Sample Poems
This next poem by Muldoon is about a frog, and how he feels it represents his people in Ireland and how they are so similar to each other. The poems breaks in certain areas to create a pause and give a dramatic touch to the poem.
"The Frog" By Paul Muldoon
Comes to mind as another small
upheaval
amongst the rubble.
His eye matches exactly the bubble
in my spirit-level.
I set aside hammer and chisel
and take him on the trowel.
The entire population of Ireland
springs from a pair left to stand
overnight in a pond
in the gardens of Trinity College,
two bottles of wine left there to chill
after the Act of Union.
There is, surely, in this story
a moral. A moral for our times.
What if I put him to my head
and squeezed it out of him,
like the juice of freshly squeezed limes,
or a lemon sorbet?
This poem, "John Luke: The Fox" is about his home back in Ireland and about the scenery that he sees. He describes the looks of where he grew up very well, so you can picture every detail about where he grew up. This poem also rhymes.
"John Luke: The Fox"
By Paul Muldoon
Believe you me, when I padded over the ploughlands to
the old Galloway 
place
I was no less taken aback by the windowpane
covered not, as it had first seemed, with Carrickmacross lace
but a curtain of frost, than by the painter setting up his easel
in a meadow in Clonoe, or Clonmain,
my twitch as his badger and weasel
brushes twitched. Since this was still high summer, since the whin
vied with the cylinder of propane
for out-and-out yellowness, I assumed I had no more chance of getting
in than had Galloway of getting out, Galloway the blacksmith with his crab
claw
of a right ann--as if he'd never had "but ane"
Galloway who, in 1912, had stood in line at Balmoral to catch a glimpse
of Bonar Law.