I am the widower—dim, disconsolate—
The Aquitainian prince in the ruined tower.
My star is dead, my constellated lute
Emblazoned with the black sun of despair.

Thus Derek Mahon translates the opening of Gerard de Nerval's haunting 1854 sonnet, “El Desdichado,” from Les Chimères. The poem, an exalted expression of Romanticism (T. S. Eliot borrowed the shattered masonry of the tower at the end of “The Waste Land”), also sets forth an autobiographical statement of Nerval's vicissitudes. In the limpid light of Mahon's customary verbal rigor, however, the passion of the French poet appears anomalous. Only when one realizes to what extent Nerval's poem parallels attitudes in Mahon's work does one see how it fits: Nerval's vision of harmony in a divided universe, his epic traversal of the river of madness and death sustained by the magic lute of Orpheus, mitigates the determinism of his past. Isolated from reality by mental illness, he shapes a non-clinical alternate reality governed by the redemptive powers of the imagination. Mahon's poetry undergoes a similar transformation, although its subject is not emotional chaos but escape from the incubus of history. Images and artifacts of art measure the imagination's direction. The tactile and visual presence of the star-spattered lute with its blazoned black sun characteristically provides access to a cultural context that refines and heightens Derek Mahon's visual acuity and individual awareness.

Mahon has published five volumes, Night-Crossing (1968), Lives (1972), Snow Party (1975), Poems 1962-1978, and The Hunt by Night (1982), combining a contemporary intelligence with a rhetoric that becomes progressively less luxurious as it acquires mounting eloquence. Among contemporary Irish poets he has cultivated a singularly urbane diction, a deliberate strategy, as Seamus Deane has observed, against the abrasiveness of public rhetoric.

His urbanity helps him to fend off the forces of atavism, ignorance and oppression which are part of his Northern Protestant heritage. There is an ease and an elegance in his writing which can be identified as that of the world-citizen, but the urbs from which his urbanity rises is the city of Belfast, a bleak and ruined site—so that the wit and sophistication of the poetry is haunted by intimation of collapse, pogrom, apocalypse.¹

The tense poetic atmosphere also reflects Mahon's position between the sorrows of history and his desire to transcend them.

The hills are still the same
Grey-blue above Belfast,

eternally distanced from the strife beneath.

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.

There is irony as well as tragic inference in assimilating the meaning of “home” through high explosives; nostalgia for an ideal of “home” rather than its actuality; and a landscape recognizably historical yet containing features impervious to time. Mahon has stated, not without reason, that exile requires a sense of belonging. Like Louis MacNeice, the Ulster poet who bulks so large in Mahon's poetry as a literary precedent, Mahon must find alternatives to exile. Contemplating his Northern Protestant past and the pressures of contemporary society, MacNeice too was a man in the middle. Protestantism (his father was an Anglican bishop) shaped his views, but he was unwilling to stomach bigotry, and neither Nationalism nor diehard Unionism supplied an acceptable resolution. “‘Exile,’ in the histrionic and approximate sense in which the word is used in Ireland, was an option open to Joyce and O'Casey, who ‘belonged’ to the people from whom they wished to escape,” Mahon has written. “It was not available, in the same sense to MacNeice, whose background was a mixture of Anglo-Irish and Ulster Protestant. Whatever his sympathies he didn't, by class or religious background, ‘belong to the people.’ How then, not sharing the general constraints, could he free himself from them?”²

Belonging yet not belonging affects the attitudes in Mahon's poetry, and among his favorite images is the window. The rectangular shape is akin to the easel of art, a framing edge, but gazing into nature, the perceiving sensibility regards it from behind a pane.

Somewhere beyond the scorched gable end and the burnt-out buses
          there is a poet indulging
                    his wretched rage for order
          or not as the case may be; for his
                    is a dying art,
          an eddy of semantic scruples
                    in an unstructurable sea.
                    He is far from his people,
          and the fitful glare of his high window is as
                    nothing to our scattered glass.

“The Snow Party,” which echoes Yeats's “Lapis Lazuli,” brings the poet Bashō and a group of friends together in Nagoya. First, there are introductions,

Then everyone
Crowds to the window
To watch the falling snow.

The stanzas exhibit the laconic fluency of Japanese haiku, but the snow falling on the tiles of houses and beyond, “like leaves on the cold sea,” evokes the snow of Joyce's short story “The Dead”: “falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves.”

The most obvious treatment of this device takes place in a concrete poem titled “The Window.” For it, Mahon designs a linguistic square of the words “wood” and “window,” with a single “wind” replacing the pane in a pentecostal rush. The window imagery recurs, notably in “The Attic,” and “The Sea in Winter,” in which the poet asks himself why he is always staring out of the windows, preferably from a height, and concludes,

Yet distance is the vital bond
Between the window and the wind,
While equilibrium demands
A cold eye and deliberate hands.

Opposed to the calmness, detachment and selectivity of the cold eye (another Yeatsian overtone) is the inchoate midden-heap of a fallen civilization. If the artifacts of art suggest the redeeming forces of an alternate reality, Mahon's catalogues of trash and archeological odds and ends manifest the defunct culture of a modern city not unlike Belfast, gutted by the disasters of war. The holocaust has run its course, and the survivors are shoring the fragments of the shattered past against absolute ruin. Starting anew at absolute zero, however, is not without possibility; there is the vigor of fresh beginnings even in the detritus. “The Apotheosis of Tins” enumerates shoelaces and hatboxes and labels peeling away the brand names of objects. In “Lives” the objects are personified: the voice of the poem is first a torch of gold, then a decaying oar, a bump of clay in a Navajo rug, a stone in Tibet, a tongue of bark in Africa, and at length an anthropologist burdened by “Army surplus boots” and other impedimenta. Awaiting a new apotheosis, “The Banished Gods” are lost in contemplation of their own natures “in a world without cars, computers or chemical skies,” and wisdom is “a five-minute silence at moonrise.”

The animate is scarcely distinguishable from the inanimate in these poems, and the best of them, the widely and justly-praised, “A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” enters with the authority of precise language into the sentient vegetable realm. The poem is dedicated to the late J. G. Farrell (as is The Hunt by Night), the Liverpool-Irish novelist whose book Troubles has an Irish setting from 1919-21. A thousand mushrooms in the gloom of a moldering shed on the grounds of a burnt-out hotel serve as the metaphorical equivalent of a contorted struggle waged in darkness since the days of the Irish Civil War. The mycologist has not returned and light filters through a rusted keyhole; the mushrooms crowd toward the keyhole in the hope of discovery, recognition of their mute, forlorn, marginal existence. Then, suddenly, a visitor opens the door, the hinges creak, and light, streaming upon the flabby and twisted shapes,

Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

The final stanza releases the dirge of the mushrooms, who plead for the anonymous victims of historical disaster, the “Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii.” Light in “A Disused Shed” blazes as the light of awareness; someone has borne witness, reaffirmed the meaning of lives otherwise consigned to shadowy oblivion, and it is interesting in this respect to compare the metaphors of the poem with Mahon's conception of the role of the poet:

The war I mean is not, of course, between Protestant and Catholic but between the fluidity of a possible life … and the rigor mortis of archaic postures, political and cultural. The poets themselves have taken no part in political events, but they have contributed to that possible life, or the possibility of that possible life; for the act of writing is itself political in the fullest sense. A good poem is a paradigm of good politics—of people talking to each other with honest subtlety, at a profound level. It is a light to lighten the darkness; and we have darkness enough, God knows, for a long time.³

Art for art's sake, a value proposed by Mahon's earlier poems such as “The Poets of the Nineties,” customarily constitutes escape from the contingencies of the real historical world. But in Mahon it is part of a dialectic; the poet returns to actuality through art. Once out of nature he will not assume the form of a hammered-gold bird who sings to keep a drowsy emperor awake; rather, he will return to a world made accessible and whole by the creative imagination. Again the visual element distinguishes the latest volume, The Hunt by Night, which opens with “Courtyards in Delft,” inspired by a 1659 painting by Pieter de Hooch, and concludes with “The Globe in North Carolina,” where the speaker, watching the sun go down over a Southern landscape, recalls the canvas of the Night Hunt by Uccello, and a love half a globe away. The role of paintings in these poems is to render imaginatively accessible once more the Belfast and the Protestant Ulster that Mahon has rejected. “Courtyards in Delft,” for instance, coincides with the political noontide of Dutch expansionism; nevertheless, tranquility prevails.

That girl with her back to us who waits
For her man to come for his tea
Will wait until the paint disintegrates
And ruined dykes admit the esurient sea

De Hooch's tranced scene evokes the details of a Belfast childhood: the coal shed, the deal table, the ceiling glittering in a radiant spoon, the sense of separation of a boy who dreams of poetry while his friends are already apprenticed to violence. The artistic past of de Hooch's painting is incorporated into the personal past which does not resolve a present of perpetual brutality but which provides the conditions of “a possible life.” This point is often missed by Mahon's critics. Martin Booth asserts that many of the younger Irish poets have an identity problem, and suggests a lack of emotion affects Muldoon, Paulin and Mahon, who write outside as well as within an “Irish” tradition:

“Irish” implies for Yeats, tradition, a certain historical and cultural type, a specific beauty in language and form … and so on. And the young poets of this category, when writing about matters Irish, are good as often as not, capturing the emotive tenor of their background. However, as soon as they move away from this, most of them seem to flounder. Is this because they are without the emotive response, that it is easier to understand the problems of Ulster and its history, its beauty and its life than it is to write into themselves a Japanese poet, a Scottish miner or an Italian count, all personae one or another has touched upon? There is a lot to be said for the fact that the Irish poets are too insular, if they are in the new mould, too Irish, and cannot escape that situation.⁴

Definitions of what is “Irish” can include many other things than Yeats and tradition. But surely it is a purpose of Mahon's generation to avoid categorization as insular local-colorists, who, rather incredibly, “understand the problems of Ulster and its history” often opaque to specialists. To write outside the Irish tradition, as Mahon does, paradoxically leads back into an Irish tradition—not as folklore, a category which has its own validity, but as the contemporary literature of an Ireland participating in the reality of the present.

Veined marble, if we only knew,
In practice as in theory, true
Salvation lies not in the thrust
Of action only, but the trust
We place in our peripheral
Night garden in the glory-hole
Of space …

When Derek Mahon moves away from Ireland, he moves empathetically toward Ireland. His poems disclose the meaning of survival amid apocalypse, examining the lute and the stars of Nerval as not unrelated to the disorders of an historical condition or the place of humanity in an infinite universe.

Notes

1. Seamus Deane, “Derek Mahon: Freedom From History,” in Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880-1980, (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 156.

2. Derek Mahon, “MacNeice in England, Ireland,” in Time Was Away: The World of Louis MacNeice, ed. Terence Brown and Alec Reid (Dublin: Dolmen Press, 1974), p. 117.

3. Derek Mahon, “Poetry in Northern Ireland,” 20th Century Studies, No. 4 (November 1970), p. 92. Also cited by Gerald Dawe, “Icon and Lares: Derek Mahon and Michael Longley,” in Across A Roaring Hill, ed. Gerald Dawe and Edna Longley (Belfast and Dover, N.H.: Blackstaff Press, 1985).

4. Martin Booth, British Poetry, 1964-84 (London and Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), p. 237.