Etymology and Elegy: Paul Muldoon’s ‘Yarrow’ and ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’

From the subtle and often ominous resonance of names in his earliest poems to the forensic investigations of Maggot (2010), Muldoon never allows etymology to be unequivocally relevant, or indeed irrelevant, to synchronic usage. This ambiguity is especially striking in his elegies, as it chimes with the classic dilemma of representing a loss for poetic gain. Through close readings of ‘Hedge School’, ‘Yarrow’, and ‘Cuthbert and the Otters’, this chapter examines the use of obsoleteness in Muldoon’s elegiac diction; words no longer current, but preserved in dictionaries, provide the poet with roundabout routes to a mitigated poetic grief. Whether evasive, provocative, and digressive, or, as in his elegy for Heaney, profoundly grounding, etymologies are an essential part of these poems’ struggle for closure.