The Reverend Mullineux - Analysis

A reverend in the scrum

Paterson’s poem is a comic celebration of a contradiction: a man called Reverend Mullineux who behaves less like a pulpit figure than like a compact engine of controlled violence. The speaker admires him not in spite of that mismatch but because of it. The title sets up a certain expectation of gentleness or moral authority, yet the poem keeps showing a body built for collision—hard and wiry, full of steam—and a temperament built for restraint. The central claim the poem makes is that true toughness isn’t loud; it is disciplined, effective, and oddly polite.

Even the first measurements lean into this joke. He’s small—five-foot-two—and unglamorous, with a face as plain as an eight-day clock. But the speaker piles on animal comparisons that turn plainness into potency: his walk is as brisk as a bantam-cock, and he’s game as a bantam. The effect is to make him feel spring-loaded: little, tough, and unshowy, a “boss” who doesn’t need to look like one.

Politeness as a kind of strength

The poem’s sharpest tension is between rough sport and refined language. When the game gets rough, Mullineux refuses the noisy, slangy aggression the speaker quotes—Strike me blue! and smacking across the snout!—phrases that sound like a crowd’s or a hothead’s idea of masculinity. Mullineux instead keeps his temper inside manners: Plays like a gentleman, and even his complaint arrives as a courteous instruction: Kindly remove from off my face!

That line is funny precisely because it’s so inadequate to the situation; nobody says kindly in the middle of a brawl unless they’re making a point. The poem suggests that decorum here isn’t softness. It’s a chosen style of authority. Mullineux’s self-control becomes another way of dominating the field: he can be polite because he is not threatened.

A small body doing large, local damage

Paterson turns athletic prowess into a catalogue of colonial comparisons: he can kick like an army mule and run like a kangaroo. Those images mix the imported and the local—military mule and native kangaroo—and they help the poem sound like an Australian voice measuring an English figure in an Australian idiom. The speaker’s admiration is bodily and practical, not abstract: Mullineux is hard to get by, he tackles his man like a bull-dog ant, and he fetches him over anyway.

The crowd’s pleasure matters, too. The poem lingers on public reaction—cheer and shout—as if Mullineux’s value isn’t only in winning but in giving spectators the satisfaction of watching big blokes get rearranged by someone smaller. It’s an underdog fantasy, but with a twist: the underdog is also the boss of the English Team, meaning the poem’s pleasure comes from seeing status complicated, not simply overturned.

The “dead” man who rises on the goal-line

The last stanza intensifies the legend by staging a near-resurrection. In a packed scrimmage, Mullineux lies prostrate and seems finished—the man that we thought was dead—yet he reappears at the most urgent moment, right on our goal-line. The image of him down with a score on his head is both brutal and heroic: he is literally under bodies and still performing his job.

This is where the reverend joke deepens. The poem doesn’t make him holy; it makes him unkillable in a very specific, physical way. His “revival” isn’t spiritual transcendence but stubborn stamina. In the logic of this sporting world, that kind of endurance looks like a secular miracle.

A sharper question the poem leaves behind

What does the poem actually praise more: the violence, or the manners that make the violence seem acceptable? Mullineux can chuck men about and still speak in a gentleman’s register; the politeness acts like a moral alibi. The poem’s joke, finally, may be that the “reverend” is not there to soften the game, but to bless it.