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 | North East Post Weekend Edition |
Steve Whitaker
Features Writer
@stevewhitaker1.bsky.social
12:00 AM 18th October 2025
arts
Poem Of The Week: Why Brownlee Left By Paul Muldoon
Why Brownlee Left
Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.
By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.
Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.
By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.
Image by Christian Birkholz from Pixabay
Irish poet Paul Muldoon's fine sonnet fills the sudden absence with suggestion: construed in the language of hope - the poet invests the horses with the cheerfully ironic certainty of marital harness and direction - we might infer that Brownlee's glimpse of the figurative light has impelled him towards a new and brighter future. That his motivation is at variance with the received wisdom of local expectation is a point of profound departure.
Muldoon renders the sense of abandonment (perhaps Brownlee is not content with his lot) with a slight change in tone from octet to sestet, in a poem gradually, and deliberately, relieved of the yoke of rhyme.