A Pilgrim's Progress: Paul Muldoon's "Immram" as a Journey of Discovery

Abstract

The title poem Paul Muldoon's third volume of poetry, Why Brownlee Left (1980), describes the mysterious disappearance of a prosperous farmer, last seen going out to plough / On a March morning, bright and early. In an interview with Michael Donaghy, Muldoon explains, it's evident... that there's a very good reason why he left... . His life was programmed, and he needed to break free becoming his own (Muldoon 1985, 84). The need to break free a prescribed future, to explore and perhaps enrich one's destiny ? as well as one's past, echoes throughout Why Brownlee Left. Departures, searches, and voyages pervade the text and culminate in Immram. Recalling the ancient Mael Duin, the poem becomes an allegory for a voyage personal to Muldoon, one exploring not so much a physical terrain as a state. I intend the term political state to reflect both the personal situation of the poem's narrator, and the actual entity, the realm that was created by colonial Britain. Immram describes the search for a father. On the narrative level, the poem echoes Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled detective stories. The (detective) narrator, a cool, wise-cracking Philip Marlowe type ? Muldoon obviously relishes the Muldoon/Mael Duin/Marlowe word play ? leaves the security of his pool hall because of a new-found interest in his father, cued, wittily enough, by his being struck with a billiard cue. The settings here on change abruptly and without transition. The narrator goes west to Paradise to visit his mother. He goes round to the Atlantic Club. He goes home for the night. He visits his mother again. He goes to the Park Hotel. The scene cuts to the Atlantic Club, where he is drugged; he later wakens in an alley-way beside a Baptist mission church. He visits the local police department and is led back to the guru of the Baptist mission. He tries the Missing Persons Bureau. He returns to the Park Hotel. Finally he returns, seemingly satisfied, to the pool hall. Muldoon's apparently aimless travels, inscribing circle upon circle, provide no reassuring resolution to this quest: at the poem's end we have discovered nothing; we have arrived nowhere. The narrator never finds his father, although we discern that he was a drug smuggler. The stories of the narrator's mother, and of Susan/Suzanne/Susannah, are left unexplored and unfinished. Why does Susannah, for example, end up in a Cadillac with the chauffeur from the 1931 Sears-Roebuck catalogue and James Earl Caulfield III? Who, for that matter, is James Earl Caulfield III? What about the old diseased man wanting Baskin Robbins ice-cream? It is not surprising that Muldoon's apparently capricious,