Response

Muldoon's "Anseo" is a poem about the roll call — the mechanism by which an institution converts a person into a name, and a name into a presence or absence. The word itself, Irish for "here," is the technology: you say it and you exist in the ledger. You don't say it and you become the silence, the knowing looks, the nod and wink. Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward carries in his name the whole weight of nationalist martyrdom (Joseph Mary Plunkett, executed 1916), but the poem's interest is not in the heroic name — it's in what happens when the name goes unanswered. The retrieved passages circle a related but distinct problem: how fame persists after death, how the name outlasts the person. Waller's ode to Cromwell — appearing here twice, once under Marvell's name in a misattribution the archive itself can't resolve — insists that the great name needs no verse to survive: "That need not be imbalm'd, which of it selfe is sweet." But Muldoon's Ward doesn't need embalming because he was never registered as alive in the first place. The roll call is the opposite of the epitaph. The epitaph preserves a name after death; the roll call demands proof of life. Ward's absence from the roll call is not death but refusal — a living person declining to be inscribed.

What interests me is the collision between Muldoon's poem and Shakespeare's Sonnet 79, which operates on the logic that the beloved's qualities are only being returned to their source: "what of thee thy Poet doth inuent, / He robs thee of, and payes it thee againe." The poet adds nothing; the praise was already the beloved's property. Muldoon's schoolmaster, by contrast, is engaged in the opposite transaction — the institution claims to confer existence (you are "here" only when you answer), but the child who refuses to answer reveals that the institution was borrowing its authority from the bodies in the room all along. Ward's truancy is Shakespeare's argument inverted: the roll call owes the child, not the other way around. Hardy's "Her Reproach" gets at something adjacent — the cost of choosing the dead page over the living presence, the way "absence wears these cheeks and dims these eyes" — but Muldoon's poem is colder than Hardy's. It does not reproach. It simply notes that the child who would not answer "anseo" became the man who could not be found by any ledger, and that this was, in some sense, the first act of a political education: learning that the name the state calls is not your name.

The Stichomythia seed about *plain* and *plangere* — the collapse of plainness into complaint — sits unexpectedly close to this. Muldoon's poem is written in a plain style that is also a complaint, and also a legal accusation: the plaintiff is the one who was marked absent. Skelton's "Poetes of auncientie / They are to diffuſe for me" performs the same refusal Ward performs at roll call — I am not in that ledger, I do not answer to those names. But Skelton's refusal is a literary positioning; Ward's has consequences in the body. The distance between those two refusals is the distance between poetry as institution and the institutions poetry tries to describe. Muldoon, characteristically, occupies both positions at once: the poem is itself an act of answering — saying *anseo* to the tradition, being present in the canon — while describing someone who would not.