A Reclamos de Ley en Av del Libertador 5699.

I must have been dozing in the tub when the telephone

rang and a small white grub crawled along the line and into my head:

Michael Heffernan was dead. (1-6)

Like many elegists, Muldoon introduces the fact of death in euphemistic, figurative language: the news is like a “small white grub”. However, even this brings connotations of death and decay, and the idea of the news entering the mourner's head as if it were a flesh-eating maggot emphasises its invasive nature: when faced with another's death, one is forced to recognise one's own mortality. When the statement of fact does arrive at the end of the stanza, this repetition, in plainer language, signals an initial step in the mourning process: an acceptance of the fact of death. While the first stanza's setting, “in the tub”, might seem like a slightly unnecessary detail, it is in fact, linked to the central metaphor of the poem. Muldoon uses the soap-pig almost as a metaphysical conceit which extends throughout the poem, and comes to signify the relationship that had existed between the mourner and his dead subject.33 In addition, the use of this inanimate object as a metonym which is a memorial to a person now lost to the poet is expanded at the end of the poem, and applied to the “father's wobbling-brush” (124) and the “mother's wash-stand” (126). The soap-pig itself also serves as a memorial to various failed relationships: “the soap-pig I carried / on successive flits / from Marlborough Park (and Anne- Marie)” (61-3); “the camomile soap-pig / that Mary, in a fit of pique, / would later fling into the back yard” (78-20). The poem meditates upon the idea of memory, and asks whether tokens of relationships can provide a satisfactory consolation for the one who has suffered loss. Muldoon, as he holds such objects up for inspection, finds that they, too, are subject to time and decay, and prove to be inadequate memorials for his lost and dead. This is emphasised by the

deconstruction of his writerly furniture (both in the sense of his office, and in the sense of his poetic techniques) in the penultimate stanzas:

For how he would delib-

erate on whether two six-foot boards sealed with ship's

varnish and two tea-chests

(another move) on which all this rests is a table, or merely a token

of some ur-chair, or – being broken – a chair at all... (110-8)

The stanza reduces the emblem of Heffernan's memory to nothing more than a quickly eroding object: “And the soap-pig? It's a bar of soap, // now the soap-sliver / in a flowered dish...” (120-

33 See Wills, “The soap-pig is a kind of body, at once fragile and enduring, which becomes symbolic not only of the body of Michael Heffernan, but of the friendship between him and Muldoon,” Reading Paul Muldoon, 127.

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This poem comments on both memory and poetry in a way that has become a central part of the elegiac tradition, and in a way that seems to relate particularly to the troubled political situation in Northern Ireland. Just as Carson's poems engage with the idea that “re- membering” is simultaneously a creative and destructive action, Muldoon's soap-pig is being consumed even as its regular use makes it a reminder of what has been lost. This links to the idea of consumption that has been discussed in James Heffernan's study entitled “'Adonais': Shelley's Consumption of Keats”.35

This essay argues that Shelley is motivated, in part, by his own desire for literary renown, and that he re-writes the life of Keats to suit his purposes, rather than to immortalise the dead poet to assuage a sense of grief. It might be suggested that this is part of the elegiac process in general: the poet tries to create something that will provide a lasting monument for both subject and writer, as the event of a death brings mortality into sharp focus, as has been seen at the start of “The Soap-Pig”.36 In the context of Northern Ireland, the capacity that elegy has for commemoration and memorial suggests that it has a role to play in bringing perspective to a complicated and drawn-out political conflict.

“7, Middagh Street” is the long poem with which Meeting the British closes.37

Muldoon finishes each of his collections with an extended poem, and these have become longer and more complex with each publication.38 It is important to note the prominence of these poems in Muldoon's oeuvre, for a number of reasons, not least for their “intrusive” presence in the body of work.39 Another reason, which is central to this study, is the fact that the long poems become increasingly elegiac, to the extent that “Yarrow”, with which The Annals of Chile culminates, is simultaneously one of Muldoon's most impressive works of poetry and one of the century's great elegies. In more recent work, the final long poem of Horse Latitudes is also an elegy. The collections that follow Madoc: A Mystery are full of poems of loss, and seem to be developed from the engagements with the elegiac tradition found in Muldoon's earlier work. Meeting the British was published in the year that Muldoon moved to America, and the

34 Campbell notes: “Finding a memorial or memento, as monument or even sliver, might be what we would look for at the end of an elegy. Could this be the achieved ‘new body’ of the poem? Muldoon maintains a resolute suspicion of the monumental in his poems,” 175.

35 See Introduction, n. 35.

36 See Wills, “...as the soap-pig is 'worked' into a lather, so Michael Heffernan is worked into the poem. While one body disappears, Muldoon creates a new body to endure. He builds a monument which at the same time acknowledges movement, loss, the process of things slipping away,” 129. See also Muldoon's own description of what takes place in “The Soap-Pig”: “it's as much about my response to Michael Heffernan, whom the poem is mostly about. It's almost in danger of seeming to be more about me and seeming self-absorbed and self-engaged. I suppose that's the risk the poem takes – it's always on the edge,” quoted in Kendall, 135.

37 “7, Middagh Street”, Poems 1968-1998, 175-93.

38 Indeed, Madoc: A Mystery (London: Faber, 1991), the collection that comes a few years after Meeting the British, contains just seven short lyric poems, and devotes the majority of the volume to “the 246-page title poem [which] is an ugly, opaque, sprawling epic, spanning two continents and half a century, while offering a potted history of Western philosophy from Thales to Hawking along the way,” Kendall, 149. 39 Kendall, 149.

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