A Half Could Be Had For Half a Crown

When times are going well, complacency and sloth can sometimes leave us numb and dense, like a big gulpin* from the backwoods of South Tyrone. Yet so too, when times are evil, and the day is one long hard slog just to get by, people can become all wrapped up in their wee world of survival.

What we need, I believe, is a startling, shocking sight, an image that shakes us and shocks us out of our rut! If not the pull-back of the camera lens that reveals the land around us with greater clarity, then perhaps its all-seeing eye pausing for a moment and focusing in on something bizarre or jaw-dropping.

Yet we're all used to, you might say, innured against the push-in and the pull-back of the 'camera eye' aspect of our vision, real, critical or otherwise. What if the lens of our reality revealed some freakish blend or mix of realities? This is what the poet Paul Muldonn calls 'immarrhage,' which he defines in his book, To Ireland, I as "the tendency towards the amalgam, the tendency for one event or character to blur and bleed into another."

Muldoon's long poem, "The Old Country", does this brilliantly. I quote only the first two sections here.

The Old Country

By Paul Muldoon

I
Where every town was a tidy town
and every garden a hanging garden.
A half could be had for half a crown.
Every major artery would harden

since every meal was a square meal.
Every clothesline showed a line of undies
yet no house was in dishabille.
Every Sunday took a month of Sundays

till everyone got it off by heart
every start was a bad start
since all conclusions were foregone.

Every wood had its twist of woodbine.
Every cliff its herd of fatalistic swine.
Every runnel was a Rubicon.

II
Every runnel was a Rubicon
and every annual a hardy annual
applying itself like linen to a lawn.
Every glove compartment held a manual

and a map of the roads, major and minor.
Every major road had major road works.
Every wishy-washy water diviner
had stood like a bulwark

against something worth standing against.
The smell of incense left us incensed
at the firing of the fort.

Every heron was a presager
of some disaster after which, we’d wager,
every resort was a last resort.
III

Every resort was a last resort
with a harbor that harbored an old grudge.
Every sale was a selling short.
There were those who simply wouldn’t budge

from the Dandy to the Rover.
That shouting was the shouting
but for which it was all over –
the weekend, I mean, we set off on an outing

with the weekday train timetable.
Every tower was a tower of Babel
that graced each corner of a bawn

where every lookout was a poor lookout.
Every rill had its unflashy trout.
Every runnel was a Rubicon.

* Gulpin: one who swallows without question whatever he hears; a simpleton or credulous person; among sailors a ‘marine.’


NOTE: With apologies to Michael McKee for using the photo of him as himself and Frank the Rabbit.