Magma Poetry

Paul Muldoon on Ozymandias, by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

In Presiding Spirits*, Magma explores how a contemporary poet is influenced by the writing of a poet now dead. Here, the Irish poet Paul Muldoon presents a new poem of his own, in response to one of the best-known sonnets in English, Ozymandias, written by Percy Bysshe Shelley.

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822) wrote Ozymandias in 1818. Paul Muldoon, born in Northern Ireland in 1951, first came across the poem at school. He didn’t realise then that the Ozymandias of the title was the Greek version of the name Ramses, the Pharaoh Ramses the Second, who left us some of Egypt’s most magnificent temples. But the poem’s immediacy, and what Muldoon calls “the extraordinary bleakness” of its ending, attracted him from the beginning. So when last year the BBC World Service programme The Lyrics asked Muldoon to take Shelley as a presiding spirit, and react to Ozymandias with a new poem of his own, he accepted the challenge.

As The Lyrics pointed out, “Paul Muldoon is admired – particularly by other poets – for his elusiveness and irony. He never tells the reader what to think, but lets his images, his strange half rhymes and his – sometimes obscure – references weave their own patterns in the reader’s mind.” He published his first collection aged 21, while still reading English at Queen’s University, Belfast. It’s been followed over the years by nine more. In 1986 he moved to the United States, where he is Director of the Creative Writing Program at Princeton. He is also Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. “His method”, the BBC went on, “is almost the opposite of Shelley’s, who wrote direct poems to do with communion with the forces of nature and rage against the imprisonment of his fellow man.” But in spite of their different approaches, for Muldoon Ozymandias remains attractive because it goes wider, and deals with time and mutability in a way he feels is still both immediate and accessible. According to Muldoon, the image Shelley leaves us with, the lone and level sands, is what he himself described on the BBC as “a moment of extraordinary bleakness, isolation and loneliness. It’s a terrifically photographic, imagistic moment, one that in its way stamps itself – to use the notion from the poem itself, and the sculptor in it – on our minds.”

So how did Muldoon set about writing his own poem in response? Some weeks after he’d first been approached, Muldoon told The Lyrics how he was doing: “I’ve been thinking for a little while about trying to write a poem set partly in St Louis, Missouri. I don’t know too much about it as yet, but I’m taken by an image of the Gateway Arch. It’s a huge hoop, made of metal, that represents the gateway to the West. This huge construct was built there and stands there – it’s quite an extraordinary thing to see coming up as you’re approaching St Louis – this great rainbow of metal that springs up and touches down in the city. And I’ve this notion that here’s a connection – and this is how many of my poems begin, just on a little hunch – that there might be some connection between standing underneath that hoop, as I did one day a couple of years ago, and it was a day on which I’d heard from my wife that the child that we were then expecting was lost and had died. And I wasn’t able to get back on that particular day – but I’d heard. So there’s something about being under this arch, and feeling something of the despair that figures in Ozymandias, and the bleakness and just the terrible isolation of this moment, that might connect in some way. I see the Gateway Arch as being a modern version of the two vast and trunkless legs of stone. So that’s about as far as I’ve got.”

And a few weeks after that, Paul Muldoon produced The Stoic:

This was more like it, looking up to find a burlapped fawn
half-way across the iced-over canal, an Irish navvy who’d stood there for an age
with his long-tailed shovel or broad griffawn,
whichever foot he dug with showing the bandage

that saved some wear and tear, though not so much that there wasn’t a leak
of blood through the linen rag, a red picked up nicely by the turban
he sported, those reds lending a little brilliance to the bleak
scene of suburban or – let’s face it – urban

sprawl, a very little brilliance. This was more like the afternoon last March
when I got your call in St. Louis and, rather than rave
as one might rant and rave at the thought of the yew
from Deirdre’s not quite connecting with the yew from Naoise’s grave,

rather than shudder like a bow of yew or the matchless Osage orange
at the thought of our child already lost from view
before it had quite come into range,
I steadied myself under the Gateway Arch

and squinted back, first of all, through an eyelet of bone
to a point where the Souris
had not as yet hooked up with the Assiniboine,
to where the Missouri

had not as yet been swollen by the Osage,
then ahead to where – let’s face it – there are now two fawns
on the iced-over canal, two Irish navvies who’ve stood there for a veritable age
with their long-tailed shovels or broad griffawns.

The poem is built around the painful experience of losing a child, and the images Paul Muldoon chooses to set alongside the Ozymandias-like Gateway Arch are of a fawn wrapped in burlap – or sacking – and, as he explains, an Irish navvy: “The canal is actually the Delaware and Raritan Canal, a canal that I live on, dug in 1832 or thereabouts by thousands of Irish navvies – navigational canal diggers. That was their expertise, why they’d been brought over from Ireland, many of them indentured, working for next to nothing; and many of them of course dying, some of them from cholera. So it’s already quite disturbing for me to even live on this canal and have a sense of these thousands of Irishmen working on it, using simply shovels or – this word griffawn, a type of Irish spade – and of course they sometimes bandaged their feet just to save the instep from the ferocious digging with the spade.”

Then the poem introduces other images, drawn as Muldoon explains from Irish and Native American mythology (reflecting the mixed Irish/American heritage the lost child would have had). “This image of the yew has to do with a conventional description of the graves of Deirdre and Naoise – the Irish lovers from various tales of Irish mythology, who died for each other, and were buried side by side. And a yew stake was planted in each of their graves, and these two yew trees grew up and intertwined and made an arch. I suppose I’m getting there at the fact that there’s some misconnection – there’s not quite a moment of connection. The yew of course is very familiar as the graveyard tree, but used also as a bow. As is, or was, Osage orange. Now Osage orange is a tree that grows actually quite a bit where I live. And it was the tree of preference for the Osage Indians when they were making bows.”

And at the source of all these misconnections Muldoon has, not the child, but the image again of the fawn and the navvy, doubled as if seen though tears. “It’s as if the second fawn stands in for this – at once, another Irish navvy, but also this child who might have been, and who’s fleshed out as it were in this strange, fleeting image of the second fawn.”

As The Lyrics says, “the image of the broken arch which Paul Muldoon drew from Ozymandias is echoed in the poem in many ways – in the Gateway Arch, the arch of the navvy’s bloody foot, the bow of Osage orange, the not-quite arch of yew over the lovers’ graves, even in the title – because stoic originally meant people who met under doorways.” And Muldoon explains how it’s also embedded in the form of his poem. “The beginning and the end mirror each other with the burlapped fawn and the griffawn, and the age and the bandage; ending up with the Osage and the age, and the fawns and griffawns. So it’s as if the poem itself is mimetic of the very arch that it’s describing. So a little bit of that is going on. Then there’s the rhyme scheme of the poem – in a number of poems that I’m writing these days I’m using – it’s not exactly full rhyme, but rhyming leak with bleak, and urban with turban, and so on. And that is a little comment on what’s going on in the poem also, and the subject matter of the poem – where things don’t quite connect, and don’t quite rhyme.”

*Presiding Spirits is based on an original idea by Lavinia Greenlaw, when she was Poet in Residence at London’s Royal Festival Hall last year. Paul Muldoon broadcast The Stoic on the BBC World Service programme, The Lyrics, in January 2001. The poem, Paul Muldoon’s comments, and the critical commentary are reproduced with grateful thanks to Paul Muldoon, The Lyrics’ producer Amber Barnfather, and the BBC World Service. There’s more about The Lyrics on the BBC World Service web site, www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/poems.