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\n“When growing up, my bunch of friends would have thought of ourselves as anti-unionist because we were anti-establishment. We would have been vaguely all-Ireland republican socialists. But then, when theory turned into practice, we had to decide where we stood and I never did resolve it for myself. Marching for civil rights was terrific, but bombs and killing people? I never put a name to my own position and I still can’t, which suits me fine. From time to time you get a kick from some critic for not being sufficiently political, or for being a closet unionist or a closet republican. There was a time when people – much more English people than Irish – would ask, ‘Why don’t these Ulster poets come out more explicitly and say what they are for?’ But there is all this ambiguity. That is poetry. It is the other thing that is the other thing.” — Derek Mahon<\/big><\/p>\n
Popular Northern Irish poet Derek Mahon died in 2020 at the age of 78. Today is his birthday. <\/p>\n
A poem he wrote some years back – “Everything Is Going to Be Alright” – came back into public consciousness when it was read on an Irish news program in early March 2020, once it became clear the pandemic was spreading and a lockdown was imminent. People shared the poem endlessly on social media. It was what people needed to hear. <\/p>\n
Everything Is Going to Be Alright<\/big> How should I not be glad to contemplate \n \n“[Seamus] Heaney is a Wordsworth man and I’m a Coleridge man. I love the poetry, and the trajectory of his life has always fascinated me. His Biographia is a complete mess, but is still full of the most wonderful stuff.” – Derek Mahon<\/big><\/p>\n \nBorn in Belfast, Mahon “came up” at the same time as other great Irish poets Seamus Heaney (one of my many posts about him here<\/a>) and Michael Longley (post about him here<\/a>). They all burst onto the literary scene in the late 60s. The accepted narrative is: this group of poets represented something new in Northern Ireland, a new burgeoning literary scene to support and pay attention to. The fact that all this new poetry came from a war zone was even more startling, more reason to celebrate it, and etc. Mahon rejected this interpretation. He insisted Belfast had ALWAYS had a great literary tradition. <\/p>\n You often hear these Mahon\/Heaney\/Longley mentioned in the same breath. They talked about one another a lot as well. They were good friends and rivals. Here is a story told in The Guardian in 2006:<\/p>\n In September 1963 Derek Mahon, Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley visited the County Down grave of the great Northern Irish poet Louis MacNeice, who had died a short time before. Longley, writing recently in the introduction to a selection of MacNeice’s poems, recalled that as they “dawdled between the graves” all three then-unpublished poets were silently “contemplating an elegy”. When they next met, Mahon read them “In Carrowdore Churchyard”: “Your ashes will not stir, even on this high ground \/ However the wind tugs, the headstones shake”. Seamus Heaney started to read his poem but “then crumpled it up”. Longley says he decided not even to attempt the task. “Mahon had produced the definitive elegy.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Lovely. <\/p>\n Heaney, Longley and Mahon saw themselves as part of a tradition<\/em>, not as something brand new. They dedicated their poems to poets from the Irish past, Patrick Kavanagh (post about him here<\/a>) or Louis MacNeice (post about him here<\/a>). Heaney\/Longley\/Mahon were hugely influential on the new generation, perhaps even holding more sway than Yeats. Such is tradition: it’s a continuum. <\/p>\n “[Derek Mahon’s] investment in “something larger” is not so great as [Geoffrey] Hill’s: his imagination has been released from the demands of an informing culture. As a result he turns rather too readily toward his reader, wry, shrugging his shoulders, as though it is too late to find the big theme his skills might be equal to.” — Michael Schmidt, Lives of the Poets<\/i><\/big><\/p>\n Derek Mahon grew up in an Ulster Protestant family. He attended Trinity College in Dublin. His viewpoint was never local<\/em>. He loved French literature and went on to study at the Sorbonne. He translated many great French authors into English. He published a prize-winning collection of poetry in the mid-60s. (Just recently, for the third time, he won the Irish Times Poetry Now award.) He traveled quite a bit, including in America. Hart Crane was a huge influence on Mahon (my post about Crane here<\/a>), as was Elizabeth Bishop (post about her here<\/a>). Mahon was reviewed books, taught in schools. His lifestyle divorced him from the upheavals of Northern Ireland, although he remained interested in all of it, of course. But politics\/war was not the wellspring of his art, as it was for some of his contemporaries.<\/p>\n Listen to this. <\/p>\n Dejection<\/strong><\/big> After years of traveling, he finally settled down in Kinsale. (Notice he did not return to settle down in Belfast. Unsurprisingly, he caught flak for this.). He looked in on Ireland from the outside (see his thoughts above on Irish exile, even internal Irish exile); his outsider status gave his work strength and scope. You can’t say he doesn’t have a “sense of place”. So-called “outsiders” often see their homes in a clearer fashion than those who live there. James Joyce understood this all too well.<\/p>\n Every Irish person knows the following poem:<\/p>\n A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford<\/strong><\/big> (for J. G. Farrell)<\/em> Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel, They have been waiting for us in a foetor There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking A half century, without visitors, in the dark \u2014 They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way, Oana Sanziana Marian wrote: <\/p>\n His most famous poem, \u201cA Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,\u201d digs, too, but instead of turning soil, as in Heaney\u2019s earthbound rural scene in (maybe his most famous poem) \u201cDigging,\u201d Mahon gets underneath \u201ca burnt-out hotel \/ Among the bathtubs and the washbasins\u201d and \u2013 but who would see this coming? \u2013 commemorates forgotten victims of Treblinka and Pompeii through the perspective of a thousand mushrooms crowded around light passing through a keyhole.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And oh, how I love his beautiful poem “Achill”. Achill Island is a big island off the west coast of Ireland. My family spent some time there years ago, when my parents yanked us all out of school and took us to Ireland. I was 13 years old, so my memories of Achill are often mortifying to read now<\/a> (while on Achille, Easter came, and I was mainly upset I hadn’t brought my curling iron to Ireland, because I wanted to curl my hair for Easter mass, because that’s an extremely important thing to be thinking about in a foreign land), but despite the journal entry, Achill Island remains vivid in my mind: the windy wildness of it, the smell of the peat fires, the impromptu soccer games among the sheep, the itchy wool sweaters, the freckled girls on bicycles with head scarves tied under their chins, the beautiful bleakness of the landscape. <\/p>\n Achill<\/big> \t I lie and imagine a first light gleam in the bay I sit on a stone after lunch and consider the glow The young sit smoking and laughing on the bridge at evening \n1<\/sup> A desolate waif scarce seeing the light of day (from a poem by Piaras Feritéar, 1600-1653, as translated by Thomas Kinsella).<\/p>\n \nI love Mahon’s poem about J. Bruce Ismay, the managing director of the White Star Line, who, famously and infamously, survived. Much to his enduring shame. Most employees were manly enough to go down with the ship. Not Ismay. The scandal dogged him the rest of his days.<\/p>\n After the Titanic<\/strong><\/big> They said I got away in a boat \n
\nby Derek Mahon<\/strong><\/p>\n
\nthe clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
\nand a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
\nThere will be dying, there will be dying,
\nbut there is no need to go into that.
\nThe poems flow from the hand unbidden
\nand the hidden source is the watchful heart;
\nthe sun rises in spite of everything
\nand the far cities are beautiful and bright.
\nI lie here in a riot of sunlight
\nwatching the day break and the clouds flying.
\nEverything is going to be all right.<\/p>\n
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\nArt can disturb, enlighten, reveal. It can also console in dark dark times. This is why we need artists. <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.sheilaomalley.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2010\/11\/derek-mahon-portrait-006.jpg\" "\\"derek-mahon-portrait-006\\"")
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\nBone-idle, I lie listening to the rain,
\nNot tragic now nor yet to frenzy bold.
\nMust I stand out in thunderstorms again
\nWho have twice come in from the cold?<\/p>\n
\nLet them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.<\/em>
\n \u2014Seferis, Mythistorema<\/em><\/p>\n
\nEven now there are places where a thought might grow \u2014
\nPeruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
\nTo a slow clock of condensation,
\nAn echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
\nOf wildflowers in the lift-shaft,
\nIndian compounds where the wind dances
\nAnd a door bangs with diminished confidence,
\nLime crevices behind rippling rain barrels,
\nDog corners for bone burials;
\nAnd in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,<\/p>\n
\nAmong the bathtubs and the washbasins
\nA thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
\nThis is the one star in their firmament
\nOr frames a star within a star.
\nWhat should they do there but desire?
\nSo many days beyond the rhododendrons
\nWith the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
\nThey have learnt patience and silence
\nListening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.<\/p>\n
\nOf vegetable sweat since civil war days,
\nSince the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
\nOf the expropriated mycologist.
\nHe never came back, and light since then
\nIs a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
\nSpiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
\nAnd once a day, perhaps, they have heard something \u2014
\nA trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
\nOr a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.<\/p>\n
\nInto the earth that nourished it;
\nAnd nightmares, born of these and the grim
\nDominion of stale air and rank moisture.
\nThose nearest the door grow strong \u2014
\n\u2018Elbow room! Elbow room!\u2019
\nThe rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
\nUtensils and broken pitchers, groaning
\nFor their deliverance, have been so long
\nExpectant that there is left only the posture.<\/p>\n
\nPoor preparation for the cracking lock
\nAnd creak of hinges; magi, moonmen,
\nPowdery prisoners of the old regime,
\nWeb-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
\nAnd insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
\nAt the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with
\nShows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
\nGrown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
\nThey lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.<\/p>\n
\nTo do something, to speak on their behalf
\nOr at least not to close the door again.
\nLost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
\n\u2018Save us, save us,\u2019 they seem to say,
\n\u2018Let the god not abandon us
\nWho have come so far in darkness and in pain.
\nWe too had our lives to live.
\nYou with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,
\nLet not our naive labours have been in vain!\u2019 <\/p>\n
\nim chaonaí uaigneach nach mór go bhfeicim an lá<\/i>1<\/sup><\/p>\n
\nAfter one more night of erosion and nearer the grave,
\nThen stand and gaze from the window at break of day
\nAs a shearwater skims the ridge of an incoming wave;
\nAnd I think of my son a dolphin in the Aegean,
\nA sprite among sails knife-bright in a seasonal wind,
\nAnd wish he were here where currachs walk on the ocean
\nTo ease with his talk the solitude locked in my mind.<\/p>\n
\nOf the sun through mist, a pearl bulb contain\u00e8dly fierce;
\nA rain-shower darkens the schist for a minute or so
\nThen it drifts away and the sloe-black patches disperse.
\nCroagh Patrick towers like Naxos over the water
\nAnd I think of my daughter at work on her difficult art
\nAnd wish she were with me now between thrush and plover,
\nWild thyme and sea-thrift, to lift the weight from my heart.<\/p>\n
\nLike birds on a telephone pole or notes on a score.
\nA tin whistle squeals in the parlour, once more it is raining,
\nTurf-smoke inclines and a wind whines under the door;
\nAnd I lie and imagine the lights going on in the harbor
\nOf white-housed N\u00e1ousa, your clear definition at night,
\nAnd wish you were here to upstage my disconsolate labour
\nAs I glance through a few thin pages and switch off the light. <\/p>\n
\nby Derek Mahon<\/p>\n
\nAnd humbled me at the inquiry. I tell you
\n I sank as far that night as any
\nHero. As I sat shivering on the dark water
\n I turned to ice to hear my costly
\nLife go thundering down in a pandemonium of
\n Prams, pianos, sideboards, winches,
\nBoilers bursting and shredded ragtime. Now I hide
\n In a lonely house behind the sea
\nWhere the tide leaves broken toys and hatboxes
\n Silently at my door. The showers of
\nApril, flowers of May mean nothing to me, nor the
\n Late light of June, when my gardener
\nDescribes to strangers how the old man stays in bed
\n On seaward mornings after nights of
\nWind, takes his cocaine and will see no one. Then it is
\n I drown again with all those dim
\nLost faces I never understood, my poor soul
\n Screams out in the starlight, heart
\nBreaks loose and rolls down like a stone.
\n Include me in your lamentations.<\/p>\n
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\nThank you so much for stopping by. If you like what I do, and if you feel inclined to support my work, here’s a link to my Venmo account<\/a>. And I’ve launched a Substack, Sheila Variations 2.0<\/a>, if you’d like to subscribe.<\/em> <\/small><\/p>\n