Meeting the British

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Meeting the British

Paul Muldoon 1987

“Meeting the British” is the title poem of Paul Muldoon’s fifth collection of verse, which was published in 1987. Set in eighteenth-century North America, the piece recounts a brief trading encounter between two British military officers and a representative of an unidentified Native-American tribe. In this spare, eighteen-line poem, Muldoon creates a work notable for the multi-layered meanings of its words, its wry—and ultimately tragic—tone, and its stinging condemnation of colonialism.

Although “Meeting the British contains actual, though disparate, historical occurrences, Muldoon weaves them into a single, unified narrative that functions as a symbolic indictment of the tactics of colonizers throughout the world. His poem’s title, however, singles out the British, perhaps because the subject of British rule is a personal and familiar one for Muldoon, a Northern-Irish poet who was born into a country ruled by Britain. That two of the poem’s lines are in French, is significant in that it is a secondary language for the speaker. This sense of discomfort at using the subjugator’s tongue is paralleled by the fact that Muldoon reaches a large audience by writing in English, rather than his native Irish Gaelic language.

Author Biography

Paul Muldoon was born in Portadown, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, in 1951. His mother was a schoolteacher, and his father was a laborer and market gardener. In the grammar school of St. Patrick’s College in Armagh, teachers introduced Muldoon to Irish language and music. He also discovered The Faber Book of Modern Verse and, most important, the work of poet T. S. Eliot. All of these events had a powerful influence on Muldoon, and at the age of seventeen, he began writing poetry, mostly in the Irish Gaelic language. Muldoon sent several poems to Seamus Heaney and Derek Mahon, Irish poets who were quickly gaining recognition themselves, and Heaney subsequently published a few of Muldoon’s poems in the journal Thresholds. Heaney later became Muldoon’s tutor at Queen’s University in Belfast, where, as an undergraduate, Muldoon attended weekly poetry gatherings at Heaney’s house.

When he was nineteen years old, Muldoon had his first volume of poetry, Knowing My Place, published; it was criticized for being too influenced by the work of Heaney. In subsequent books, however, Muldoon produced more experimental and extravagant poems that were very obviously written in his own unique voice. 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. After the death of his father in 1985, he quit his job. A year later, he moved to the United States, where he lives with his wife, Jean Hanff Korelitz, and their daughter, Dorothy Aoife. Since 1990, he has been the director of the creative writing program at Princeton University.

Muldoon has been awarded many literary prizes, among them the Sir Geoffrey Faber Memorial Award in 1991, the T. S. Eliot Award in 1995, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Literature in 1996, and the Irish Times Poetry Prize in 1997.

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

Poem Summary

Lines 1-3

The first three lines of “Meeting the British” establish the work as a narrative poem, or one that tells a story. The unidentified speaker reveals that there was an encounter with the British, and he sets the scene, indicating the time of year and providing a description of the landscape. The phrase “dead of winter” is generally used to signify the period of greatest intensity of that season. In this poem, however, the word “dead” seems to be particularly important, given its placement in the first line. Thus, there is a brief sense of foreboding, and yet the next line immediately shifts to a seemingly positive and poetic characterization of the sky as lavender, a color ranging from light purple to purplish-blue. Indeed, both the sky and snow are described as being shades of lavender. This repetition suggests that the term has special significance.

There is a sense of mystery in the poem thus far. The reader is only gradually learning what has happened as a result of this meeting with the British. We only know that several people met—by the narrator’s use of the word “we” and the assumption that “the British” refers to more than one person. We do not know who the narrator is, or his nationality. The word “snow” gives a hint about the location of the meeting. We can assume that the encounter does not take place in Great Britain; that country has a mild climate, due to warm currents in the surrounding seas.

Lines 4-9

Moving beyond visual description, the speaker now incorporates the sense of hearing to further flesh out his account of events. He hears the noise of two merging water sources as well as the tone of his own voice “calling out in French.” By classifying both sounds as strange, he invites the reader to scrutinize the reason for their inclusion. One would not expect to hear anything from streams that “were frozen over,” especially from a distance that the narrator claims was “far.” This image could serve as a metaphor for icy relations between two parties who were, perhaps, reluctantly meeting. The word “strange” also indicates that French is not the speaker’s native tongue.

Lines 10-12

Finally, the setting and identification of participants is confirmed. Both General Jeffrey Amherst and Colonel Henry Bouquet were eighteenth-century British military officers who served at the same time in North America. In addition, the phrase “our willow-tobacco” clarifies that the speaker is a representative of a Native-American tribe.

The time frame of the poem’s action can also be narrowed to the 1760s. That decade saw the end of the French and Indian War, the name given by American historians to the last of a series of North-American colonial conflicts between Great Britain and France for domination of the eastern portion of the continent. During the war, British troops attempted to capture French forts, including several in present-day Ontario and Quebec. General Amherst led the battle to take Fort Louisberg, located on Cape Breton Island, Novia Scotia, in 1758. After this victory, Amherst was named supreme commander in America. In 1759, Quebec, the seat of French power in North American, fell to the British, and the next year, Amherst led the campaign to seize Montreal. While the British ostensibly controlled the region, it would be more than two years until the 1763 Treaty of Paris officially signalled the end of French domination of North America.

Colonel Bouquet came to North America in 1756, but he is best known for his role in quashing Pontiac’s Rebellion (1763-66). Named after Pontiac, an Ottawa warrior chief, this uprising began just after the conclusion of the French and Indian War. According to The New Columbia Encyclopedia,

The French attitude toward the Indians had always been more conciliatory than that of the English. French Jesuit priests and French traders had maintained friendly and generous dealings with their Indian neighbors.... [T]he English aroused the resentment of the Western tribes by treating them arrogantly, refusing to supply them with free ammunition

Media Adaptations

An audio cassette and book edition of Muldoon’s The Essential Byron was published in 1989.
A book and audiocassette edition of Readings (by the Poets): Philip Larkin; Thom Gunn; Ted Hughes; Seamus Heaney; Douglas Dunn; Tom Paulin; Paul Muldoon, was released in 1995.
An internet home page on Muldoon is at www.uni-leipzig.de/angl/muldoon/bibio.

(as the French had done), building forts, and permitting white settlement on their lands.

The Indians of the Great Lakes areas—including the Ottawa, Wyandott (Hurons), Potawatomi, and Ojibwa (Chippewas)—and their allies attempted to oust the British from their territory and halt the influx of white settlers. They believed their efforts would be supported by the French and that they could restore the positive relationships they had once shared with Europeans. Pontiac and his legions attacked Fort Detroit and Fort Pitt. It was Colonel Henry Bouquet who led reinforcements to relieve the beleaguered defenders at Fort Pitt. Bouquet also led an offensive into the Ohio valley that saw the Delaware and Shawnee agree to a treaty.

Lines 13-16

The scent of lavender, described as “unusual,” is unknown to the Native-American speaker. Colonel Bouquet informs the narrator about the flower: “C’est la lavande. / unefleur mauve comme le ciel (“It is lavender, a flower purple as the sky”). Lavender is not an indigenous plant in North America; it is native to the Mediterranean region and has long been cultivated commercially in France and England. Lavender was also a component of herbal bundles that, for centuries, were used to mask odors and ward off illness.

Lines 17-18

Line 17 suggests that this meeting is a standard example of trade. The shocking, final line,

Topics for Further Study

Imagine you are at high school in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Write about a day in your life. You could include details about your school, home, and neighborhood as well as information about your hopes, fears, and ambitions.
Using “Meeting the British” as a reference point, invent a “history” for the narrator of the poem—from the moment when he first saw Amherst and Bouquet in the forest until the moment when he tells the story in the poem.
Write a poem about your sense of belonging to your country. You may want to include some of your parents’ or grandparents’ experiences in the poem.

however, reveals the treachery of the British; instead of provisions, Colonel Bouquet, in an act of germ warfare, gives smallpox-infested blankets to the narrator. Historical documents provide evidence for such an act. During Chief Pontiac’s siege of Fort Pitt, William Trent, the leader of the local militia, wrote these lines in his journal: “... we gave them two Blankets and an Handkerchief out of the Small Pox Hospital. I hope it will have the desired effect.” And, according to researcher Peter d’Errico, a postscript in letter from Bouquet to Amherst on July 13,1763, suggests “the distribution of blankets to ‘innoculate the Indians.’”

Themes

Poet as Spokesperson

In the poem “Meeting the British,” Muldoon relates the historical event of the British deliberately passing the smallpox virus on to the Native Americans in the guise of a gift, or trade, during the British colonization of America and Canada. This event is retold by the narrator of the poem, presumably an eighteenth-century Native American. That he is telling this story indicates that he is speaking for his tribe. However, the ability of the narrator to make strong, enduring statements for his people is undercut by events that are taking place. He is speaking across “that forest- / clearing”—across a clearing that is no longer one place or another. The words “forest” and “clearing” are separated by a line break, as though language itself, along with the trees, has been removed from its usual context. The forest clearing is neither in the forest, nor out of it—no longer Native American or British land. So the poet speaks “across that forest- / clearing” in a third language, an unfamiliar “strange” language that is a mixture of influences, including the language of his oppressors.

The narrator is retelling a story, using all of the language he has picked up during and since the event itself. While the actual historical event can be “hooked” onto the page, the ebb and flow of influences on the narrator make it difficult for him to untangle the images and words of the oppressors to tell this story of oppression. In this poem, Muldoon implies that it is complex, if not impossible, for the poet to be spokesperson for his or her tribe when poetry does not have any real political or tribal borders. 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. In choosing to write in English, he can access words and images from a variety of cultures and from a huge literary tradition. “Meeting the British” raises the question of whether it’s possible for a poet to accurately present the history of his or her people when language has been part of the colonization process. For the poet, the process of writing, of gaining power over language, also implicates him in a betrayal of his people. The narrator of “Meeting the British” was the one who knew French, that third “strange” language (which could also symbolize the “strange” language of poetry); this knowledge opened the way for communication with the British and the destruction of his people. Paradoxically, as a poet, Muldoon can set the scene of the event vividly, so that the reader is shocked as the treachery is revealed. In engaging the imagination of the reader, the poem brings the historical moment alive in a way that no history book could.

Events and Identities

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 at war with the French over American land. Another example of this mixing of influences in the poem is the Native American who finds he can speak French and use European literary devices. This blurring of identity highlights an important theme in this poem: once countries are colonized they no longer have a pure, self-contained cultural identity. When two different races begin to share a land, whether through colonization or immigration, their language and, thus, their culture and history, become intermingled. Even if they are at a sTatemate, frozen over like Muldoon’s two streams, they will eventually intermingle and influence each other, both positively and negatively.

Muldoon reveals how translating from the mother tongue, the self-contained language of a people, into a common language can lead to betrayal rather than compromise and understanding. Across the forest clearing—the space between one culture and another—words can be used to manipulate and betray. If language, to a certain extent, creates reality, the reader might feel by now that reality, like quicksand, gives way on you at every step. However, there is yet another layer to this poem. With all the strange, blurred, fragmentedness of the poem, Muldoon does offer one line of continuity. It is perhaps a more dependable version of reality, one that is found in the spaces between events and identities. Although the sky and snow in “Meeting the British” are a similar color (one lavender, the other lavender-blue), it is the difference between them that is important. The slight difference in shade between the sky and the snow makes the horizon visible, allows for a sweeping view and for events to be played out between them. Similarly, although the two streams are frozen over, they are not silenced. Beyond what is presented as the facts of history, of colonization, the facts of lives and personal identities, there is the sound “far below.” This is the sound of the imagination that, like our skin, grows as we grow and changes as we change. The language of the imagination and poetry is not frozen over and is not locked into issues of politics or history. It is a language that can absorb influences without losing its original identity.

Style

“Meeting the British” is written in nine, two-line stanzas. The rather orderly structure gives the poem the look of being very spare and controlled. This structure creates an irony, given that one of the poem’s strongest themes is the instability of language and the disorder it can create. “Meeting the British” is a narrative poem, it is a story retold, but rather than growing larger and wilder over time, it has the look of being pruned back as far as possible. In breaking the compound words “forest-clearing” and “handkerchief” and placing them as fragments on separate lines, Muldoon reminds us that the compound words were originally two single words. These words have been joined to create a third “meaning,” each meaning both absorbing and distorting elements of the original words. This is like the common language in the poem that has elements of shared understanding and also of misunderstanding.

Throughout the poem, Muldoon uses the repetition of the word “lavender” as a motif, to build links within the narrative. On first reading, in the opening two stanzas, lavender is used as a descriptive device, to describe the color of the sky and the snow. In the first instance, this is a definite statement: “The sky was lavender.” In the second stanza, the word lavender is qualified to describe the color of the snow; a compound word is created, “lavender-blue.” Already Muldoon is signaling that words can change their original meaning when they are connected with other words. The colonization of language goes hand-in-hand with the colonization of a race of people. In stanza seven, the “scent” of lavender enters the poem. Stanza eight has Colonel Bouquet explaining that the scent is from the flower lavender and that its flowers are the same color as the sky. This provides a link to the opening stanza, with its “The sky was lavender.” It also leads us into the final stanza, when it is revealed that the lavender scent was used to disguise the smell of the disease-infested blankets. So, Muldoon’s use of the word “lavender” is a path that we can follow backward and forward through the poem; it provides a continuity within a poem that seems fragmented and “strange” on first reading.

Historical Context

In 1986, Paul Muldoon followed a route that numerous Irishmen before him had taken by traveling to the United States, where he settled with his wife and daughter. The following year, his volume Meeting the British was published. While the volume’s title poem concerns an incident in eighteenth-century North America between British colonizers and Native Americans, the poem’s action

Compare & Contrast

1987: In the wake of Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev’s attempts to reform the Soviet Union, the three Baltic states—Estonia, Latvia and Lithuanian—began to assert their rights and move toward independence. They have never accepted incorporation into the Soviet Union, since this was done by force as a result of the German-Soviet Pact of 1939.
1990: The Baltic states became independent republics. In late 1990, however, the Soviets began a crackdown in the Baltic republics, but after the dissolution of the Soviet government and suppression of the Soviet Communist Party, the independence of the three Baltic republics was recognized by the Russian Republic.
1987: After years of public demands for independence in Quebec, the government of Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney worked out the Meech Lake Accord with the provinces. The accord was named for the lake north of Ottawa where the negotiations were conducted. To be adopted as part of the constitution, the accord had to be approved by the 10 provinces and the federal Parliament by June 23, 1990. When approval from all the provinces was not forthcoming, the accord died.
1995: In October of 1995, voters in the Canadian province of Quebec narrowly rejected a referendum that proposed independence for the predominately French-speaking territory. After a hard-fought and emotional campaign, 50.6 percent voted against secession from Canada, while 49.4 percent were for independence.

has clear parallels to events that occurred in nineteenth-century Ireland as well as to the British attitude toward that native population. To draw comparisons, however, some background on Anglo-Irish relations is necessary.

In the twelfth century, Pope Adrian IV granted overlordsip of Ireland to England’s King Henry II, who invaded Ireland in 1171, starting the Anglo-Irish struggle that has raged for more than 800 years. According to Reverend John Hughes, “The invaders regarded the natives as illegal occupiers of the soil—as barbarians, who stood between them and the peacable possession of their property.” The negative perceptions of native Irish people continued; in the late 1400s, when English monarchs resided around Dublin in fortifications known as the Pale, the Irish outside of this area were dubbed “savages ‘beyond the pale.’” In 1537, England’s King Henry VIII established a Protestant church of Ireland, despite the fact that a majority of the Irish people were Catholic (and had been since the fifth century). During the reign of Elizabeth I, a Protestant who claimed the English throne in 1598, both colonization of Ireland and revolts against English rule increased. Beginning in 1609, Ulster saw a steady influx of English and Scottish settlers. When Oliver Cromwell crushed Irish opposition in 1649, thousands of Catholics were resettled or transported abroad, and many of those who remained saw their land seized. In four counties, between 26 and 41 percent of Catholic-owned land was taken. The tactic was considered a way of controlling an unruly country; it created an impoverished Irish class with little rights who had to pay rent to absentee English landlords.

The issues of land ownership and negative attitudes toward the Irish people came together in a disaster lasting from 1845 to 1850; the Irish called it An Gorta Mor (“the Great Hunger”). The potato crop, upon which millions of Irish people depended as a staple food source, failed due to blight: 40 percent of the crop failed in 1845, and 100 percent of it was destroyed in 1846. As a result, the Irish population suffered from mass starvation and disease, including typhus and cholera. Estimates indicate that out of a population of eight million, 800,000 were evicted from their homes for failure to pay rent, at least one million died, and nearly two million people emigrated to North America. According to Cormac O Grada in Ireland Before and After the Famine, “Although the potato crop failed, the country was still producing and exporting more than enough grain crops to feed the population. But that was a ‘money crop’ and not a ‘food crop’ and could not be interfered with.” Although there were some relief efforts carried out by the British, many Irish blamed the British for not acting quickly enough and for creating the underlying causes of the famine. Semus Metress declared, “Starvation among the peasants is blamed on a colonial system that made them dependent on the potato in the first place.”

Adding to Irish resentment was the fact that grain was exported from Ireland, sometimes under guard, during the famine and that there seemed to be little sympathy in Great Britain for their plight. In the August 30, 1847, London Times, a writer criticized the plea for help from the Irish people, saying, “In no other country have men talked treason until they are hoarse, and then gone about begging for sympathy from their oppressors.” The writer concluded, “[Ireland] may have her poor; but it is ridiculous to imagine that she should throw herself altogether upon the alms of an English population, the great part of whom are as well acquainted with hunger, and far more familiar with toil, than the most unfortunate of our Irish neighbors.” In October of 1848, an editorial writer for the London Times observed that “Another winter is approaching, and Ireland again appeals to the sympathies and solicitudes of her provident and more fortunate sister.” The same article judged:

The people [in Ireland] have always been listless, improvident, and wretched, under whatever rulers.... [T]heir present misfortune is that they are simply what they have always been, and from want of variety and intermixture they have not participated in the great progress of mankind... .[W]e must either rebuke their perverseness or pity their savage condition. We do pity them, because they have yet to be civilized. In Canada we have Indians in our borders, many of whom we yearly subsidize and maintain. In Ireland we have Celts equally helpless and equally the objects of national compassion.

In another edition of the Times, as noted by John O’Beirne Ranelagh in A Short History of Ireland, a writer declared, “Soon a Celt will be as rare in Ireland as a Red Indian on the streets of Manhattan ....”

Critical Overview

In 1987, when Meeting the British was published, it was greeted with enthusiasm and hailed by some as Muldoon’s best work to date. 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. So the ‘British’ in the title are also French, and the manner in which nature and culture are confounded in the ‘lavender’ imagery and the name ‘bouquet’ raises important questions about how language structures experience.”

Criticism

Carolyn Meyer

Carolyn Meyer holds a Ph.D. in modern British and Irish literature and has taught contemporary literature at several Canadian universities,

What Do I Read Next?

For an account of life in Northern Ireland during the early 1980s, the time just before Muldoon came to the United States, see John Conroy’s Belfast Diary: War as a Way of Life.
As well as being an account written near the time of the events described in “Meeting the British,” The Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada, written in 1886 by Francis Parkman, contains a reference to General Amherst and Colonel Bouquet.
Read more about General Amherst in J. C. Long’s 1933 publication, Lord Jeffrey Amherst: A Soldier of the King.
Nineteen volumes of The Papers of Colonel Henry Bouquet, edited by Slyvester E. Stevens and others, were published by the Pennsylvania Historical Commission and Works Progress Administration between 1940 and 1944.
Donald R. Hopkins’s Princes and Peasants: Smallpox in History, published by the University of Chicago Press in 1983, is a history of the disease that describes how people have tried to conquer the epidemic.
Irish Nobel Prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney was a significant influence on Muldoon. The Redress of Poetry (1998) is a collection of lectures that Heaney gave over five years as a professor of poetry at Oxford University. These texts discuss poets as diverse as Elizabethan Christopher Marlowe, modern English poet Philip Larkin, and American poet Robert Frost.

including the University of Toronto. In the following essay, Meyer examines how the brief encounter Muldoon’s poem depicts serves as a microcosm of cross-cultural interaction.

The title poem of Northern Irish poet Paul Muldoon’s 1987 collection, “Meeting the British” offers a deceptively factual account of the first recorded case of germ warfare, as carried out by British forces against the North-American Indian population following the fall of Quebec in 1759 and the conquest of Canada a year later. In keeping with Muldoon’s penchant for historical revisionism, however, “Meeting the British” is a poem that not only gestures at the atrocities committed in the cause of imperial expansion, but in fact interrogates history in a way that critic Edna Longley, in an article in The Living Stream, says “sabotages all kinds of certainty about how ‘far’ we ‘know’ into the past or future.” Muldoon’s approach, in Longley’s words, is not so much to “assail the tyranny of the past” by bold strokes, but to subject it to “death by a thousand cuts.” Any sense of historical certainty is undermined by the way the poetry itself questions and undercuts its own authority through deferred meanings and syntactic ambiguities that make the familiar strange. To read a Muldoon poem is to be at once engaged and estranged, to be confronted by the factual but also brought to an awareness of “more than we could see” (quoted from “Early Warning,” in Why Brownlee Left) and of how meanings, unstable as they are, are assembled. What Muldoon desires most from the poetic act, as he explained in an interview in Rhinoceros, is for his own “vision to be disturbed,” to see things “in a different way.” “Meeting the British” is, in part, concerned with ways of seeing and how differences in those ways of seeing become apparent when cultures collide. To this end, as elsewhere in his poetry, Muldoon courts linguistic complexities in order to embody social, sexual, and political ones (according to Eamon Grennan in New Irish Writing). “Meeting the British” is concerned with the connections between language and culture, together with the extent to which one culture can “translate” and truly “know” another. As in Irish dramatist Brian Friel’s Translations (1980), a play about the consequences of the British re-mapping and renaming of Irish place names in the 1830s, the act of opening up lines of communication and trade between cultures ends in an inevitable loss of cultural identity for the colonized group—as interaction leads not to mutual understanding but to oppression. The speaker/spokesman/go-between in “Meeting the British” (much like the linguistically adept and cross-culturally orphaned Owen in Translations) is the unwitting party to the betrayal of his people, for in meeting and speaking with the British, he falsely assumes equality with them, and in a catastrophically unequal trade, he gives up both land and birthright for nothing more than a few fishhooks and blankets. As Clair Wills notes in her essay about “Meeting the British,” the poem’s language is thus an instrument of domination and destruction. Though Muldoon has been both championed and condemned for what Wills calls “his reluctance to draw links between poetry and politics in Northern Ireland,” “Meeting the British” displaces such an engagement both temporally and geographically—to the French and Indian War of the mid-eighteenth century. Yet in doing so, the poem manages to foreground the issue of the writer’s responsibility to his community and to draw implicit parallels between the subjugation of the Irish nation and the plight of another colonized culture, that of the North-American Indian. The curious position of the Irish writer, who must necessarily borrow and use the English language of the colonizer, is also at issue here; Muldoon makes this point clear through the profound, almost disembodied strangeness that the speaker/spokesman of “Meeting the British” experiences as he hears his own voice “calling out in French.”

Almost every image and poetic device in “Meeting the British” flirts with, yet ultimately runs counter to, the idea of two sides “coming together.” The pairing of lines through end rhymes, which include both half-rhymes and the assonantal rhymes Muldoon favors (“winter/lavender,” “together/over,” “forest-/Amherst,” “hand-/lavande,” “fishhooks/smallpox”), produces an incongruity of sense and sound. 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 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.”

serves as a bridging device that conflates the coldest and deadest of seasons with an image of growth, uniting the elements of earth and sky in one continuous whole (and, in the process, figuratively collapsing the white space between lines 2 and 3) and, finally, drawing together, yet necessarily highlighting the differences between, two cultural solitudes. Though both sides use the word “lavender,” the plant to which it refers is European in origin and, hence, alien to the speaker. His use of the word becomes an act of cultural appropriation, serving as evidence of the extent to which his way of viewing the world has been “colored” by his experience of meeting the British. What the word ultimately encapsulates is a profound cultural divide; it shows how distinct and different these ways of looking at the world really are. The analogy that Colonel Bouquet makes as he flourishes his lavender-scented handkerchief, “C’est la lavande, / unefleur mauve comme le ciel,” proves to be the inverse of the speaker’s earlier comparison (for he compares not the sky to the flower but the flower to the sky). To the speaker, lavender is an “unusual scent,” but to the British it is an aromatic or perfume commonly used as a herbal disinfectant. It thus becomes not only an ironic means of masking the contagion that lies hidden within the blankets they offer up as gifts, but also a symbol of the hypocritical intent and latent violence of the British agenda.

One of Muldoon’s poetic practices has always been to root out the structures of language and explore the multiple meanings of words as they relate to their contexts. This is precisely what he sets out to do in the poem’s opening line. Wills notes in The Chosen Ground that “dead” is not only a metaphor for the middle of winter, the time at which “we met the British,” but also a rather blatant reference to the carnage that led up to that meeting and the destruction that will be its consequence. That this encounter with the British will be more death-enforcing than life-enhancing is similarly suggested by the multiple implications of the phrase “forest-clearing.” By choosing to break the line where he does, splitting the compound between two lines, Muldoon calls up not simply one image but two, the second of which (“clearing”) cancels out the first (“forest”). What is implicated here is the activity of deforestation, and, by extension, the cultural deracination the British will undertake in the name of colonial domination and settlement. 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. While topical references to real historical figures such as General Jeffrey Amherst (1717-97), the commander of British forces at Louisbourg and Montreal, make for a passing sense of historical authenticity, Muldoon’s real impulse is to deconstruct history and, according to Edna Longley, to write poetry that “questions its own authority along with origins, foundations, heritage, precedent, preceptor and pedigree.” “Meeting the British” stands as a prime example of postcolonial historical revisionism, an exercise in historiography. It gives speaking subjectivity not to the conquerors, with their hierarchically inflated sense of identity, but to a nameless spokesman for the oppressed group. As such, it traces what Longley calls the “chain-reactions of brutality and corruption that dominate Muldoon’s political vision.”

What the final four stanzas describe is not the achievement of cultural understanding or even an act of “coming together,” but the “untranslatability” of one culture to another. The inability of General Amherst and Colonel Bouquet to “stomach our willow tobacco”—to tolerate, let alone participate in, another culture’s customs—pre-empts any form of bonding or brotherhood through shared experience. 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.

The speaker’s acquisition of a foreign language, as much as a patois though it may be, makes trade between the two sides possible, but what that trade involves is an unfair exchange of objects of unequal value. The speaker’s people hand over virtually all that they have and, in return, receive six fishhooks, two blankets, and an infectious disease that will decimate their ranks. The fishhooks, as images of self-sufficiency as well as of violence, serve as potent reminders not only of the Indians’ coexistence with the land, but of the entrapment and captivity they are destined to as a result of this meeting. The Indians are quite literally the unsuspecting victims—“hooked” and reeled in—in the dissembling plot of colonial domination. The shock of the atrocity and full disclosure of its brutality hinges on the final word, “smallpox,” which Muldoon’s speaker withholds until the last moment, just as the Indians themselves are blind to British motives until it is too late. The smallpox is said to be “embroidered” into the blanket, suggesting the way in which the disease is both disfiguring and permanent, for it is sewn into the cloth and cannot be washed away. Meeting the British becomes a meeting with the brutish underside of allegedly civilized conduct.

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. 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. It is a poem that draws attention to its own construction as well as to the uncertainties that underlie any attempt to create fiction or to reconstruct history. Seen through the eyes of the colonized, Muldoon’s poem comments directly on the “civilized” savagery to which the North-American Indians were subjected, yet it more implicitly and indirectly offers a commentary on the plight not simply of the Northern Irish, but of all colonized nations.

Source: Carolyn Meyer, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Tyrus Miller

Tyrus Miller is an assistant professor of comparative literature and English at Yale University, where he teaches twentieth-century literature and visual arts. In the following essay, Miller analyzes the underlying complexities of Muldoon’s understated and seemingly straightforward poem.

Paul Muldoon’s poem “Meeting the British,” the title poem of his 1987 collection, takes the form of a dramatic monologue by a Native-American trader drawn into fatal dealings with British colonizers. 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. Muldoon makes reference in this poem to the documented historical fact that such trades were used by the colonists as a calculated strategy to eliminate the native dwellers in North America, who had little resistance to the diseases introduced by the Europeans and consequently died in great numbers, once the infection had taken hold among their populations. One of the common ways that the infection was introduced was by the colonists’ trading blankets of smallpox victims with the Indians. This heinous strategy was genocidal in its intention and often proved extremely effective in wiping out whole groups of the feared and troublesome natives. Thousands died before they could develop any immunity to the previously unencountered diseases.

In the context of Muldoon’s work as a whole, and among the other poems of the book Meeting the British, this historical situation becomes a typical episode in a broader history of British colonialism, including the long and violent history of British domination of Ireland. Muldoon, as a native of Northern Ireland, experienced firsthand the violence and suffering that this history continues to exact from the citizens of Ulster—the scene of riots, bombings, military occupation, and dubious police actions since the late 1960s. As an Irish poet writing in English, he is thus seeking to imply an analogy between the situation of the writer growing up under British imperial rule and the betrayed (and self-betraying) native trader-translator of the colonizer’s tongue in colonial America. A common thread of history forges a poetic bond between two circumstances that are, at first glance, radically separated by time, geography, and ethnicity. Likewise, a complicated meditation on the politics of language runs through Muldoon’s poem, which is written in English, includes two lines in French, and dramatizes the thoughts of a Native-American narrator, who tells of his feeling of alienation at the sound of his own words, spoken in the language of the settlers. Just as the native takes up the other’s language in the hopes of mutual recognition and benefit—only to be condemned to be complicitous in the destruction of his people—so too, Muldoon suggests, English is a double-edged instrument for the Irish writer. Writing in English potentially widens his sphere of contact and effective reach beyond the narrow, native circles of the Irish language, giving him an entry into the world market in literature, just as his Native-American narrator believes he has entered into the large and advantageous market of trade with the settlers. But the writer, like the trader, may be fooling himself. It is difficult, Muldoon implies, to disentangle the ability of a language to conjoin hitherto separate things through metaphor with its ability to conceal or falsify meanings; the positive power of poetry to reinvent the truth of the world lies uncomfortably close to the deceptive misuses of language in the interest of demagogy and manipulation. Language’s role in communication and trade masks the dark side of words as instruments of violence and domination. The poetic stitching together of lines and rhymes finds in Muldoon’s poem its ironic counterpart in the contagious “embroidery” of smallpox on the infected blankets—as if the false deal had been sealed with an invisible signature of disease and death.

Muldoon highlights the working of metaphor in his poem in order to reveal its double-edged and dangerous nature. One important figure in the poem, thus, is the metaphorical equation drawn between the two streams meeting under the cover of ice and the confluence of tongues in the encounter of Indian, French, and British. The sound of the two streams, seemingly a natural symbol of an underlying, deep unity beneath the apparently “cold” and “frozen” relations of the whites and Indians, proves deceptive as an indicator of the affiliations that are actually being established. In fact, in his sense of estrangement at the sound of his voice speaking French, which he likens to the peculiar note of the stream (“and, no less strange”), the speaker picks up a faint intimation of the fatal danger of misreading the stream too positively. Yet by the time the stream reappears by implication at the end of the poem, in the image of the fishhooks as half of the trade, it is already too late. No fish will ever be pulled out of this stream; its tainted waters promise only disease and decimation to the natives.

Even more central to the metaphorical system of the poem, however, is the flower and lavender imagery. First, the sky is characterized as lavender-colored; the reflections that this sky casts on the snow, thus blurring the divide between sky and ground and setting up a relation of resemblance between them, account for the snow’s “lavender-blue” tint in line 3. The French colonel’s name, moreover, is “Bouquet,” which already anticipates his lavender-scented handkerchief. It is as if he has been reduced to an essential metaphorical object, his perfumed handkerchief standing in for that

“... [I]t is through the deceptively sutured chain of similes and metaphors that Muldoon has embroidered his story of false reciprocity and betrayal.”

bunch of flowers his name implies. Finally, the French sentence that Colonel Bouquet speaks in lines 15 and 16 returns the chain of comparisons full circle: “C’est la lavande, / une fleur mauve comme le ciel.” He is disavowing that there is anything strange in the “unusual scent”; it comes from lavender, a flower blue like the sky. Yet if the lavender at the end of this chain is actually a sign of deceit, literally a mask for the Frenchman against the tainted blankets and a means of concealing any odor of sickness that might cling to them, so too the trustworthiness of the whole poem, with its ostentatious flower imagery, is undermined. We might note that the figurative language of poetry was traditionally referred to as the “flowers of rhetoric”; it is through the deceptively sutured chain of similes and metaphors that Muldoon has embroidered his story of false reciprocity and betrayal. This deal, Muldoon implies, may have been doomed from the start, because the speaker has accepted the language of the colonizer as a neutral, reliable medium of exchange rather than as something to handle with only the greatest care and suspicion. Is the Irish poet caught in a similar self-condemning bind in using the figural resources of the English language to embroider his poetry? Muldoon, as it were, gives warning to his readers and to himself to take heed, pay attention, and cast a jaded eye on any too-easy slippage along this poisoned daisy chain of rhetorical flowers.

Muldoon’s metrical and stanzaic forms pick up on the imagery of meeting and trade, while at the same time subtly suggesting the unequal or failed nature of the encounter that is narrated here. The poem is composed of nine couplets of uneven lengths, giving the poem its jagged appearance and playing off the regularity of the couplet’s oscillation against the consistent inequality of its two elements. Most of the syntactical units, its sentences and phrases, are enjambed across line and stanza breaks, similarly contributing to a formal picture of mismatched elements. Still more dramatically, at two key points, Muldoon sets the line break in the middle of a word or word compound. The first time he does this, in the fifth couplet, the break serves to make the reader linger over the possible double meaning of the word “forest-clearing.” This term refers literally to the clearing in the forest in which the meeting and the trade are taking place. The staggering of the word across the line break underscores the distance across the forest’s space to be spanned—a distance as much cultural as physical. 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. Yet in the extended context, “forest-clearing” also takes on more violent and ominous connotations. For the effect of the trade will be to “clear” the forest, through disease, of its native inhabitants in order to allow the settlers to “clear” the forest of its trees and take possession of it as privately owned farm land. The second break of a word, “hand- // kerchief,” stretched between the seventh and eighth couplets, is even more striking. It mimics the act of the officer’s shaking out of the handkerchief, as if this object were physically dropping down from stanza seven and flapping back into the opening of stanza eight. In fact, however, this break’s ostentatious strangeness as a metrical figure calls excessive attention to the seemingly innocuous gesture of pulling out the handkerchief, signaling to the attentive reader that there is something wrong here; something stinks beneath the “unusual / scent” of lavender. Indeed, as we soon find out, the gesture is far from innocent, and its rather fey appearance camouflages its true nature. The terrible irony of this gesture is that though it seems delicate and effete, it is actually the index of the most deadly violence: the florally named Colonel Henry Bouquet is protecting himself, with his flowered handkerchief, from the virulent rot lurking in the blankets he is about to pass off on the Native Americans.

The poem’s slant-rhymes, often highly forced and made across stanzas rather than within the couplets, likewise reinforce this image of deception and violence in the face-to-face encounter of native and settler. 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 the native’s use of the colonizer’s language in order to initiate trade, the rhyming effect is notably false and forced: “strange”/“French.” The next stanza, which rhymes the “forest” of “forest/clearing” with the General’s name, “Amherst,” reinforces the double meaning of “clearing”: it is as if the forest were already cleared and appropriated as private property, a proper name attached to the cleared plot of land. The sixth stanza, a concentrated emblem of the settlers’ denial of reciprocity in their refusal of the Indian’s gift offering, also echoes the harsh, ugly “k” sounds of “Bouquet,” “stomach,” and “tobacco.” The seventh and eighth stanzas, which dramatize the scene of betrayal, send the slant-rhyme scheme completely askew. The rhymes stretch across the couplets, while the couplets themselves are disjointed; the contact has been cynically manipulated for power and profit: “As for the unusual / scent when the Colonel shook out his hand- // kerchief: C’est la lavande, / une fleur mauve comme le ciel.” In the last couplet, finally, Muldoon returns to a relatively close slant-rhyme, but now to emphasize the ironic difference between the two items of trade: “They gave us six fishhooks / and two blankets embroidered with smallpox.”

Source: Tyrus Miller, in an essay for Poetry for Students, Gale Group, 2000.

Sources

Andrews, Elmer, ‘”Some Sweet Disorder’—the Poetry of Subversion: Paul Muldoon, Tom Paulin and Medbh McGuckian,” in British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s: Politics and Art, edited by Gary Day and Brian Docherty, London: Macmillan, 1997.

“The Great Irish Famine,” http://www.nde.sate.ne.us/SS/irish/irish_pf.html, accessed August 4, 1999.

Gregson, Ian, Contemporary Poetry and Postmodernism: Dialogue and Estrangement, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996.

Grennan, Eamon, “Two-Part Invention: Reading into Durcan and Muldoon,” in New Irish Writing, edited by James D. Brophy and Eamon Grennan, Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.

Hughes, John, “A Lecture on the Antecedent Causes of the Irish Famine in 1847,” given at the Broadway Tabernacle on March 20, 1947, New York: Edward Dunigan, http://www.people.virginia.edu/~eas5e/Irish/Hughes.html, accessed August 4, 1999.

Imlah, Mick, review in Times Literary Supplement, September 4, 1987.

“The Irish Famine,” http://www.boston.com/famine/irishmore2.stm, accessed August 4, 1999.

Kendall, Tim, Paul Muldoon, Bridgend: Seren Books, 1996.

“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.

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.

Lucas, John, review of Meeting the British, New Statesman, August 21, 1987.

Metress, Seamus, “The Great Starvation and British Imperialism in Ireland,” in The Irish People, 1996, http://wwwvms.utexas.edu/~jdana/iphunger.html, accessed August 4, 1999.

Muldoon, Paul, interview with Kevin Smyth in Rhinoceros, Vol. 4, 1990, p. 90.

O Grada, Cormac, Ireland Before and After the Famine: Explorations in Economic History 1800-1925, second edition, Manchester, 1989.

Ranelagh, John O’Beirne, A Short History of Ireland, Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Toibin, Colm, Bad Blood, London: Vintage, 1994.

Waldman, Carl, Atlas of the North American Indian, New York: Facts on File, 1985.

Wills, Clair, “The Lie of the Land: Language, Imperialism, and Trade in Paul Muldoon’s ‘Meeting the British,’” in The Chosen Ground: Essays on the Contemporary Poetry of Northern Ireland, edited by Neil Corcoran, Chester Springs, PA: Dufour Editions, 1992.

Wills, Clair, Reading Paul Muldoon, Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1998.

For Further Study

Heaney, Seamus, “Place and Displacement: Reflections on Some Recent Poetry from Northern Ireland,” Contemporary Irish Poetry: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Elmer Andrews, London: Macmillan, 1992.

Both critic Elmer Andrews and Nobel Prize-winning, Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney are lucid, thoughtful, and interesting writers on Northern Irish literature. “Place and Displacement” touches on many of the issues that appear in Muldoon’s poetry.

Kiberd, Declan, “Anglo-Irish Attitudes,” The Field Day Theatre Company, Ireland’s Field Day, London: Hutchinson, 1985.

Declan Kiberd has written extensively, both in Irish and English, on the literature and politics of modern Ireland. In “Anglo-Irish Attitudes” he explores the complex relationship between England and Ireland.

Longley, Edna, “‘Varieties of Parable’: Louis MacNeice and Paul Muldoon,” Poetry in the Wars, New Jersey, University of Delaware Press, 1987.

This book is an overview of poetry produced during and after both World Wars and the Northern Irish “Troubles.” In “Varieties of Parable” Longley writes: “The social and political strata of MacNeice’s and Muldoon’s multilevel writing prove that parables are not merely fairy Tates, any more than they are merely realist.”

Matthews, Steven, “Letters from the Alphabets: Carson’s and Muldoon’s Contingent Poetics,” Irish Poetry: Politics, History, Negotiations. The Evolving Debate, 1969 to Present, London: Macmillan, 1997.

Cairan Carson is Belfast poet who, like Muldoon, has won several awards, including the T. S. Eliot Prize. Both Carson and Muldoon write poetry that shimmers and shifts yet explores serious issues. The word “contingent” means conditional, or dependent on an uncertain event. It is in the light of this theme of contingency that Matthews explores the two poets’ works.

Waters, John Paul, “Ireland and Irish Cultural Studies,” The South Atlantic Quarterly, winter 1996.

The winter, 1996 edition of this quarterly magazine focuses on Ireland—its writers, history, and culture in general. It has several interesting and informative articles that give an understanding of the background and references in Paul Muldoon’s poetry.

Poetry for Students