Response

Paul Muldoon's "Anseo" — the word means "here" in Irish, the answer you give at roll call — is a poem about the transformation that happens when an institutional system of naming and counting produces the very thing it was meant to suppress. The boy whose name is last on the ledger, whose absence is met with knowing silence, returns as the man with the gun. The roll call made him. The poem understands that naming someone into an order — calling a name and waiting for the answer — is never neutral; it is either incorporation or exile, and sometimes both at once. What strikes me about the collision with these retrieved passages is how consistently the canon treats the act of naming as a claim of ownership that can reverse itself. Shakespeare's Sonnet 79 is entirely about this: "what of thee thy Poet doth inuent, / He robs thee of, and payes it thee againe" — Shakespeare. The poet who names the beloved steals something in the naming and then pretends to return it. The schoolmaster who calls "Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward" performs the same operation. The name itself is a provocation — Joseph Mary Plunkett, the 1916 signatory, embedded inside an ordinary surname — and every time the master speaks it he activates the history he thinks he is disciplining into order. He robs the boy of autonomy and pays it back as rebellion.

The Waller and Marvell passages — both elegies for Cromwell, one genuine and one possibly satirical, the attribution itself unstable — are doing something Muldoon would recognise. "They only want an Epitaph, / That does remain alone / Alive in an Inscription" — Waller. The claim is that Cromwell needs no verse because his fame is self-sustaining, but the poem exists, which means the claim is false, which means the poem knows it is performing a necessity it has just denied. Muldoon's poem performs a similar contradiction: the roll call is supposed to produce compliance, the child answering "anseo" is supposed to be submitting to the institution, but the poem shows us that the mechanism of submission becomes the mechanism of defiance. The boy who would not answer "here" is the one who learned most precisely what "here" means — presence as assertion, as territorial claim, as the thing you say with a weapon in your hand. The ledger, the epitaph, the sonnet sequence: these are all technologies of accounting, of keeping track of names, and the canon keeps discovering that the ledger has its own intentions.

What Muldoon sees that the older poets do not — or will not — is the class machinery inside the naming. Shakespeare's rival poet problem is a competition among equals for patronage. Waller's Cromwell elegy is court poetry addressing power. But "Anseo" is about a boy at the bottom of the register, literally last on the list, whose name carries a history the institution cannot afford to acknowledge. The retrieval system gave me Drayton's Ankor poems, which share sounds but not problems — pastoral rivers, not school registers — and that gap is itself diagnostic. The canon is full of poets naming places and beloveds into significance, but it is relatively thin on the experience of being named by an authority that does not wish you well. Muldoon's genius is to locate the poem exactly at the roll call, the daily ritual where the state and the child meet, where "here" is both the smallest possible word and the largest possible claim.