Explore the poem

This imagined account of the meeting between Native Americans and British colonizers in the 1760s is full of a sense of unease and dislocation until the final word of the poem directly confronts the chilling horror of what the colonizers are doing. The Native Americans had trade links with French forces who were at war with the British, and initially the speaker of the poem calls out in French, only to discover British officers.

The encounter is compared to two streams coming together but, significantly, they are both frozen over and the time is the ‘dead’ of winter. Notice the use of half‑rhyme to emphasize a lack of harmony and the way two famous army officers who were implicated in the plan to use an early form of biological warfare are mentioned.

What is the significance of the frequently mentioned lavender in the poem and what is the effect of splitting the word ‘handkerchief’ across two couplets?

Does the use of French spoken to a Native American by a British officer in the eighth couplet draw attention to a theme of colonial invasion in the poem?

About Paul Muldoon

Paul Muldoon was born and educated in Northern Ireland and worked for the BBC for a number of years as a producer. He moved to America in 1987 and is a professor at Princeton University and poetry editor of the New Yorker. He was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford between 1999 and 2004.

Muldoon has won many major literary prizes, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 2003. His work is technically highly accomplished, witty, full of intriguing allusions and often ambitious in the range of ideas with which it engages. His long post-modern poem Madoc: A Mystery, which explores colonization, is a good example of the stimulating scope and complexity of his writing.

Muldoon has also written children’s books, translations, literary criticism and librettos for several operas, as well as collaborating on lyrics for the likes of rock musicians such as the late Warren Zevon.