I

If we concede that Derek Mahon does not fit squarely into the Irish poetic tradition, we may establish the idea that this tradition is multilateral. The facts that this young Belfast poet has lived outside of Ireland during most of the last decade and that he addresses the Troubles in Ulster only rarely and indirectly have misled one TLS reviewer to label him “the least locally attached” of the recognized Ulster poets, such as John Hewitt, John Montague, Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley, James Simmons, and Paul Muldoon. Except in Montague's Rough Field and Heaney's North, however, Ulster poets have chosen to treat the Troubles obliquely. We can also recall that writers such as Joyce, O'Casey, Beckett, and MacNeice have made living outside of Ireland seem very Irish.

Derek Mahon was conceived, according to my fallible math, during the first Nazi bombings of Belfast, or perhaps in an “all-clear,” and born in November, 1941, to Protestant parents. His father, who followed his grandfather into the Belfast shipyards, became an inspector of engines. Derek enrolled in Trinity College, Dublin, attended the Sorbonne for one year, and returned to Trinity to earn a degree in French, as well as in English and philosophy in 1965. He tried out Toronto and Boston and endured a year of teaching in Belfast and two in Dublin before his hegira to London in 1970. An attempt to return to Ulster, as poet-in-residence at the New University between 1977 and 1979, left Mahon depressed and in bad health and resolved “never to live in Northern Ireland again.” Disaffected particularly by his repugnance for the Protestant extremist (“God, you could grow to love it, God-fearing, God- / chosen purist little puritan that”), he may appear, to the undiscerning, to be at home in the English tradition. For example, one critic, Roger Garfitt, has misplaced him with the British minimalist poets such as Empson, Fuller, and Porter, in this manner: “His very English insistence on the limitations of poetry inhibits him from proceeding to any … imaginative restructuring.” Although Mahon looks forward to the day when the question, “Is so-and-so really an Irish writer?” will clear a room in seconds, mislabeling leads to misinterpretation, as Garfitt demonstrates, and therefore a more helpful characterization of Derek Mahon is required.

II

Mahon extends the tradition of those Irish exiles—Joyce, Beckett, and MacNeice—whose writing elevates character and place, or setting, over history and ideology, particularly the Irish version of history. Goaded by killing Irish rectitude, they reject political formulations about humanity and find man most human among the waste spaces, alone or with his own fool. Throughout the four volumes, Mahon's poems are set in an actual specified place, Belfast, or more frequently, in some barren, primitive, or post-holocaust site. Value resides not in society or the force-march of history but in the respite when one knows love or light from the hills. Through his four volumes Mahon discards social and historical values, stripping his subject to the bare forked creature.

The history Mahon discards includes the Troubles in Ulster but is not restricted to that ineluctable homicidal process. As Terence Brown has characterized it, “History for Mahon is no saga of land and people but a process, … which casts one man as coloniser, another as colonised, and man in innumerable roles.” The stripping of these roles down to unaccommodated humanity, Mahon's emerging theme, was obscured among other concerns in his first volume, Night-Crossing (1968), much of which was written at Trinity. The volume opens with an ironic love poem, worthy of MacNeice, that is addressed to “Girls in their Seasons” (“matches go out in the wind”). It includes four cock-sure love poems that have been dropped from Poems 1962-1978, the poet's personal selection, published in 1979. Mahon often loses his deftness in love poetry and either unzips emotions or tarts them up. Within the four volumes only one love poem seems totally successful, “Two Songs,” a recent harmonious marriage of short poems that were printed separately in Lives. Despite a distracting arrangement, several poems in Night-Crossing—“Four Walks …,” “An Unborn Child,” “Epitaph for Robert Flaherty”—point to the remarkable archaeological poems of Lives (1972) and Snow Party (1975), in which the survivor of an unspecified holocaust locates himself:

We are
Holing up here
In the difficult places—
In caves,
Terminal moraines
And abandoned farmhouses,

(“Entropy”)

or artifacts of a dead civilization disclose themselves:

Having spent the night in a sewer of pre-
cognition, consoled by moon-glow, air-chuckles,
and the retarded pathos of mackerel, we wake
among shoelaces and white wood to a raw wind
and the cries of gulls. Deprived of use, we
are safe now from the historical nightmare …

(“The Apotheosis of Tins”)

We hear also the voice of the archaeologist who fingers shards and reflects on the striae of civilizations within himself:

So many lives,
So many things to remember!
I was a stone in Tibet,
A tongue of bark
At the heart of Africa
Growing darker and darker …
I know too much
To be anything any more—
And if in the distant
Future someone
Thinks he has once been me
As I am today,
Let him revise
His insolent ontology
Or teach himself to pray.

(“Lives”)

All three excerpts are from poems animated by an elaborate rhetoric and florid diction which may be the most valuable artifacts of the otherwise defunct culture. Precisely when the culture collapsed remains uncertain, even vaguer in Mahon's revisions of earlier poems for Poems 1962-1978. In these revised poems trade names on the junk have peeled off, the Citroen has become “the car,” and topical references, to Mailer, the CIA, Cambodia, etc., have been erased. More significantly, in the new poems, a quarter of the volume, he has chastened his diction, simplified his rhetoric, and shifted most of the irony from his tone to the formal strategies of the poems. In the new poems we may miss the bite of lines such as these from Snow Party:

Your great mistake is to disregard the satire
Bandied among the mute phenomena.
Be strong if you must, your brusque hegemony
Means fuck-all to the somnolent sun-flower
Or the extinct volcano.

(“After Nerval”)

In the new poems, Mahon's distinctive voice is nearly submerged in the stream of a conventional British diction and rhetoric:

Yet even today the earth disposes
Blue bells, roses and primroses,
The dawn throat-whistle of a thrush
Deep in the dripping lilac bush,

(“Ford Manor”)

Even if we find the adroit control of assonance and rhythm and onomatopoeia of the last two lines an inadequate compensation for the biting imperatives and rich diction of the earlier poetry, as several reviewers have, we must recognize Mahon's intention to shuck off ostentatious personality and to comment on history through his form. Whatever our opinions of Poems 1962-1978, it seems reasonable for me to accept the poet's own selection and revisions as canonical and to base the following observations on this volume.

III

In “The Last of the Fire Kings” the escaping monarch declares,

                                                                                I am
Through with history—
Who lives by the sword
Dies by the sword.
Last of the fire kings, I shall
Break with tradition and
Die by my own hand
Rather than perpetuate
The barbarous cycle.

He recognizes, however, that

… the fire-loving
People, rightly perhaps,
Will not countenance this,
Demanding that I inhabit,
Like them, a world of
Sirens, bin-lids
And bricked-up windows—
Not to release them
From the ancient curse
But to die their creature and be thankful.

The Belfast battlescape establishes grounds for arguing that Mahon's “ancient curse” is more malign than Stephen Dedalus's “nightmare,” to which Mahon alludes. … [In “Snow Party” observe that]

Snow is falling on Nagoya
And father south
On the tiles of Kyoto.
Eastward, beyond Irago,
It is falling
Like leaves on the cold sea.
Elsewhere they are burning
Witches and heretics
In the boiling squares,
Thousands have died since dawn
In the service
Of barbarous kings;

“Barbarous Kings” directs us to “The Last of the Fire Kings,” the next poem in this volume. “Snow Party” also mirrors the last sections of Yeats's “Lapis Lazuli” and points in other directions: toward the slaughter of Aughrim and the Boyne, contemporary with Basho's tour to Nagoya and to northern Japan, but also away from history toward Gabriel Conroy's snow-dream in “the Dead” that life is brief compared to our endless citizenship among the dead.

Mahon is not so concerned with history's indeterminacy, one of Joyce's themes in Finnegans Wake, as with its determinism, which Stephen attempts to evade in Ulysses. In the Ithaca episode, when the typal characters Stephen the artificer and Bloom the voyager practice an ancient rite under the ageless constellations, they seem to rise out of history's causal net. Mahon terms such a liberating perspective “the theoptic view.” His comments on Hugh MacDiarmid could apply to Joyce as well: “He had a lively sense of the planet earth as one stone among many, albeit the most interesting because peopled by the peculiar creatures we call people.” To achieve this theoptic view of man's fragility and ephemerality, Joyce would not sacrifice his alternative realistic view of the urban world (as Bloom re-enters from under the dizzying heaventree of stars, he knocks his head against a walnut sideboard). Mahon, too, maintains a dialectic between a historical urban setting, usually Belfast, and some point beyond history. Early poems, such as “DeQuincey At Grasmere,” “Van Gogh in the Borinage,” “Teaching in Belfast,” and “Canadian Pacific,” a poem from the middle volume's “Afterlives,” and the new poem “The Return” provide a historical perspective to which the poet occasionally commutes. He usually resides in a perspective we might term “phenomenological.”

The term seems appropriate when Mahon attempts to ease “the metaphysical disjunction between ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ between the perceiving sensibility and everything external to it,” an intention he attributes to Beckett. His most effective attempts, in Lives and Snow Party, are forays along the border that barely separates the animate from the inanimate, the inert, articulate Beckett-like character from the bones, tins, and shards. “Consolations of Philosophy” concludes with Mahon's recurrent image for this border:

                                                                                                    … When the broken
Wreath bowls are speckled with rain-water
And the grass grows wild for want of a caretaker,
Oh, then a few will remember with delight
The dust gyrating in a shaft of light;
The integrity of pebbles; a sheep's skull
Grinning its patience on a wintry sill.

Interchanges across this sill between the animate and inanimate are maintained through Mahon's sound effects, his metaphors, and even his titles. In the excerpt above he relates the quick and the dead through assonance and feminine rhyme (“integrity,” “grinning,” “wintry”) and through the near-anagrams, “rain-water” and “caretaker” (in Lives he pairs sugar and Fergus).

Even more than by rhyming effects his phenomenological intention is served by metaphors that confuse the living and insensate. For example, in a trope on the metaphor of leaves as souls of the dead, as developed by Virgil, Milton, and Beckett, Mahon writes,

The prisoners of infinite choice
Have built their house
In a field below the wood
And are at peace.

(“Leaves”)

He describes “A stadium filled with an infinite / Rustling and sighing,” lines that are echoed in a poem on gypsies, “after Jaccottet”:

There are fires under the trees
Low voices speak to the sleeping nations
from the fringes of cities.
…
perpetual murmur
around the hidden light.

The two poems collaborate to render gypsies and leaves referents for each other.

A more concentrated metaphorical exchange occurs in the highly praised “Disused Shed in Co. Wexford”:

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rocks querulous in the high wood.

The Irish critic Seamus Deane has written that the actual subject of this poem is dispossessed humans, “the lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii” to whom the mushrooms are compared, whereas the engaging subject, the one Mahon is engaged with, is the tenacious marginal life of the mushroom colony.

The most interesting of such metaphorical inversions occurs between wraiths and shift-workers in “Going Home,” a poem that might appropriately exchange titles with the next poem after those from Lives, “Afterlives.” “Going Home” clearly begins beyond mortality:

Why we died
Remains a mystery,
One we shall never solve.

In the ninth stanza these spirits move into an indefinite metaphorical relation to dispirited laborers from Hull:

For ours is the afterlife
Of the unjudgeable,
Of the desolate and free
Who come over
Twice daily from Hull
Disguised as shift workers
And vanish for ever
With a whisper of soles
Under a cindery sky,

Stepping upon the material sense of soles, the poem continues within a sterile and recognizably contemporary landscape:

A sunken barge rots
In the mud beach
As if finally to discredit
A residual poetry of
Leavetaking and homecoming,
Of work and sentiment;
For this is the last
Homecoming, the end
Of the rainbow—
And the pubs are shut.
There are no
Buses till morning.

By rendering a metaphor's reference and referent interchangeable, Mahon often exposes the animistic roots of poetry.

Mahon does entertain ideas of animism. He says of the Irish novelist Brian Moore:

An object, for Moore, is more than the sum of its atoms. It preserves within it the racial memory of its raw material, as a wardrobe might have heard of the crucifixion.

He wittily extends to the Ulster Calvinists this notion of things having memory:

The chair squeaks in a high wind,
Rain falls from its branches,
The kettle yearns for the
Mountain, the soap for the sea.
In a tiny stone church
On the desolate headland
A lost tribe is singing ‘Abide With Me.’

(“Nostalgias”)

IV

At this point we might remind ourselves that Mahon is not a pioneer in following Husserl's first directive, to return to the ‘things themselves.’ For example, Mahon's fellow Irishmen, Thomas Kinsella and Seamus Heaney, employ a peculiar hinged image and a textured language, respectively, to restore the aseity of things. Mahon's method is distinguishable from theirs, however, and from that of such poets as Ted Hughes and Gary Snyder, because his wit and elaborate rhetoric remind us of the observing speaker and of “the metaphysical disjuncture between ‘subject’ and ‘object.’” Mahon's objects usually speak only through their eloquent attorney: “Your great mistake is to disregard the satire / Bandied among the mute phenomena.” Whether the speaker is unidentified or identified as an anthropologist or survivor, we are charmed by his advocacy of objects' ‘viewpoints,’ as of umbrellas in this poem:

We know they have also shivered
In the cold draught of despair
And are, therefore, the more
Ecstatic after rain—

(“A Kind of People”)

The new poems depart from earlier verse by dispensing with eloquence and advocacy and making the poet's relation to nature an important subject of the poem. For example, one of four “Surry Poems” begins as if it were from Lives or Snow Party:

Ancient bathtub in the fallow field—
midges, brown depths where once
a drift of rainbow suds,
rosewater and lavender.
Now cow faces, clouds,
starlight, nobody there.

Then imagination returns home to the poet, as it has not in the earlier poems:

Nobody there for days and nights
but my own curious thoughts
out there on their own
in a rainstorm or before dawn
peering over the rim
and sending nothing back to my warm room.

(“Field Bath”)

We become aware of the “watchful heart” that encounters the blank of nature in this gentle extension of poems about nothingness, such as Shelley's “Mont Blanc,” Stevens' “The Snow Man” and perhaps Frost's “For Once, Then, Something.”

Tracing the point of view becomes one of the pleasures of such new poems as “Midsummer” where the speaker takes up his vigil only “when the people have gone home” or “The Home Front” where the innocent source of the poem's recollected journalistic images is revealed in the closing lines:

Americans in the art-deco
Milk bars! The released Jews
Blinking in shocked sunlight …
A male child in a garden
Clutching The Empire News.

The angle of vision and the source of light become the actual subjects of the suite of twenty-five short lyrics entitled “Light Music,” as we can see in this poem about the poet's son:

He leads me into
a grainy twilight
of old photographs.
The sun is behind us,
his shadow in mine.

(“Rory”)

In the new poems the watcher is neither the anthropologist, master of the meter,” nor the voluble survivor. In “The Attic” Mahon writes from the home of the poet John Montague in Cork: “Listen can you hear me / Turning over a new leaf?” He has suppressed the imperative voice, active verbs, ornate diction, and elaborate rhetoric of the early poems. He frequently pleads ignorance and asks only for a little room in nature. To the trees and grasses he says, “there is no need for fear— / I am only looking …”, and he makes the meager claim,

I have a right to be here too.
Maybe not like you—
like the birds,
say, or the wind blowing through.

(“Dry Hill”)

He even contemplates conversion, “into a tree / Like somebody in Ovid / —a small tree certainly / But a tree nonetheless—” (“The Return”). This suppression of self one reviewer labels “Eastern.” Certainly relative to the earlier poems the new poems move Laotze's way, as the new title of the restructured prose poem “Mayo Tao” suggests.

Many of the new poems seem autobiographical; we identify the poet as the unassuming watcher at the window, his eye attracted to landscape and light rather than to society. He is represented as isolated, especially, from the Catholic and Protestant citizens of Ulster, “un beau pays mal habité.” He shares with the speakers of the earlier poems an alienation from Gaelic traditions (“In the Aran Islands”) as well as from the majority of his countrymen. An earlier poem, “As It Should Be,” which demonstrates Mahon's deft control of idiom, makes a wry, allusive comment on the poet's role. An outlaw, perhaps an IRA pariah, is gunned down “in a blind yard / Between ten sleeping lorries / And an electricity generator.”

Let us hear no idle talk
of the moon in the Yellow River.
The air blows softer since his departure

The middle line refers to Denis Johnston's play “The Moon in the Yellow River” and therefore makes his association of the lunatic, the bomber, and the poet, by alluding to Johnston's source in a Chinese poem, but the line substitutes the poet for the bomber. In either case the opposition represents a homicidal methodology:

Since his tide burial during school hours
Our kiddies have known no bad dreams.
Their cries echo lightly along the coast.
This is as it should be.
They will thank us for it when they grow up
To a world with method in it.

In “Afterlives” he considers the alternative to his exile:

Perhaps if I'd stayed behind
And lived it bomb by bomb
I might have grown up at last
And learnt what is meant by home.

More likely, “The Return” suggests, he would have gained the harsh tenacity of a thorn tree, grotesque but nearly tragic, like Milton's “burnt-out angel / Raising petitionary hands.”

Eschewing “the fire-loving people” of Ulster, Mahon turns to an audience of one reader, the confiding tone implies, or to that sizable lodge of writers and friends to whom poems are dedicated. One-fourth of the poems that appear in the new volume are dedicated there or in earlier editions. As in the two verse-letters—“Beyond Howth Head” and “Sea in Winter”—the dedications render the poems confidential and the addressee complicit in a poetic ideal. Through translations, allusions, and references the poet recognizes, beyond the implied reader, a poetic community that includes MacNeice, Beckett, DeQuincey, Van Gogh, Villon, Munch, Guillevic, Cavafy, Lowry, Bashō, Sophocles, Fraser, Nerval, Seferis, Dowson, J. G. Farrell, Jaccottet, Botticelli, Mozart, Corbière, Dante, and Matthew Arnold.

The community is international. We would be seriously misreading the new poems if we inferred that one nation, England say, was freer of historical illusions than another. Consider “Penshurst Place,” which takes as epigraph “And if these pleasures may thee move …,” Marlowe's opening to “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love”:

The bright drop quivering on a thorn
In the rich silence after rain,
Lute music from the orchard aisles,
The paths ablaze with daffodils,
Intrigue and venery in the air
A l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs,
The iron hand and the velvet glove—
Come live with me and be my love.
A pearl face, numinously bright,
Shining in silence of the night,
A muffled crash of smouldering logs,
Bad dreams of courtiers and of dogs,
The Spanish ships around Kinsale,
The screech owl and the nightingale,
The falcon and the turtle dove—
Come live with me and be my love.

As the historical references to Elizabethan intrigue imply, treachery resides at Penshurst as well as in Belfast. Whatever comfort the poem offers derives from the playful extension of the troping poems by Marlowe, Ralegh, Donne, and modern poets, such as Day Lewis, whose refrains the poem borrows, from the imported title of Proust's novel, from more remote allusions to Dunbar and others, and from evocation of the tradition of topographical poems that celebrate the home of Philip Sidney, such as Waller's “At Penshurst” or Ben Jonson's “To Penshurst.” The irony of the speaker's invitation arises less from his tone than from the conflict of traditions, literary and historical.

The tradition of literature and art offers an escape, or at least a diversion, from the world of method, determined roles, and homicidal causality. In “The Sea in Winter” the speaker finds nested in the patterns of art our various dreams of an ideal future:

In Botticelli's strangely neglected
Drawings for The Divine Comedy
Beatrice and the rest proceed
Through a luminous geometry—
Diagrams of that paradise
Each has his vision of. I trace
The future in a colour-scheme,
Colours we scarcely dare to dream.
One day, the day each one conceives—
The day the Dying Gaul revives,
The day the girl among the trees
Strides through our wrecked technologies,
The stones speak out, the rainbow ends,
The wine goes round among the friends,
The lost are found, the parted lovers
Lie at peace beneath the covers.

Some months ago in a public but premature conjecture I inferred from this and other passages that Mahon's new volume celebrates a perpetual, ideal world comprised of the colors and patterns of art and the timeless features of a landscape that was recognizably the west and north coast of Ireland. Furthermore, because this world abounds with Ovidian nymphs or Herrick's rustic maidens, offering “a glimpse of skin in the woods,” I suggested Mahon's ideal might be Tir na Mná (the land of women), one version of the otherworld from which the ancient Irish poet derived his authority. One week after delivering these remarks, I finally obtained an essay by Mahon on MacNeice in which he characterized his compatriot and predecessor at BBC in these terms:

The Islands of the Blest, the Hesperides, Tir na nOg, the Land of the Ever Young—call it what you will, it crops up regularly in MacNeice's poetry and is usually associated with the West of Ireland. Although he was born in Belfast, his father and grandfathers before him grew up in the West of Ireland and MacNeice cultivated the fact as a private romance.

V

Beyond the coincidental mythological naming lies a deep attraction, shared by Mahon and MacNeice, for the permanencies of Irish landscape. Although Mahon has composed poems specifically about the Aran Islands and Mayo, the landscape that pervades his poetry, not merely as setting but as a source of value as well, could as easily be Ulster as Connaught. The principal features of this poetic landscape are variability (created in fact by saturated land and sky), stark outlines yielding a sense of bound spaciousness, and that capricious light, which must be peculiar to Ireland. In Mahon's home-city, although the sky is “cindery” and changes have occurred “bomb by bomb,” “the hills are still the same / Grey-blue above Belfast,” (“Afterlives”), and major avenues lead toward the West where “the fields are bright with sunlight after rain” (“Teaching in Belfast”). The West radiates a distinctive light and color, “a dream of limestone in sea light” (“Thinking of Inishere in Cambridge”). In “The Mayo Tao” we hear that

The nearest shop is four miles away.
          When I walk there
                    through the shambles of the morning
for tea and firelighters,
          the mountain paces me
                    in a snow-lit silence.

Mahon's poems depict this peculiarly Irish light, undependable and therefore a gift, a sign of grace; “the light / of heaven upon the mountains of Donegal,” he says in one poem, or:

The fields dark under
a gunmetal sky, and one
tiny farm shining
in a patch of sunlight
as if singled out
for benediction.

(“October,” from Light Music)

In addition to light and the stark outlines, this Belfast poet celebrates the spaciousness of rural Ulster and of the West of Ireland. “Yet distance is the vital bond / Between the window and the wind” he states in “The Sea in Winter.” Of this sense of spaciousness in other Irish writing Norman Jeffares has said,

This is what the Irish writer realizes Irish space can do for him or his characters; it can take them out of time, out of the past—a thing particularly to be hoped for—into a blessed sense of timelessness. …

Both Mahon and MacNeice find the English landscape always within earshot of machines and too humanized to escape change (cf. Mahon's “Ford Manor” and MacNeice's “Woods”). For both poets the permanencies of Western Ireland can win us, or give us respite, from the illusory concerns of society. MacNeice seems closer than Mahon to society which he represents in specific and political terms:

All over the world people are toasting the King,
Red lozenges of light as each one lifts his glass,
But I will not give you any idol or idea, creed or king,
…
I give you the toy Liffey and the vast gulls,
I give you fuschia hedges and whitewashed walls.

(“Train to Dublin”)

MacNeice's glances westward seem wistful beside Mahon's more developed “cold dream of a place out of time.” On the other hand Mahon's returns to Belfast offer us few particulars of that city mangled by history.

MacNeice never imagines an inhuman view of nature nor attempts to penetrate its otherness. He offers impressions that are often magical:

White Tintoretto clouds beneath my naked feet
This mirror of the wet sand imputes a lasting mood
To island truancies …

(“The Strand”)

They are transmitted, however, through the viewpoint of a civilized observer who does

… not envy the self-possession of an elm-tree
Nor the aplomb of a granite monolith.
All that I would like to be is human, having a share
In a civilised, articulate and well-adjusted
Community …

(Autumn Journal, XII)

This contrasts sharply with Mahon's attitudes and approach, especially as reflected in the phenomenological poems of Lives and Snow Party in which he explores imaginatively the unconscious state of rock, trees, and shards. He reminds us that this is the world toward which man, in his relatively brief life, moves so fast. His view seems darker than MacNeice's although somewhat less tragic than Beckett's, whose “bleak reduction” he rebuts in “An Image from Beckett.” He answers Pozzo's complaint that we are born astride the grave:

In that instant
There was a sea, far off,
As bright as lettuce,
A northern landscape
And a huddle
Of houses along the shore.
Also, I think, a white
Flicker of gulls
And washing hung to dry—
The poignancy of those
Back-yards—and the gravedigger
Putting aside his forceps.
Then the hard boards
And darkness once again.
But in that instant
I was struck
By the sweetness and light,
The sweetness and light,
Imagining what grave
Cities, what lasting monuments,
Given the time.
They will have buried
My great-grandchildren, and theirs,
Beside me by now
With a subliminal batsqueak
Of reflex lamentation.
Our hair and excrement
Litter the rich earth,
Changing, second by second,
To civilizations.
It was good while it lasted,
And if it only lasted
The biblical span
Required to drop six feet
Through a glitter of wintry light,
There is No one to blame.
Still, I am haunted
By that landscape,
The soft rush of its winds,
The uprightness of its
Utilities and schoolchildren—
To whom in my will,
This, I have left my will.
I hope they had time,
And light enough, to read it.

Through the legacy of poetry, the poem affirms the thing itself, “unaccommodated man.” Although life is accepted on its most minimal basis, the poem seems no more minimalist in its intention than, say, Lear or Waiting for Godot. I cannot see that it reflects “an English insistence on the limitation of poetry,” as our critic charged. When asked if poetry makes nothing happen, Mahon has invoked Shelley's assertion in the Defense that “poetry enlarges the circumference of the imagination” which is “the great instrument of moral good.” Mahon might adopt as the basis for his theoptic view Shelley's belief that the emotions aroused by poetry make “self appear as what it is, an atom to a Universe.”

Poetry's legislative powers, therefore, seem to Mahon no basis for arrogance. When he departs from his family in Kensington and crosses London twice daily, in the guise of a BBC editor and writer, as MacNeice did for two decades, he knows that poetry cannot free us physically from the roles in which history has cast us. He knows too that if poetry helps shape man's acceptance of mortality, it also shares mankind's fate:

You will tell me that you have executed
A monument more lasting than bronze;
But even bronze is perishable.
Your best poem, you know the one I mean,
The very language in which the poem
Was written, and the idea of language,
All these things will pass away in time.

(“Heraclitus on Rivers”)