Celebrating Poetry Month with Jennifer Militello on Paul Muldoon

New Hampshire Book Festival celebrates National Poetry Month with NH Poet Laureate, Jennifer Millitello.

NH Poet Laureate Jennifer Militello talks about Paul Muldoon’s poem “Hedgehog”

For National Poetry Month, we asked New Hampshire Poet Laureate Jennifer Militello to tell us about a favorite poem. She chose Paul Muldoon’s poem “Hedgehog” (from Muldoon’s collection Poems, 1969-1998, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux). Paul Muldoon’s reading and talk at the 2024 NH Book Festival was a highlight for poetry fans.

Here are the first two stanzas of “Hedgehog”:

The snail moves like a

Hovercraft, held up by a

Rubber cushion of itself,

Sharing its secret

With the hedgehog. The hedgehog

Shares its secret with no one.

We say, Hedgehog, come out

Of yourself and we will love you.

When I read Paul Muldoon’s poem “Hedgehog,” I am always struck by its initial comparison, the snail as hovercraft, which has changed the way I imagine snails for life. There are few things better than a poem that can take something encountered a hundred times and reinvent it before your very eyes.

This initial comparison is striking and deeply appealing, but that is only the entry point, the vestibule of the poem. For this rich parallel is leading us to a poem that unfolds line by line, petal after petal, into its own perspectives and transformations, perhaps like an artichoke, which Muldoon describes with a similar precision in a different poem.

This poem in its first line is one thing—but by the time one reaches its conclusion, “Hedgehog” is another animal entirely. How do we start with a snail and end in God? The hedgehog is how, because it is an animal, yes, but it is also a mystery, an enigma, a set of defenses

This poem in its first line is one thing—but by the time one reaches its conclusion, “Hedgehog” is another animal entirely. How do we start with a snail and end in God? The hedgehog is how, because it is an animal, yes, but it is also a mystery, an enigma, a set of defenses.

Muldoon travels down through this discovery via the “secret” which “we,” are attempting to urge the hedgehog to give up. We coax this shy creature, we reassure it, we know its emergence and potential domestication and trust are a gift. But the hedgehog stays curled tightly in protection of itself and this leads us to the poem’s final tender heart: the declaration that there is a god inside the hedgehog, marked (brilliantly!) by its exterior’s “crown of thorns.” We betrayed the last thorned god to emerge onto the earth and trust humankind, so the hedgehog steers clear of us and keeps its spiny armor on.

In its incredible expansion from the mundane details of the everyday to an explosive musing on the nature of God, “Hedgehog” reminds me of Rilke’s poem “The Rose-Window.” It is a poem’s job to show us the hovercraft in a snail or the God in a hedgehog, and Muldoon’s poem fully answers that call.

—Jennifer Militello