is “head and shoulders above anything else so far published this year.” Mick Imlah, writing in the Times Literary Supplement, concedes that “Meeting the British isn’t an easy book, sitting too happily in its painful mode of in transit for the reader’s comfort,” but that “... the whole—leaky, shifting, overladen—is a fascinating exercise in departure.” In “The Lie of the Land” from The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, published in 1991, Clair Wills writes about the poem: “Like the Indians in the poem ‘Meeting the British,’ the danger in opening up to new forms of communication is colonization, a loss of ‘self-containment.’ And of course this is the situation for Muldoon, who has perfect command of the English language though he was born in Ireland, where English is in one sense an ‘alien’ language.” In Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrangement (1996), Ian Gregson writes: “The title poem of Meeting the British is, for Muldoon, a surprisingly savage indictment of the colonizing of native Americans who are clearly an analogy for the Irish: ‘They gave us six fishhooks / and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.’ However, it is as though Muldoon usually takes all this for granted and is more interested in exploring the complex contemporary ramifications than in protesting about the violent imperialist roots.” Gregson goes on to say that this poem: “calls its own medium into question by dwelling on voices and languages. In subsequent books, however, Muldoon produced more experimental and extravagant poems that were very obviously written in his own unique voice. This event is retold by the narrator of the poem, presumably an eighteenth-century Native American. Puts Muldoon into the wider context of modern Irish poets. His most notable contribution to Irish literary culture has been his idiosyncratic, and in some quarters controversial, editing of The Faber Book of Contemporary Irish Verse (1986). Maggot contains the clever, highly formal poem Lines for the Centenary of the Birth of Samuel Beckett.
Historical documents provide evidence for such an act.
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