“I want you to tell me if grief, brought to numbers, cannot be so fierce”: Stanzaic Form, Rhythm and Play in Paul Muldoon’s Long Poems

Abstract

Three long poems by Paul Muldoon are discussed, and the argument is advanced that their rhythmic organisation is located above all at the level of the stanza. From early in his career, Muldoon has not used regular metres; the iambic pentameter, whose traces are often heard in the lines of his contemporaries such as Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, is never audible in his later work. Muldoon’s “At the Sign of the Black Horse. . .” is compared to the poem which it echoes, W.B. Yeats’ “A Prayer for my Daughter”: where Yeats inscribes his presence in strongly metrical forms, Muldoon’s disorderly rhythms seem to mimic the action of the tempest whose aftermath he describes. Muldoon nevertheless speaks in a distinctively individual (and post-Romantic) voice, whose formal articulation owes much to his use of the stanza. The repetitions and returns of the stanza play a key role in the creation, out of materials often laden with “grief” (in Donne’s phrase), of a paradoxically ludic poetry.

Keywords

• P. Muldoon
• W.B. Yeats
• disorder
• grief
• long poem
• play