Survivals

I trace Paul Muldoon’s borrowing from Yeats’s “A Prayer for My Daughter” along with some other intertextual references in “At the Sign of the Black Horse, September 1999” (Moy Sand and Gravel) with a view to demonstrating that Muldoon’s poem represents both a challenge to Yeats’s political ideas and acceptance of his aesthetics of vacillation. Subscribing to the idea that poetry may be a sort of protective charm against the evils of the world, Muldoon discovers a reassuring strength in the moments when Yeats sheds his mask of a lofty mage.