This is at one remove, a substitute for final answers. …

Derek Mahon, “Preface to a Love Poem”

In “Man and Bird,”¹ the second of four in his series entitled “Breton Walks,” Derek Mahon dolefully remarks the seemingly insurmountable reality of man's inability to participate fully in his natural environment. Implying that birds have good reason to avoid man's advances, he writes:

All fly away at my approach
As they have done time out of mind
And hide in the thick leaves to watch
The shadowy ingress of mankind.

The unfortunate distance he senses between nature and humankind Mahon terms an “ancient fear,” suggesting that birds have always mistrusted the presence of human beings among them, yet he self-consciously admits that he had attempted to overcome the gap created by this fear by means of his “whistle-talk,” and had promptly failed. Somewhat miffed by their rebuttal of his self-serving attempts at communication, Mahon bemoans the blow dealt his pride for he had wished to consider himself an “enlightened alien,” an outsider with the intelligence and the wherewithall to bridge “the gap / From their world to the world of men.” The wisdom that the poet clearly gained from reflection on his failure is, in my view, central to his entire poetic project. This short poem is testimony to his belief that human language ought not posit itself as the optimal avenue by which meaning might find expression. Indeed, the birds had good reason to disdain the anthropocentric parody of their song, the poet's “whistle-talk,” for clearly past experience had taught them that man's inclination to dominate of nature is rarely innocent.

So perhaps they have something after all—
          Either we shoot them out of hand
          Or parody them with a bird-call
          Neither of us can understand.

Nevertheless, Derek Mahon surely regrets his inability to be an “enlightened alien,” for he would no doubt love to enter into a fuller communion with nature, to return to that mythic time before man attempted to master the universe through language. Yet Mahon's poetry might best be read not as a Remembrance of Things Past in verse but far more fruitfully as a respectful, patient and self-effacing effort to “let speak” rather than to “make speak,” to listen to the poetry that surrounds us rather than to attempt to master all the significant voices by means of human language. Realizing as he does that history, be it nightmarish or otherwise, cannot be escaped, Mahon chooses to discover the profound in voices other than the human. In a spirit of deep respect for the world around him, Mahon seems to step back and listen, whether it be to sounds or to the absence of all sounds—he operates, in his term, “at one remove.”

Throughout his work, Mahon exhibits the belief that language is somehow at the root of man's alienation from the rest of the world: he certainly believes that it has done more harm than good in human history. In “Beyond Howth Head,” Mahon suggests that man's efforts to subjugate natural and even metaphysical phenomena by means of language are not only foolish but also very much linked to what is fundamentally wrong with the modern world, specifically, with Ulster politics. He associates human willingness to accept oppression with man's allowing language's dominance. He believes that language has been permitted to structure the way we reason and perceive and that consequently our value systems have deteriorated to where men readily accept the dominance of words over any other factors determining their relationship to the world they inhabit.

Religion, particularly the western traditions that are based in the primacy of the Word, and specifically Irish Christianity in its factionalized and secularized forms, comes under Mahon's attack as he shows how he perceives the veneration of language, of the Word, to have links with a whole variety of western civilization's more unfortunate accomplishments. In a passage describing the church bells of Monkstown, he associates their sound with the loss of a mythic worldview in which a greater expanse of the imaginary was permitted:

I woke this morning (March) to hear
Church bells of Monkstown through the roar
Of waves round the Martello tower
And thought of the swan-sons of Lir
When Kemoc rang the Christian bell
To crack a fourth-dimensional
World picture, never known again,
And changed them back from swans to men.(2)

Christianity is here linked with the destruction of a “fourth-dimensional world picture,” a marvelous image that allows for the existence of realms beyond our common imagination, realms quite familiar to the Celtic sensibility in which man might once have shared characteristics with swans. This image recalls the poem discussed earlier, “Man and Bird,” as well as a host of other poems in which birds are evoked, and also underscores Mahon's sadness at the loss of kinship between humans and other living beings. This same relationship is drawn in the lines describing a locale whose

          ground is thick
With the dead sparrows rhetoric
Demands as fictive sacrifice
To prove its substance in our eyes.(3)

As has been suggested by both the gospel of Matthew and the Prince of Denmark, “there is a special providence in the fall of a sparrow.” God himself is aware and concerned about each and every insignificant sparrow that perishes in a fall: Mahon is no less concerned about the casualties brought on by empty and irresponsible rhetoric.

Manifest in the following lines are the repercussions of man's having abandoned mythic, imaginary time in favor of the linguistically dominated, three-dimensional, quantifiable time Mahon here associates with the Christian religions. These lines begin by referring to the sound of the Christian bells but end by linking Christian dogma to the violence in the North of Ireland:

And tinkles with as blithe a sense
Of man's cosmic significance
Who wrote his world from broken stone
Installed his Word God on the throne
And placed, in Co. Clare, a sign:
‘Stop here and see the sun go down.’
Meanwhile, for a word's sake, the plastic
Bombs go off around Belfast. …

(BHH [Beyond Howth Head])

The line, “Who wrote his world from broken stone” refers, of course, to the Mosaic tablets upon which God handed down his commandments, but it must also refer to Yeats' hillmen, symbols elsewhere in this same poem of Ireland's incapacity to change, so bound is she by historical divisions. Irish factionalism is again linked with a linguistic dogma that alienates man from fully participating in his own universe as Mahon juxtaposes the venerated “Word God” with the “commandment” inscribed on a sign along a country road, directing passersby to take the time to watch a sunset. This, he seems to be saying, is what has happened to man's sense of his “cosmic significance.” Consequently, it would seem, the obvious ramification: bombs go off around Belfast for the sake of a word—that word being, while not necessarily “religion” itself, surely one which connotes the tribalism that manifests itself in Northern Ireland as denominational division.

Mahon's preference for operating “at one remove” quite evidently suggests itself again in his contempt for facile humanism. Simplistic liberal ideals are not readily embraced by the poet; in fact, he fights against them, refusing to grant a position of centrality to what he terms “humanistic self-regard.” Unwilling to accept civilization as it is, he opts for a marginalized relationship to it which is manifold in its forms of expression. His mistrust of the modern world's capacity to subvert communism with the natural universe and to promote superficiality is expressed in these lines, also from “Beyond Howth Head”:

Centripetal, the hot world draws
Its children in with loving claws
From rock and heather, rain and sleet
With only Kosangas for heat
And spins them at the centre where
They have no time to know despair.

In “Glengormley,” Mahon again is quite explicit about his disagreement with the belief that modern man, now so “civilized,” is in a position of mastery over his universe. While some claim that men have escaped the binds of old superstitious legends about monsters and giants, and now dwell in a reasoned and controlled universe, Mahon certainly does not. The poem, as well as the entire volume, Poems, 1962-1978, opens with the line, “Wonders are many, and none is more wonderful than man,” words that Mahon encloses within inverted commas so as to render unmistakeable their ironic intent. For these words immediately meet with his most ironic of commentaries as the poem sets out to show how enslaved modern man has become to the belief that his own centrality to the universe is unquestionable. Mastery of, rather than participation in the universe has come to be considered normative:

‘Wonders are many and none is more wonderful than man’
Who has tamed the terrier, trimmed the hedge
And grasped the principles of the watering can.

No dangers lurk in dark corners in this our modern, rational age: no dangers, Mahon retorts, but language. “Only words hurt us now.” These words themselves suggest an inversion of the children's chant about sticks and stones: though perhaps once it was they that broke bones, now those objects of nature cannot harm us, for they, like the terriers and the hedges, have been mastered. But if, as the poem tells us, the threat we face today is that posed by words—those “names” that previously could never hurt us—it is all the more problematic for the poet whose job it is to use them. Yet Mahon's decision quite clearly is to meet the challenge head on, to defy the danger of falling prey to language's powers of conformity that so often lead to simplistic, rationalized explanations. Instead, he will “praise / A wordly time under this worldly sky”; he will write poetry that attempts to give expression to the world as a whole rather than to man's, or his own, prominent position at its center. As he states, “By / Necessity, if not choice, I live here too.”

Mahon's acknowledgement that he too is caught up in language's web, that he too is historically shaped and therefore, perhaps, given to flights of fancy that are potentially self-serving, provokes his characteristic attempt to resist the world's centripetal pull. His operating “at one remove” enables him to de-center himself, to de-emphasizes his own voice and all human voices, to de-prioritize his own words and let objects speak for themselves.

Mahon's poetry is profoundly self-effacing. It seems that through verse Mahon has hoped to unseat the human voice as the voice that makes poetry live. He has tried, instead, to tap into realism of existence that are not dependent on language, realms that signify in a sort of pre-linguistic way. In this sense, the notion of operating “at one remove” can be understood as a decentering of language's position of prominence in the way we regard the world. Frequently, Mahon makes use of poetic language in order to evoke silence, a wise, primordial silence that resonates with a meaning not sullied by efforts to describe it.

This privileging of silence is magnificently suggested in the poem, “Preface to a Love Poem.” It is most significant that the love poem referred to in the title does not itself exist, at least not in language. It exists in its own absence, in the space created for it by the preface, a space so sacred its silence must not be disturbed. The concept is quite beautiful—for Mahon the only legitimate experience of love is a love beyond words. Perhaps this explains the absence of love poetry in his work as a whole.

“Preface to a Love Poem” can be read as a declaration of love to a cherished individual, certainly, but it can also be read as a tribute to the absent poem itself. Surely Mahon's intimacy with poetic language brings him a joy comparable to that shared by lovers. The repetition of the phrase “this is” at the beginning of every stanza suggests the effort to describe what is indescribable, and as the first stanza makes explicit, the best that can be hoped for is a carving out of a space in which silence might reside.

This is a circling of itself and you—
A form of words, compact and compromise
Prepared in the false dawn of the half-true
Beyond which the shapes of truth materialize.

Poetry, then, can serve best to give rise to silence, to give from to words that are themselves pale in comparison with “the shapes of truth.” The evocation of silence is always phrased in Mahon's poetry is terms of a “beyond,” a place where language cannot quite reach, where human beings can no longer claim to have dominion. As such, the poem is only the potential; it only can prepare for what is immanently realizable in its completion. The poem is “compact and compromise”; it is a tensed coexistence of half-truths that prepare the way for the glimpsing of a realm that not even poetry can inhabit. Its compactness and readiness suggest the evocative potential, the immanent splendor of the silent realm which alone is capable of expressing love.

“Preface to a Love Poem” continues with a reference to Rimbaud's “Le Bateau Ivre,” a poem which Mahon translated and by which he was clearly influenced: “This is a blind with sunlight filtering through,” he writes, recalling Rimbaud's “frissons de volets.” The image recalls that of the “false-dawn” referred to in an earlier line, and suggests an only partial expression of the fullness of light—a giving shape to that light yet an incapacity to control the light itself. The correlation with Rimbaud is manifest: the poete maudit has always sought through poetry to attain to levels of existence that transcend the bounds of language.

This is a stirring in the silent hours,
As lovers do with thoughts they cannot frame
Or leave, but bring to darkness like night-flowers,
Words never choosing but the words choose them—
Birds crowing, wind whistling off pale stars.

As previously, with “This is a circling of itself and you,” the present “This is a stirring in the silent hours” calls attention to the fact that this poem is not in itself a linguistically articulated declaration of love—it is in fact that suggestion of a love that defies declaration. The late hours of lovers' intimacy are “silent” but for the “stirring”; the love they share is expressed far better in the absence of words. Birds and wind appear throughout Mahon's work to suggest this very piercing sort of expression that nonetheless in no way partakes of human language. It partakes far more of the deep and sonorous tones of nature's language, sounds that, while audible, seem impossible to locate. The same is true of the next image, “This is a night-cry, neither here nor there.” These sounds are primordial, “outlasting stone and bronze,” yet they too are transient, they too can only suggest and disappear. In disappearing, however, they leave for the silence in which love dwells.

This is at one remove, a substitute
For final answers; but the wise man knows
To cleave to the one living absolute
Beyond paraphrase, and shun a shrewd repose.

In this stanza, Mahon expresses rather explicitly the principle upon which his whole poetics is based. “This is at one remove” refers not only to this particular poem in its role as prefact to something else; it refers also to the way Mahon has consistently chosen to situate himself with regard to the universe he inhabits, “by necessity, if not choice.” In order to gain perspective, Mahon locates himself outside of the center, preferring to consider that there is more falseness than truth in the humanist position that wishes to place man at the center of the universe. In so doing, he avoids seeking for final answers; he negates the need to explain, to describe, to quantify, to master. Instead, he posits the quest for silence as “a substitute for final answers,” and makes no apologies, for in this attitude he finds a wisdom whose greatness is in its refusal of finitude. In silence, in the realm “beyond paraphrase,” the “wise man” is granted access to the “one living absolute” that is so limitless it cannot be bound by words.

          This is a way of airing my distraught
Love of your silence. You are the soul of silence.

“A way,” not the only way; “airing,” not describing; “distraught,” not confidently circumscribable. The poet loves the silence that poetry provides, for it is in silence that love finds its most perfect expression. “You,” at once poetry and the human lover Mahon addresses, “are the soul of silence,” the most profound of ineffable phenomena—the immeasurable wellspring of joy, of love itself.

In “Bird Sanctuary,” following immediately upon “Preface to a Love Poem,” Mahon again speaks of a silent place, a place “at one remove,” from his so-called real life. Mahon finds himself in this place only in dreaming—his dreamlife is his sanctuary, his means of distancing himself from urban turbulence.

Towards sleep I came
Upon the place again,
Its muted seas and tame
Eddying wind. The mist and rain
Come only after dark, and then
Steam out to sea at dawn.

The images characterizing Mahon's dream world are “muted” and “tame,” lacking the sharp, determined edges that might describe his waking world. It is a realm, like that of silence, where exactitude and finitude are not required; it too serves as “a substitute for final answers.” In this “place,” Mahon has “erected / A birds sanctuary … where all my birds collect.” This image of birds finding sanctuary in a place removed from the intrusion of the city recalls the observations the poet made in composing “Man and Bird”: it is only from a respectful distance that man can hope to approach birds at all. Birds, then, are a metaphor in Mahon's universe for the sort of distance which one must establish in order to avoid disturbing those voices, be they silent or audible, which speak in the absence of the human.

This distance is again suggested by the lines,

I live elsewhere—
In a city down the coast
Composed of earth and fire.

“Elsewhere,” like “at one remove,” renders explicit the poet's dual consciousness: he knows the value of the perspective he gains by de-centering himself from a self-centered worldview. He seeks a balance between the two realms, as he knows he does inhabit the “real” world but refuses to dismiss the more infinite world his dreams and imagination offer. In combination he integrates all four elements—earth and fire, water and air—so as to maintain as much contact as possible with the fullness of his entire worldly existence.

As in “Preface to a Love Poem,” the images of birds and wind are joined in “Bird Sanctuary” to evoke the presence of that realm of imagination which is genuinely unknowable, the way birds are, yet still as powerful and evocative as the whistling wind.

I except great things
Of these angels of wind,

Mahon writes, thereby pointing to the force which he knows resides in the imaginative realm of his mind. That force, he believes, though commonly ignored in modern consumer cultures, will one day show forth its boundless potential:

There will come a time
When they sit on the housetops
Shouting, thousands of them,
This is their own, their favourite dream,
Beyond reason, beyond rhyme,
So that the heart stops.

Again the realm that Mahon most respects is shown to be “beyond”—“beyond reason, beyond rhyme”; it transcends rational linguistic categories. His vision provides for the triumph of that non-linguistic domain “when they sit on the housetops,” for the penetration of the mundane by the ineffable.

Birds, of course, are not the only things in Mahon's vision that give voice to the pre-linguistic, silent realm the poet so values. A great variety of images is employed in this poetry to evoke the sort of simple innocence that Mahon believes speaks volumes more than any mere human language could hope to express. For the most part, these images are from nature, like his beloved birds, yet they need not even be voiced creatures. “Leaves,” for example:

Somewhere there is an afterlife
Of dead leaves,
A stadium filled with an infinite
Rustling and sighing.

Mahon's leaves, of course, recall a scene in Beckett's Waiting for Godot⁴ in which the discussion turns explicitly to the elusiveness of silence. It is Estragon who remarks, “we are incapable of keeping silent,” while encouraging Vladmir to maintain the level of conversation in order to avoid the risk of actually thinking. The “dead voices” to which Estragon refers are said to “make a noise like wings,” and then, “like leaves, like sand.” Mahon clearly is suggesting his affinity with Beckett in contending that those voices must be allowed to speak, that the ignored must be permitted expression. Mahon would rather that human voices find the courage to terminate conversation and cede the initiative to the voiceless, the “mute phenomena.”

Other such “Mute Phenomena” whose very beings resonate with silent messages are enumerated in a poem by that title. Among them can be counted sunflowers, volcanoes, turnips, cutlery and a lost hub-cap:

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 sunflower
Or the extinct volcano. What do you know
Of the revolutionary theories advanced
By turnips, or the sex-life of cutlery?
Everything is susceptible, Pythagoras said so.
An ordinary common-or-garden brick wall, the kind
For talking to or banging your head on,
Resents your politics and bad draughtsmanship.
God is alive and lives under a stone.
Already in a lost hub-cap is conceived
The ideal society which will replace our own.

There quite clearly is no question as to the validity of Mahon's logic: operating “at one remove” affords the poet ample room to “let speak” the non-human, pre-linguistic voices that inhabit our universe. Although “Mute Phenomena” has something of a tongue-in-cheek tone, Mahon's message is equally clear when he writes in a more contemplative and earnest mode, as is the case in “Mayo Tao”:

I have stood for hours watching
          a salmon doze
                    in the tea-gold dark,
for weeks watching a spider weave
          in a pale light, for months
listening to the sob-story
          of a stone on the road—
                    the best, most monotonous
sob-story I have ever heard.
I am an expert on frost crystals
          and the silence of crickets,
a confident of the stinking shore,
          the stares in the mud.

What is one to make, then, of Derek Mahon's tribute to silence? Although it might at first seem facile to contend that the poet's penchant for silence is in some way part of his political position, the possibility of a relation merits examination. We have seen how in “Beyond Howth Head” the dominance of language in western metaphysics is linked with the Belfast bombings, and we have explored how Mahon's operating “at one remove” provides him with an increased acuity of vision vis a vis the world he inhabits. It seems plausible, then, to assert that Mahon truly believes he can better come to terms with the political situation of his native Belfast by distancing himself from it. His personal experience certainly bears this out: Mahon has been something of an exile since leaving Ulster to work in England and elsewhere as a free-lance writer. It is thus hardly surprising to discover a certain ambivalence in Mahon's relationship to his own cultural identity as an Irishman.

Mahon's poetry clearly does not share in the sense of rootedness to Irish soil that so characterizes the work of his Catholic compatriot Seamus Heaney, for example. This is made only too clear in the final stanzas of “Afterlives” in which the poet reflects upon his return to war-torn Belfast after a long absence:

As I step ashore in a fine rain
To a city so changed
By five years of war
I scarcely recognize
The place I grew up in,
The faces that try to explain.
But the hills are still the same
Grey blue above Belfast.
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.

One might assert that Mahon indeed believes he would have become a wiser man had he never exiled himself from Northern Ireland. Yet to do so would be to disregard the obvious value Mahon places on the self-distancing, de-centering power provided by poetry. “At one remove,” that is to say, from his “dark flat” from which he can “look out over London / Rain-fresh in the morning light” (“Afterlives”), Mahon can observe Ireland with a reserved, unsentimental eye, an eye which simultaneously provides him with the perspective to look at himself and his kind with a self-awareness not to be found in a Seamus Heaney or a John Montague:

What middle-class cunts we are
To imagine for one second
That our privileged ideals
Are divine wisdom, and the dim
Forms that kneel at noon
In the city not ourselves.

(“Afterlives”)

Mahon's refusal to grant himself a home is a conscious choice on his part to stave off the sort of stubborn sectarian complacency that maintains Irish politics in such an absurd state of affairs. The alienation that results is not only nationalistic but pervades his whole worldview, it forces him to bring into question the project of poetry itself in so confused a nation as Ireland:

Somewhere beyond the scorched gable end
and the burnt-out buses
there is a poet indulging
his wretched rage for order—

So begins the poem “Rage for Order” in which Mahon expresses his mixed and unsettled emotions about the poet's role in society.

He is far from his people,
          and the fitful glare of his high window is as
                    nothing to our scattered glass.

Yet ultimately Mahon admits that perhaps the self-exiled poet can offer man something of which he has a greater need than he is often ready to acknowledge as he pretends to make sense of a universe so horribly alienated and alienating:

Now watch me as I make history. Watch as I tear down
          to build up with a desperate love,
                    knowing it cannot be
          long till I have need of his
                    desperate ironies.

Irony is what Mahon's poetry affords the modern reader attempting to reconcile a will to understand with a recognition of life's absurdities. Irony points to the incongruities and the ambiguities of the universe we inhabit—it often points to the fact that rational analysis bears precious little result when dealing with complex phenomena that, simply stated, one ought not be so pretentious as to try to understand entirely. Irony inspires one to pause, to listen to the noises men make and assume to be intelligent, noises which often serve only to fill the silent spaces whose profundity is perhaps too unsettling to face voluntarily. Derek Mahon's poetry, as we have seen, privileges these silent places and values them far more than some places that might too easily be called home. Resistance to complacency in Mahon's poetry carries with it a necessary resistance to rootedness—home and hearth are relinquished in the effort to disclose truths that they sometimes serve to mask.

If one considers Heaney's sort of rootedness a preferable relationship to one's homeland, then Mahon's distancing perspective is bought at a high price. Yet the Anglo-Irish poet seems to believe that the exiled position is the most authentic position he could possibly occupy. In this sense, he is perhaps closer to being the “enlightened alien” than he gives himself credit for being in the self-effacing “Man and Bird.” It is clearly Mahon's belief that to call for silence, to beckon people to listen rather than to wax political in the usual rhetorically empty ways, is to make a very heart-felt and sincere plea for Ireland and for all societies. As Mahon writes in “The Forger”:

For even at one remove
The thing I meant was love.

Mahon's latent optimism must not be ignored. His poetry is more hopeful than one might at first suspect. His longing is for a time perhaps only imaginary, utopian and unrealizable in any practical sense, yet his acknowledgement of life's complexity and simultaneous simple beauty need not be considered inapplicable to the contemporary world. As “The Golden Bough” suggests, the time of silence, a time beyond paraphrase, is worth aspiring for even as we dwell in the confusion of modernity.

What will be left after
The twilight of cities
The flowers of fire,
Will be the soft
Vegetables where our
Politics are conceived.
When we give back
The cleared cities
To the first forest,
The hills to the hills,
The reclaimed mudflats
To the vigilant seas,
There will be silence, then
A sign of waking
As from a long dream.

The same hopefulness that is evoked in this poem can be found in Mahon's masterpiece, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford.” Like the long-hidden mushrooms that have “learnt patience and silence / Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood,” all men might hope to attain a hitherto unknown sort of wisdom by allowing silence, rather than voices, to pervade their world. These mushrooms, these “soft vegetables” can surely help the Irish to conceive of a new notion of politics, for

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.

Mahon seems to be calling for a cessation of the empty talk that tends to dominate the Irish political scene. He is calling not only for a somewhat idealized return to pre-linguistic primordial time, but also for an end to the pointless divisions that scar Ireland's otherwise retrievable landscapes. The valor of the mushrooms he offers as an emblem of the kind of determination and humble faith that alone can reverse the ravages of war in the north of Ireland. One senses he believes, yet dares not attempt to submit, that men too can attain to this level of valor and can get on with the business of living in harmony with the universe.

Let the god not abandon us
Who have come this far in darkness and in pain
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!

Notes

1. Derek Mahon, Poems, 1962-1978 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979). All citations from this volume unless otherwise indicated.

2. Beyond Howth Head. Hereafter, BHH.

3. See Matthew 10:29-30. Also Hamlet, V, ii.

4. Samuel Beckett, Waiting for Godot (New York: Grove Press, 1954), p. 40.