Though it wasn’t until 411 BC he took up the oar
in the Peloponnesian War
against “man-loosening” Lysander,
our hero was not unknown
to Thucydides, who’d evenhandedly intone
“What’s sauce for Aegeus is sauce for the gander.”
Despite his background
being less than sound,
he nonetheless managed to drive a phaeton
through the Spartan ranks
or, on more than one occasion, an oar-bank.
If his circumstances were quite often straitened
he couldn’t say no
to manning up and having a go
at the slightest hint of an old school oligarchy.
No scanty there, then?
Faced with the very same problem time and again
he would resort to being snide or snarky
and immediately made a dent
in it. It was no small accomplishment
that he somehow managed to claim kin with Nestor
and, since he was far
from the sharpest ray in the earthstar,
was quite likely an ancestor
of the not exactly inspiring Greek
who would eke
out an existence in the precincts of the Abbey
where he’d been married sword in hand, ye Gads,
turning out to be not half bad
or, as Thucydides would have it, “None too shabby.”
by Paul Muldoon (b. 1951).
I recently discovered the poetry of Paul Muldoon who, as once described in the New York Times, “… takes some honest-to-God reading. He’s a riddler, enigmatic, distrustful of appearances, generous in allusion, doubtless a dab hand at crossword puzzles.” This poem is from Joy in Service on Rue Tagore (2024), which is published by Faber & Faber.
In the Dark 