| The
poet Paul Muldoon in Milkweed
and Monarch is creating specific
landscape. He starts from church
and goes to human beings in
general. The speaker of the
poem was kneeling in front of
the grave of his parents, random
thoughts and images crept to
his consciousness. Random thoughts
baffled him and laid a great
stress in his psyche that troubled
the persona to render tribute
to his parents. As the sons
gone to church yard for the
memories of his parents, the
taste of sweet herbs comes to
his mouth.
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He can hardly tell what
is what. Something is
filled in his mouth.
He lacks concentration
in the purpose he has
gone to churchyard.
It seems as if he has
suffocated but he is
not. It seems as if
he is stricken with
the grief of his parents
but he is stricken with
the grief of a woman.
May be she was his beloved.
He remembered the woman
who slinked from sea-otter.
The woman is selfish
and she left him. She
has given him pickled
gherkin. Why should
he remember her who
left him? Rhetorical
question is there. |
Now speaker brings the reference
of monarch and butterfly. While
he was thinking of his beloved,
the monarch flew for the milkweed.
It passed with hunger and it
forgot everything as it was
satisfying its hunger. In the
same way the boy (speaker) and
the girl are interdependent
because of the passion. They
cannot be separated like milkweed
and monarch. Despite the physical
separation, the boy is always
her. Her memories are like a
hurricane that can erase the
memories of his parents. Through
the help of milkweed and monarch
Paul Muldoon is trying to show
the interdependence of male
and female.
Similarly, we can safely say
pervasiveness of the past actions
imposes meaning to the present
action. No actions of present
and no picture of the mind are
complete without reference of
the past. Mind of the persona
of the poem oscillates between
past and present. This is the
plight of the modern man tool.
The speaker cannot act properly
in present because past memories
always, intervene him in the
present. In this poem Muldoon
mixes together a memory of his
parents’ Collegelands
grave with the remembered tastes
of the plants that he used to
eat as a child! He also remembers
the American sea otter, Irish
Monarch butterflies, Irish Cliffs
and a Russian samovar. Visiting
this mother and father’s
grave in Milkweed and Monarch,
Muldoon free associates with
time and place, fact and emotion,
and religion and philosophy.
Milkweed and Monarch - Poem
by Paul Muldoon
As
he knelt by the grave of his
mother and father
the taste of dill, or tarragon
–
he could barely tell one form
the other –
filled
his mouth. It seemed as if he
might smother.
Why should he be stricken
with grief, not for his mother
and father,
but
a woman slinking from the fur
of a sea-otter
in Portland, Maine, or, yes,
Portland, Oregon –
he could barely tell one form
the other –
and
why should he now savour
the tang of her, her little
pickled gherkin,
as he knelt by the grave of
his mother and father?
He
looked about. He remembered
her palaver
on how both earth and sky would
darken –
“You could barely tell
one form the other” –
while
the monarch butterflies passed
over
in their milkweed-hunger: “A
wing-beat, some reckon,
may trigger off the mother and
father
of
all storms, striking your Irish
Cliffs of Moher
with the force of a hurricane.”
Then: “Milkweed and Monarch
‘invented’ each
other.”
He
looked about. Cow’s-parsley
in a samovar.
He’d mistaken his mother’s
name, “Regan”, for
“Anger”: |
