The Yeats Journal of Korea/ 한국 예이츠 저널 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2018.55.

125
Vol. 55 (2018): 125-145

Derek Mahon’s Poetry: Guilt, Poetic

Responsibilities, and the Autonomy of Art* 1)

Yeonmin Kim

____________________________________

Abstract: This paper examines Derek Mahon’s search for the autonomy of art via his
guilt about history and his poetic responsibility. First, Mahon expresses his guilty
conscience over the historical strides of Northern Ireland. Agonized by a culprit
sensibility, he even comes to censure himself as a poet who colludes in the sectarian
violence of his time. Second, Mahon’s guilt directs him to his concern for victims.
Mahon sympathetically responds not only to Irish citizens but also to those who
have remained neglected and unknown in world histories. Third, Mahon seeks the
autonomy of art. His longing for transcendence is represented in his scrupulous
search for both poetic forms and images of light.
Key words: Mahon, guilt, poetic responsibility, autonomy of art, ekphrasis
Author: Yeonmin Kim is Associate Professor of English at Chonnam National
University. He teaches British poetry and Irish literature.
E-mail: kogmc@jnu.ac.kr
____________________________________

제목: 데렉 마혼의 시: 죄의식, 시적 책임, 그리고 예술의 자율성

우리말 요약: 이 연구는 데렉 마혼의 시 세계가 역사에 대한 시인의 죄의식과 시인의
책임감을 거쳐 예술의 자율성에 대한 추구로 발전되었음을 고찰한다. 첫째, 마혼은 개
신교도로서 북아일랜드 사태에 대한 죄책감을 경험하는데, 이것이 그의 시의 기저를
이룬다. 둘째, 이러한 죄책감에 기인하여 마혼은 아일랜드뿐만 아니라 세계 역사에서
희생된 이들에 대한 관심을 표현하며 시인으로서의 책무를 수행한다. 마지막으로, 마
혼은 엑프래시스의 독특한 시적 형식과 빛의 이미지를 사용하여 초월성 및 예술의 자
율성을 추구한다.
주제어: 마혼, 죄의식, 시적 책임, 예술의 자율성, 엑프래시스
저자: 김연민은 전남대학교 영어영문학과 부교수이다.

* This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National
Research Foundation of Korea (NRF-2017S1A5A8020709).
126 Yeonmin Kim

1. Introduction

I n “Lapis Lazuli” W. B. Yeats describes a carving of two Chinese noblemen

looking down from a mountain, playing sad flute melodies, their eyes
glittering and gay amid wrinkles. The noblemen understand that artists sing
and play “human unsuccess / In a rapture of distress” (Auden, “In Memory
of W. B. Yeats” III. 24-25). This paradoxical phrase signifies a poet’s
destiny: to represent society teeming with turmoil while enjoying the sheer
pleasure of creation. Writing in the midst of tragedy seems impossible, even
barbaric; yet a poet records miserable human experiences, maintaining an
aesthetic distance from them. Striking a perilous balance between two
competing voices, poets dance on a tightrope. As a successor to Yeatsian
“tragic joy,” Derek Mahon shows his struggle with fulfilling his poetic
responsibilities while pursuing the autonomy of art.
Yeats’s ambivalent pursuit of art was attributed to his sociopolitical
background. The Ascendance had been undermined following the Land
Reforms in the late nineteenth century, its downfall marked by the
establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 as the Anglo-Irish were
deliberately excluded from the reconstruction of postliberation Ireland. Once
passionately involved in Irish cultural nationalist movements, isolated from,
and disillusioned with politics, Yeats directed his attention to the realm of art,
where he found the ideal. His sense of disconnection from history, or
repudiation, an indispensable feature of Decadence, was bequeathed to Mahon
in the form of a “complex sense of alienation from contemporary Belfast,”
which is “exacerbated by the perceived ugly violence, the sense of
directionless futility” (Vance 570) at the time of a political crisis, the
so-called Troubles. Mahon’s alienation, however, differs from Yeats’s, which
resulted from political discrimination against the Ascendancy. Born into a
Protestant Belfast working-class family, Mahon feels alienated as he
Derek Mahon’s Poetry: Guilt, Poetic Responsibilities, and the Autonomy of Art 127

recognizes his culpability as a Protestant during the Troubles. His uncle

Robert served as a member of the B-Specials, violent opponents of the
Catholic civil rights movement, and the familial association with the cause of
the sectarian violence traumatized Mahon. Confiding to Eamon Grennan, he
said, “I felt perhaps as a hit-and-run driver must feel when he wakes up the
next morning” (qtd. in Enniss 3); in fact, his personal‒familial guilty
conscience, derived from recent Irish history, forms the basis of his poetry.
Despite a sense of guilt about historical victims and a sense of
responsibility for history as illustrated in some of his best poems, historical
culpability led Mahon to a cosmopolitan pursuit of art far living outside
Ireland from home in self-exile with an inextinguishable sense of an outcast’s
melancholy. This feature characterizes him as a poet distinct among his
contemporaries, such as Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, who led a
“Northern Renaissance” or a “Northern poetry,” that is, post-1969 poetry
reflecting the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Although Northern
writers shared a sense of historical accountability for the turbulent era, “[t]o
read poetry according to the imperatives of time and place (the Troubles,
Northern Ireland) is also too often to miss the broader poetic context in
which that work should properly find its ‘place’” (Brearton 95). Unlike
Heaney and Longley, whose poems are about “their fathers” (Ennis 95), that
is, Irish tradition and legacy, and historical specificity, Mahon finds his own
alternatives beyond Irish issues. Instead, he aspires to a realm of art
transcending secular affairs without disregarding them as if he took an
imaginary journey to Yeats’s Byzantium.
Locating Mahon in a broader tradition of poetry in which form and
language are the primary issues may sound appealing despite his simultaneous
awareness of urgent political issues at home. His poetic orientation aligns
with literary predecessors like Yeats, Beckett, and Larkin. From Yeats, Mahon
inherited decadent poetics based on the poet’s sense of disillusionment with
128 Yeonmin Kim

the established order, resulting in the pursuit of the aesthetic serenities of

form and beauty (Vance 569). Despite his struggle to overcome the anxiety
of Yeatsian influence, Mahon focuses on the formal elements of poetry that
Yeats once elaborated. In addition, Mahon is the successor to Beckettian
auditory poetics, “listening between the extremes of silence and noise to the
murmur of voices which can no longer, or not yet, be fully apprehended”
(Janus 185). In particular, from Beckett Mahon learned to wait for language
at the limits of silence; whereas his contemporary, the poet Muldoon, learned
to hear murmurs at the limit of noise (Janus 187-88). Another major
influence on Mahon came from Larkin, who paid attention to ordinary objects
in which he found singularity. Larkin’s poetic legacy to Mahon showed him
how to evoke “a spiritual sense from a secular site” (Russell, “Shades of
Larkin” 93). With his interest in poetic form, language, and object, Mahon
has influenced younger Irish poets since the 1990s, including Justin Quinn
and David Wheatley, often called the “metre generation” (Darcy 3). Mahon’s
position can thus be found in his earnest inquisitiveness about the nature of
the art of language, poetry per se, impervious to the political upheavals of
the era.
Poetic form must be foremost for a poet to represent his or her
predicament. Through ekphrasis, “a transtextual and a transcultural event”
(Han 92), Irish poets, once inspired by pure art forms, have fulfilled their
poetic responsibilities in times of political crisis. They adopt the genre of
ekphrasis to console historical victims, brushing the official Irish history
against the grain (Kim 176). Mahon also longs for resolution of the poetic
dilemma derived both from his yearning for a transcendent sphere of art and
from his guilty conscience about history. Assuaging his agony in art and
concurrently sensing a responsibility, he makes ekphrasis his prominent
strategy in writing poetry and uses it sometimes to resolve his dilemma
successfully. Twentieth-century ekphrasis is marked by five trends: “into
Derek Mahon’s Poetry: Guilt, Poetic Responsibilities, and the Autonomy of Art 129

history,” “in the museum,” “narrative,” “the tutelary function,” and “talking
pictures (prosopopoeia)” (Loizeaux 21-24). Of the five, the first two align
with the growth of Mahon’s ekphrastic poems from his dilemma. As he
interprets works of art in terms of historical urgency, recalling victims, he
attempts to fulfill his responsibilities; simultaneously, he attends to the
autonomy of art, to an artefact itself, and to a museum as “a place of
transcendent aesthetic experience” (Loizeaux 22). A museum has dual status
as “an institution founded on the material ambitions of an industrial elite” as
well as “the temple of art” (Loizeaux 22); and Mahon appropriates works of
art to illuminate his predicament, positing his poetry between the historical
and the aesthetic.
The significance of Mahon’s poetry lies in his ambivalent position on
home. Once spurred by the guilt that keeps him away from Ireland, he
becomes a self-exile in search of aesthetic detachment. With that in mind, I
will discuss Mahon’s poetry in terms of three points. First, in the early
poems Mahon expresses his guilty conscience over the historical strides of
Northern Ireland. Agonized by a culprit sensibility, he even comes to censure
himself as a poet who colludes in the sectarian violence of his time. Second,
Mahon’s guilt directs him to his concern for victims. Mahon sympathetically
responds not only to Irish citizens but also to those who have remained
neglected and unknown in world histories, primarily represented as lost
objects personified. Third, and above all, Mahon seeks the autonomy of art,
partly to assuage his culpability as a poet of inaction and partly to transcend
the inescapable, indecipherable miseries of the world. Aspiring to an
immaculate sphere of art, he pursues an aesthetic distance from the world
outside, unswayed by the politics of sectarian violence. His longing for
transcendence is represented in his scrupulous search for both poetic forms
and images of light.
130 Yeonmin Kim

2. Mahon’s Guilt Rooted in Modern Irish History

Helpless and responsible in the face of atrocities, Northern Irish poets in

the second half of the twentieth century have responded to the Troubles.
Most Catholic poets, in defense of marginalized Catholic citizens, who
suffered discrimination, raised politically positive voices against social
injustice, but Protestant poets like Mahon were at a loss because of their
sense of complicity in the sectarian violence. In “After the Titanic” Mahon
shows that he is tormented by historical culpability. The title reminds the
readers of the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, and this poem deals with a
survivor’s guilty conscience after the tragedy. The poem opens with “They
said I got away in a boat” (1), the speaker suffering from anxiety after
leaving victims behind. Why and how he survived the tragedy is unclear;
however, that he is tormented with guilt is evident. This indicates an
exceptional Protestant consciousness during the Troubles in which Protestants
in the North were indiscriminately blamed for the cause of the historical
catastrophe. What Mahon can do is “hide / In a lonely house behind the sea”
(8-9), alienating himself from the world, temporarily alleviating his agony
with “his morphine” (16). He suffers from Posttraumatic Stress Disorder
(PTSD), dramatizing his guilty conscience: “Then it is / I drown again with
all those dim / Lost faces I never understood” (16-18). His suffering is
reflected in the poetic form. Unlike Mahon’s masterful pursuit of consistent
rhyme schemes in most of his poems, in this poem the lack of regular rhyme
represents his guilt-ridden anxiety. Distressed by extreme culpability, he
becomes another victim of history when he closes the poem with a plea
addressed to the readers: “Include me in your lamentations” (21). A
bystander, an escapist, and finally a sufferer, a hybrid of a culprit and a
victim, Mahon shows complicated emotions with regard to his unwilling
involvement with history.
Derek Mahon’s Poetry: Guilt, Poetic Responsibilities, and the Autonomy of Art 131

Mahon is agonized by his guilty conscience, in particular when he

considers himself a poet who evades historical accountability, guarding himself
in the stronghold of art. In “Afterlives” the speaker has spent five years in
London away from the sectarian violence in which “The orators yap, and
guns / Go off in a back street” (10-11). He stays in a relatively peaceful
place with a romantic landscape of wooing pigeons and fresh rain. Moreover,
he seems to naively believe that “the dark places be / Ablaze with love and
poetry / When the power of good prevails” (16-18). The poet naturally looks
as if he has a faith in poetry and that it will bring us peace. In the
following stanza, however, he confesses his naivete: “What middle-class shits
we are / To imagine for one second / That our privileged ideals / Are divine
wisdom” (19-22). In that self-deprecating tone, he admits that he and his
Protestant colleagues are hypocrites as long as they keep themselves intact in
their own ivory tower of art, despising the Catholics and intending not to be
like them. A sense of the disguised superiority of the Protestant artist
awakens his guilt, making him return home with a sense of responsibility in
the second part of the poem.
On his return home, the landscape of the speaker’s home never looks
favorable; instead he feels emotionally distant from home. Mahon’s poetry
offers “none of the consolations a poetry of place customarily involved in
Irish cultural tradition, with its suggestions of belonging, of familial and tribal
continuities, nor does it allow indulgence in romantic concepts of nature as a
restorative spiritual agent in consciousness” (Brown, “Mahon and Longley”
135). Arriving home “At dawn” (31), instead of in daytime, which suggests
that the speaker is still ridden with a sense of culpability, he “scarcely
recognize[s]” the places and faces, his home city “so changed” (38) because
of the war. What remains the same are the hills, “Grey-blue” (44), only to
reflect the speaker’s melancholic sense still unresolved after returning home.
Alienated from his home, in particular, from the tragic aftermath of the
132 Yeonmin Kim

sectarian violence, Mahon confesses that he does not know “what is meant
by home” (48). Hence his sense of guilt increases; his rootlessness intensifies.
This poem is dedicated to the Northern poet James Simmons, who
remained in Northern Ireland since the Troubles began, experienced “bomb by
bomb” (46), and had a strong sense of belonging. Similarly, in “Digging”
Heaney decidedly expresses his sense of rootedness in his native land and the
agricultural legacy that his father and grandfather bequeathed to him. In
excavating the origin of the nation as described in “Bogland,” Heaney often
romanticizes the landscape of his native land. By contrast, Mahon feels
dissociation, regarding himself as homeless at home. He stands with
contemporary Irish poet Paul Durcan, who shows his solitude, referring to
himself as “the native who is an exile in his native land” (“Ireland 1977” 2).
Mahon’s sense of detachment from home, that of a traveler and exile, creates
the tension that engenders both his guilty conscience and his aesthetic distance.

3. Mahon’s Concern for Victims

Once criticizing himself as a too romantic or naive poet, Mahon pursues

a way to become involved in history. Although he understands that poetry
makes nothing happen, he stares at all tragic scenes with both emotional and
aesthetic detachment. If he cannot heal the world, he can at least remember
those who have been forgotten in official history. Mahon directs his attention
to suffering and historical victims. “Mahon’s best poems” Stephen Enniss
insists, “are those that put suffering to constructive use, those that probe his
past of fracture and of loss while working through that human condition
towards some longed for recovery” (5). Concerned with the suffering of
others, Mahon searches a way to fulfill his poetic responsibility in “A
Disused Shed in Co. Wexford,” often acclaimed as his best poem. Adapted
Derek Mahon’s Poetry: Guilt, Poetic Responsibilities, and the Autonomy of Art 133

from J. G. Farrell’s novel Troubles (1970), this poem describes the British
Imperial Hotel, burned to the ground during the War of Independence.
Juxtaposing a disused shed at the hotel with “Peruvian mines, worked out
and abandoned” (2) and “Indian compounds” (6), Mahon intimates that the
poem is a lamentation for all those who were sacrificed unnoticed.
Unexpectedly, what the speaker finds “Among the bathtubs and the
washbasins / [are] A thousand mushrooms” (12-13). The only hope of
salvation comes from the light, streaming through a rusting keyhole under
which the mushrooms “crowd” (13) in contrast with the darkness of the
abandoned shed. Through the epiphanic moment of his observation, in
particular with the image of a ray shedding light on the deserted mushrooms,
Mahon shows his concern with the existence of victims long forgotten in
official history.
The epigraph of the poem, written by the Greek poet George Seferis,
states “Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.” For
half a century, the mushrooms, like Seferis’s asphodels, have endured
loneliness and the pain of “insomnia” (46), the word anthropomorphizing
them so that readers can interpret the mushrooms as historical victims for
whom Mahon makes clear what his poetic duty is: “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” (51-53). The victims have evidently
long remained silent. He believes neither poets nor readers, as indicated with
“us” and “you,” should disregard their existence, but instead at least listen to
their silence, the silence as the first place “where a thought might grow” (1).
It occurs in the moment when “independent thought through engagement with
existing words and images” emerges as “the starting point of poetic progress”
both for the poet and readers (Collins 257). The poet and the readers attend
to the marginalized, assuming a basic ethical attitude when they are ready to
respond to “their wordless way,” their silence on the verge of a burst of
134 Yeonmin Kim

sound. The Beckettian ear attending to “vibrations at the limits of silence”

passed to Mahon with “an ear attuned to the traditionally modern poetics of
a voice waiting for a language in which to think” (Janus 187). The mode of
listening, to be exact, the stance of waiting, “as prorogatory listening” (Janus
187), serves as the poet’s fundamental act of recalling the silenced and
forgotten in history. In that sense, this poem resonates with W. H. Auden’s
“Musée des Beaux Arts” in that both deal with the suffering of others and
question the poet’s and the reader’s responsibilities (Steare 51).
Mahon’s attitude toward victims differs from Heaney’s in many ways.
First, Mahon’s sympathy expands beyond modern Irish history and territory
toward the “Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii” (54), both for the Jews
massacred in the gas chambers of the concentration camp by the Nazis during
WWII and for the ancient Roman citizens buried beneath volcano ashes. In
“The Tollund Man” and bog poems, Heaney also expresses his concerns with
historical victims sacrificed in sectarian violence by introducing an ancient
sacrificial ritual in Denmark, ultimately returning to Ireland, the scene of
atrocity at home. In contrast, Mahon’s vision is not restricted to domestic
concerns but permeates world history abroad, formed either by his sense of
alienation from home or his cosmopolitan vision beyond Ireland or both.
More importantly, Heaney’s positive view of victims illuminates Mahon’s
negative one. In “Summer 1969” Heaney is distressed when he finds himself
cooling in the Spanish Art Museum; so he is encouraged to “Go back [. . .]
[and] try to touch the people” (15) and to face fearlessly the hardships that
history bestows upon him, comparing himself to a bullfighter. By contrast,
Mahon cannot express his poetic responsibility in the heroic voice of Heaney,
mainly because of the culpability he experienced in modern history. Heaney,
of course, senses his complicity with historical atrocity, illustrated in
“Punishment,” in which he confesses he is the one “who would connive / in
civilized outrage / yet understand the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge”
Derek Mahon’s Poetry: Guilt, Poetic Responsibilities, and the Autonomy of Art 135

(41-44) directed toward the Catholic girls cruelly punished by their Catholic
community because they socialized with British soldiers. Although Heaney
seems to believe the communal violence “lies in the rigid authoritarianism
and the intolerance of Catholicism” (Hong 137), he insinuates his sense of
guilt as a member of the community. When he turns his attention toward his
self-consciousness, however, he expresses a superficial sympathy or
exaggerated emotional culpability. Despite confessing that he is an “artful
voyeur” (32), most of the poem is focused on—instead of on the victims—the
poet’s inner conflict between the shame of his inaction and his silent
complicity. He repeats “I” and “my” six times throughout the poem, showing
he is attuned to his self-consciousness. Heaney expresses his guilt; however,
he devotes himself to describing the victim’s appearance primarily in the first
nine stanzas of the eleven, concerning a female body sacrificed, buried, and
found in a bog. The female body is objectified by Heaney’s voyeuristic and
conventional nationalistic perspectives. The male speaker recognizes his
complicity, and he confesses his guilt about contemporary victims, yet
Heaney’s first-person perspective on the historical victims remains sentimental,
relatively suppressing their suffering.
By contrast, Mahon maintains a distance from a sentimental approach to
victims. A melancholic poet, he is probably aware of the impossibility of
consolation for victims in that a self-centered lamentation, as found in
Heaney, may lead a poet to a superficial understanding of the suffering of
others. Instead, Mahon does not reveal himself in his poems. “He has a
modesty, a kind of good manners of the imagination which nearly always
prevents him from indulging in any form of Whitmanesque self-exhibitionism”
(Kennelly 133). In addition, Mahon’s melancholic mourning is “not
redemptive or consolatory but disruptive and ironic” (Darcy 3). He is attuned
to lost objects and the state of being lost instead of to the completion of
mourning to console the victims. Mahon adopts objects instead of human
136 Yeonmin Kim

beings left behind by history. The ekphrasistic poem “A Garage in Co. Cork”
was inspired by a postcard by Fritz Curzon of a deserted gas station called
“McGrotty’s Garage” (Haughton 185). What this poem shares with “A
Disused Shed in Co. Wexford” is that they are about historical ruins,
allegories for victims; yet the former differs from the latter in a sense that
the latter is based on the existence of victims, but the former on their
absence. In “A Garage” Mahon opens with a description of the abandoned
gas station where no one lives, only scattered rubbish littering the property.
The residents probably left the place to live as emigrants just as many Irish
had left home since the Great Famine: “Where did they go? South Boston?
Cricklewood?” (19). Regardless of the historical background of the Great
Famine, aggravated mainly by English colonial dominance, losing about one
million to death by starvation and another million to emigration, both the
postcard and Mahon’s first two stanzas show ruins in the absence of victims.
He describes the victims by imaginatively recalling them with his
exclamation, “Nirvana!” (13). A family must have been performing routine
daily tasks. The poet hears an echo of children’s cries through “the cracked
panes” (13). In that melancholic reminiscence, in the absence of what he
longs for, unattainable but tantalizingly accessible, allegorical remnants awaken
the poet to the existence of the marginalized. In a sense, a poet’s
responsibility for victims can be partially fulfilled through Mahonite
recollection, enabled by the melancholic distance from which a poet truly
faces the forgotten, without reducing their suffering to the poet’s subjective
understanding.
When Mahon maintains melancholic distance, a metaphysical
transformation of the ruins takes place. To be exact, the poet finds in the
image of a quotidian object of a postcard, a transcendental implication—“a
late sacramental gleam” (36). In an interview with Terence Brown, Mahon
mentions that he is interested in “a sort of secular numen” (“An Interview”
Derek Mahon’s Poetry: Guilt, Poetic Responsibilities, and the Autonomy of Art 137

16). The poet experiences in ordinary objects a sort of transcendence, the

mode in which he succeeds Larkin (Russell, “Shades of Larkin” 99). With a
religious connotation of “Nirvana” (13), Mahon’s recollection in their obvious
absence is made possible by transcendence via the abandoned object.
Mourning on the lips of a poet sounds impossible for Mahon; true mourning
would be made possible by transcendence:

A god who spent the night here once rewarded

Natural courtesy with eternal life —
Changing to petrol pumps, that they be spared
For ever there, an old man and his wife. (37-40)

Thanks to a transcendental power beyond the poet’s reach, the absent old
couple are transformed into two petrol pumps. Thus, historical victims gain
eternal life in the form of monuments, not from a poet’s superficial
sympathy, easily swayed by guilty conscience and public pressure for a poet,
but in a mystical metamorphosis. The victims metamorphosed into monuments
are remembered with their own singularities, their feet set on the “unique in
each particular” (45) place, irreducible, indefinable to the poet’s understanding.
Every existence, including victims forgotten and unnoticed, subsists “with a
sure sense of its intrinsic nature” (48). Through the transformation of victims
to monumental objects, Mahon’s affirmation of the singularities of the lost
become his distinct mode of mourning.

4. Toward the Autonomy of Art

When Mahon experiences a sense of transcendence through a secular

object, he launches a voyage to Yeats’s Byzantium, to the autonomous realm
of art. Yeats’s imaginative voyage was initiated by his displacement from
138 Yeonmin Kim

postindependence Irish politics, the hegemony seized by the non-Anglo Irish

and Yeats himself longing for an imagined community of the Ascendancy.
Mahon’s search for art, however, can be traced first to his ineradicable
feelings about the historical culpability discussed earlier and, more
importantly, to the broader skepticism about civilization, widely shared by
post-WWII European intellectuals and artists like Beckett and Larkin. In this
sense, Mahon can be regarded as a melancholic poet who, disillusioned,
refuses the concept of the progress of history.

Mahon’s historical consciousness, as guilty and punitive as Beckett’s, not

only turns biblical Protestantism inside out, but contradicts Whig history and
deplores Belfast’s industrial history. His poetry denies progress, views the
rise of the bourgeoisie as a descent into ‘barbarism,’ and cries woe to a
houseproud ‘civilization.’ (Longley 161)

The melancholic poet, dissociated from the established order, searches for
alternatives other than those that are bound to history. He explores the sphere
of pure art. In ekphrasis, Mahon aspires to the autonomy of art in showing
ideal images of true artists who maintain their artistic independence.
Mahon aspires to the aesthetic value transcending both contemporary
disorder and utility. In “Lapis Lazuli,” which reminds the reader of Yeats’s
poem of the same title, in which Yeats finds in lapis lazuli a poetic
responsibility as well as a poetic detachment in times of trouble, Mahon
emphasizes the material state of the stone per se. The sheer materiality of a
meteorite, an “azure block blown in from the universe” (2), “coarse-grained
and knobbly” (5), a “complex chunk of sulphurous silicates” (12), represents
an aesthetic distance from any signification process that human language can
bestow. Even the stone transcends authoritative Yeatsian interpretations in
leaving Yeats’s descriptions “still unknown” (7). Mahon insists that the
material state is the origin of art: “this is the real thing in its natural state, /
Derek Mahon’s Poetry: Guilt, Poetic Responsibilities, and the Autonomy of Art 139

the raw material from which art is born” (9-10). In other words, for Mahon,
art has such a pure independence of its own that secular events can never
penetrate it. In times of global warming (“bewildering weather” [33]),
threatening war in Iraq (“vast tankers and patronizing warships” [36]), and old
ideologies of a haunting “spectre, some discredited ghost” (39), art stands
still. Even in the hectic world of business and its “money-shower” (28), art
of “slow thought” (28), which resonates with “slow fires” (21) in cindery
grates that emit a glow, can replace blind capitalist greed. Contemplating the
azure meteorite, the blue color of which has definitely carried a positive
connotation throughout Mahon’s poetic career (Russell, “The Blues” 246),
Mahon thus contrasts the quiet, independent sphere of art with a clamorous
real world of a darkling plain, where ignorant armies clash by night.
In the final stanza, Mahon suggests the reason we need art like the
engraving on the lapis lazuli: it provides a true image of an artist. Despite
the pessimistic description of contemporary society, the poet “manages to end
at an optimistic tangent with an epiphany” (Haughton 345). He shows a
young woman reading alone on a Eurostar train. Again, he uses for artistic
autonomy an image of a lighted train that stands in stark contrast with planes
darkening “the sun in another rapacious war” (42). Under the overwhelming
power of atrocity, the lady, calm and composed, indulges in her own interest
in reading. At this epiphanic moment Mahon declares, “Hope lies with her”
(46). As the idle young boy in “Courtyards in Delft” was absorbed in the
world of poetry, the woman also forms her own independent world of
imagination, searching for “the rich and rare” (45). Hope lies in the image of
her act of reading, the impervious realm of autonomy. An alternative to the
world of warfare, art gives us new possibilities, replacing “old hopes” (40),
such as all -isms, into which previous generations blindly fell. For Mahon,
the era of ideology has gone; that of art has come to liberate the individual.
Mahon’s pursuit of a model for an artist is also reflected in “Girls on the
140 Yeonmin Kim

Bridge,” an ekprahsis on Edvard Munch’s work. Both in the painting and the
poem, meditative girls are out late on a bridge. The world at the end of the
bridge is represented with a chaotic image of “bad dreams” (31), rhyming
with “someone screams” (36), by which Mahon insinuates something terrible,
like nightmare, is occurring outside as illustrated in Munch’s The Scream.
Thus, the predominant tone of the poem is “that of an elegist for a vanishing
civility, a pessimist of the present moment” (Brown, “The Poet and the
Painting” 204). By contrast, the girls preserve their private sphere by gazing
“at the unplumbed, reflective lake” (15). Although they, the “Grave daughters
/ of time” (19), are probably aware of the contemporary crisis, they are
“content” (14) with the serene scenery. They maintain a distance from
modern anxiety, represented by the overall rhyme scheme: each stanza is
written with a delicate abccba rhyme scheme, slant-rhyming engendering a
sense of tension. In addition, their “averted heads” (5) indicate that they
willingly isolate themselves from world affairs despite the curiosity of youth.
The girls’ autonomous act of contemplation reflects Mahon’s desire to keep
his aesthetic distance from the upheavals of the time, by which an artist can
achieve accountability.
Mahon creates figures who remove themselves from political turmoil and
maintain their artistic independence. “Courtyards in Delft” after the
seventeenth-century Dutch painter Pieter de Hooch is a poem about Mahon’s
reminiscence of home. The original painting shows details of a domestic life,
well-kept and clean; the first three stanzas reflect Mahon’s mother fulfilling
the Protestant work ethic: “Perfection of the thing and the thing made. /
Nothing is random, nothing goes to waste” (14-15). Even the stanza formation
seems to follow regularity with eight lines in each stanza. Mahon has been
viewed as “an immaculate precisionist playing the well-tempered clavier of
traditional poetic form” (Haughton 156). The poem, however, ends with an
image of a “strange child” (30), evading the hard work required of the
Derek Mahon’s Poetry: Guilt, Poetic Responsibilities, and the Autonomy of Art 141

Protestant boy, Mahon himself. The speaker’s “hard-nosed companions” (31)

are busy preparing war in a deromanticized world of “parched veldt and
fields of rainswept gorse” (32). The boy is considered strange for his “taste
for verse” (30), “lying low” (29) in a shed, isolating himself from the world
outside. The lazy, idle little schemer, like Stephen Dedalus in Joyce, rejects
the work ethic, be it home management or nationalist ideology. Mahon
himself is that loitering boy, the artist as a young man who dreams of the
autonomous world of art.
The ambience surrounding the young artist is exemplified by light images
pervasive in the small shed. “Light plays a crucial part in the imaginative
world” of his poetry (Brown, “The Poet and the Painting” 199). The room, in
which the young boy lies indulging in the pleasure of poetry, is filled with
rays of light; “the coal / Glittering” (25-26), tender “Lambency” (27) and
radiance reflected from a spoon, causing the ceiling to gleam. The solitary
young boy embraced by aesthetic moments of light becomes a foundational
character: a poet. Whether or not Mahon builds his own independent realm of
art in opposition to the family atmosphere of the Protestant work ethic is,
however, still ambiguous. In search of artistic perfection, he may have been
influenced by it, in that the images of light pervade not only in the shed but
also in the house. Describing the house bathed in “oblique light” (1) instead
of gaudy, the speaker finds modesty and adequacy in the yards and
“composure” (8) in trees. The comfortable, neatly ordered family aura,
impervious to exterior sways like war, probably fostered his artistic
inclination, despite his consciousness of the role of his Protestant family in
modern Irish history, about which he feels guilty. In addition, the family
provides him with the illuminated shed, his secret workshop, where he can
feel a sense of leisure or boredom, indispensable for an artist.
142 Yeonmin Kim

5. Conclusion

My discussion of the poet’s artistic dilemma has focused mainly on the

poet’s early poems except “Lapis Lazuli,” yet when we consider that Mahon
has habitually revised his poems throughout his career, his dual pursuits
appear in all his poetry. Since the 1990s the poet has devotedly headed
toward the autonomous realm of art, longing in his early years for art once
initiated by his guilt; but in his later years, as in The Yellow Book (1997),
Mahon reveals estranged perspectives from contemporary politics and
utilitarianism that shapes “formless sensationalism in the contemporary arts”
(Williams 117). In that sense, Mahon’s expression of his distaste for
contemporary life has much to do with the Decadent tradition: “As in such
Symbolist and Decadent writers [. . .] with their distaste for
nineteenth-century bourgeois notions of utility, there is in Mahon a welcoming
acceptance of the practical uselessness of the type of literature which he
admires” (Williams 114). A beneficiary of the Decadent legacy, Mahon stands
not only in the specificity of modern Irish history but also in the broader
literary tradition of the post-WWII era. Thus, he pursues the autonomous
aesthetic realm that his poetry reaches beyond Irish boundaries, and he
achieves universality appealing to world readers.
Torn between two positions and agonized both by his desire for the sheer
pleasure of art and by guilt caused by his inaction in the specific course of
history, Mahon is concerned about his destiny as poet. In “Rage for Order”
he shows a poet’s double consciousness split between his pursuit of artistic
autonomy and social duty. In a self-questioning or self-accusing tone, he
evaluates himself. He is well aware that he must miserably search for his
own realm of poetry while innocent people are dying as proven on Bloody
Sunday, yet he never articulates the historical record in the poem. “[F]ar /
From his people” (11-12), through “his high window” (14), and with
Derek Mahon’s Poetry: Guilt, Poetic Responsibilities, and the Autonomy of Art 143

“Grandiloquent and / Deprecating” (17-18) tone, the poet is obsessed with his
own pleasure in composing poetry: “there is a poet indulging his / Wretched
rage for order” (4-5). With his formalistic concerns, as represented in the
five-line stanza formation of this poem, the poet has rigorously pursued poetic
formality distinguishable from socially engaged movements. In that sense his
poetry seems useless in times of political crisis. Mahon thus recognizes his
poetry makes nothing happen, sensing his poetry as “a dying art” (8) “in the
face of love, death, and the wages of the poor” (25). His poetry sounds
ineffective in the world of violence and terror, where “Catholic fascists versus
Protestant fascists with British fascists on every street corner—there is no side
to take” (qtd. in Enniss 110). Mahon, however, does not relinquish his private
joy in poetry, in particular, poetic forms:

Poetry, for me (as for most poets, I suppose), is basically a struggle with
the exigencies of form, and may, if one is very lucky, reveal certain
declivities of the language that have not been revealed in quite the same
posture before. It is in these declivities, I am convinced, that the
unparaphrasable displacements of human thought and feeling lie—things that
language cannot, in the normal course of things, encompass. (qtd. in
Russell, “Shades of Larkin” 100)

The poet faces a dilemma in which he must choose between his pursuit of
pleasure in poetic formality and the responsibilities required by the
contemporary society in which he is undeniably enmeshed. And Mahon thus
willingly embraces “With a desperate love” (37) a poet’s “Terminal ironies”
(40), his unresolvable dilemma, the Yeatsian tragic joy.
144 Yeonmin Kim

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Manuscript peer-review process:

receipt acknowledged: 5 Mar. 2018.
peer-reviewed: 26 Mar. 2018.
revision received: 2 Apr. 2018.
publication approved: 16 Apr. 2018.